In the Strange South Seas

by Beatrice Grimshaw

But in Niué, the isolation was complete. There was no come and go. We were on the road to nowhere. Nobody knew when any communication with anywhere would be possible, so nobody troubled, and save for an occasional delirious day when a ship really did come in, and waked us all from our enchanted slumber for just So long as you might turn round and look about you before dropping off into dreams again, we were asleep to all that lay beyond the long horizon line below the seaward-leaning palms. Niué was the world. The rest was a cloudy dream.

I rented a little cottage in the heart of a palm-grove, when I settled down to wait for the problematic return of the Duchess, and see the life of Niué. It belonged to a native couple, Kuru and Vekia, who were well-to-do, and had saved money selling copra. The Niuéan, unlike every other Polynesian, is always willing and anxious to make a bargain or do a deal of any kind, and Kuru and his wife were as delighted to get the chance of a “let” as any seaside landlady. They moved their small goods out of the house most readily, and left me in full possession of the two rooms and the verandah and the innumerable doors and windows, with everything else to find for myself.

A general collection of furniture, taken up by a friendly white resident, resulted in the loan of a bed and a box and a table, three chairs, some cups and cutlery, and a jug and basin. These, with a saucepan lent by my landlady (who, as I have said, was rich, and possessed many superfluities of civilisation), made up the whole of my household goods. For two months I occupied the little house among the palms, and was happy. “Can a man be more than happy?” runs the Irish proverb, and answer there is none.

There were never, in all my island wanderings, such shadows or such sunsets, as I saw in lonely Niué. The little house was far away from others, and the palms stood up round it close to the very door. In the white, white moonlight, silver-clear and still as snow, I used to stay for half a night on my verandah, sitting crosslegged in the darkness of the eaves, and watching the wonderful great stars of shadow drawn out, as if in ink, round the foot of every palm-tree. The perfect circle of tenderly curving rays lay for the most part still as some wonderful drawing about the foot of the tree; but at rare intervals, when the hour was very late, and even the whisper of the surf upon the reef seemed to have grown tired and dim and far away, the night would turn and sigh in its sleep for just a moment, and all the palm-tree fronds would begin to sway and shiver up in the sparkling moon-rays, glancing like burnished silver in the light. Then the star at the foot would dance and sway as well, and weave itself into forms of indescribable beauty, as if the spirit of Giotto of the marvellous circles were hovering unseen in the warm air of this alien country that he never knew, and pencilling forms more lovely than his mortal fingers ever drew on earth.... Yes, it was worth losing one’s sleep for, in those magic island nights.

In the daytime, I rode and walked a good deal about the island, which is very fairly provided with roads, and tried to find out what I could about the people and their ways. There is not a more interesting island in the Pacific than Niué, from an ethnological point of view; but my scientific knowledge was too contemptibly small to enable me to make use of my opportunities. This I regretted, for the place is full of strange survivals of ancient customs and characteristics, such as are seldom to be found among Christianised natives. The people are somewhat rude and rough in character; indeed until about forty years ago, they were actually dangerous. Their island is one of the finest of natural fortresses, and they used it as such, declining to admit strangers on any pretext. Captain Cook attempted to land in 1777, but was beaten off before he had succeeded in putting his boat’s crew ashore. Other travellers for the most part gave the place a wide berth.

When men of the island wandered away to other places (the Niuéan is a gipsy by nature) they received no kindly welcome on attempting to come home. The Niuéan had an exceeding fear of imported diseases, and to protect himself against them, he thought out a system of sanitary precaution, all on his own account, which was surely the completest the world has ever seen. There was no weak link in the chain: no break through which measles, or cholera, or worse could creep, during the absence of an official, or owing to the carelessness of an inspector. Every person attempting to land on Niué, be he sick or well, stranger, or native, was promptly killed! That was Niué’s rule. You might go away from the island freely, but if you did, you had better not attempt to come back again, for the “sanitary officers” would knock your brains out on the shore. It was without doubt the simplest and best system of quarantine conceivable. Possibly as a result of this Draconian law, the people of Niué are remarkably strong and hardy to-day, though since the relaxation of the ancient rule, a certain amount of disease has crept in.

The people, though warlike and fierce, were never cannibals here at the worst. They did not even eat their enemies when slain in battle. They enjoyed a fight very much, however, when they got the chance of one, and still remembered the Waterloo victory of their history, against the fierce Tongans, about two hundred years ago. The Tongans, until within the last half-century, seem to have been the Danes of the Pacific, always hunting and harrying some other maritime people, and always a name of terror to weak races. Tonga is the nearest land to Niué, being about three hundred miles away, so it was not to be expected that the Niuéans would escape invasion, and they were fully prepared for the Tongan attack when it did come. They did not attempt to meet force by force. There was one place they knew where the Tongans might succeed in landing, and near to this they laid a cunning plan for defence.

A trader took me down to see the spot one Sunday afternoon. It is one of the numerous caves of Niué, with a top open for the most part to the sky. The cave runs underneath the greenery and the creeping flowers of the bush—a long black gash just showing here and there among the leaves. The drop is forty or fifty feet, and an unwary foot might very easily stumble over its edge, even now.

On the day when the Tongan war canoes broke the level line of the sea horizon, the Niué men hastened to the shore, and prepared the cave in such a way as to set a fatal and most effective trap for their enemies. They cut down a mass of slight branches and leafy twigs, and covered the gulf completely, so that nothing was to be seen except the ordinary surface of the low-growing bush. When the enemies landed, the Niué men showed themselves on the farther side of the cave, as if fleeing into the woods. The Tongans, with yells of joy, rushed in pursuit, straight over the gulf—and in another moment were lying in crushed and dying heaps at the foot of the pit, while the men of Niué, dashing out of ambush on every side, ran down into the cave from its shallow end and butchered their enemies as they lay.

After this, it is said that the Tongans left Niué alone.