“You’ll see a lot of stuff in travel books,” said an old resident to me, “about the wonderful generosity of the island people, all over the Pacific—how they press gifts of every kind on travellers, and won’t take any return. Well, that’s true, and it’s not true. All the island people love strangers, and are new-fangled with every fresh face, and they do come along with presents, but as to not wanting a return, why, that isn’t quite the case. They won’t take payment, mostly, and there’s very few places where they’ll even take a present, right off. But they always expect something back, some time. I know that isn’t what the books say, but books are mostly wrong about anything you’ve got to go below the top of things to see—and the traveller likes that pretty idea, of getting presents for nothing, too much to give it up easily. Still, you may take my word for it that the natives will take a return for anything and everything they give you, here and everywhere else, unless it’s a drink of cocoanut, or a bit of fruit they offer you on the road, or maybe a bit of dinner, if you’d drop in on them at meals. Set presents you’ve got to pay for, and more than their value too, if you take them. I don’t myself, I find native presents too expensive.”
What do you want to give? Oh, well, if a woman brings you in a dinner or two, give her a trade silk handkerchief, one of those shilling ones, some day. Or if they bring you baskets of fruit, give them a couple of sticks of tobacco. They’ll take payment for fruit here, in that way, at any time. You’ll need to give some things when you’re going away, to the people you’ve seen most of—a few yards of cotton, or something of that kind. White people are expected to give presents, all over the island—it needn’t be dear things, but it ought to be something.
If the lords and folk who have been round the Pacific in their yachts only heard what the natives say of them, because they didn’t know that, they’d take care to bring a case or two of cheap stuff for presents next time. ‘Not chief-like,’ is what the natives say—and I ask you yourself, it isn’t ‘chief-like,’ is it, to take all you can get, and give not a stick of niggerhead or an inch of ribbon in return?
I’d think they’d be too proud—but then, I’m not a tourist trotting round the globe, I’m only a man who works for his living.
“As for yourself, you take my advice, and say right out you don’t want the dinners, when they bring them. Yes, it’ll offend them, but you must either do that, or pay for stuff you don’t want three days out of seven, or six days, more likely, if they think you’re liberal-minded. You’ll get no end of presents when you’re going away, pretty things enough, and those will have to be paid for in presents, too. Better make it as cheap as you can, meantime.
“But those people who go travelling like princes, and load their cabins up with spears and clubs and tappa-cloths and shells the natives have given them everywhere they went—and not a farthing, or a farthing’s worth, do they let it cost them from end to end—I tell you, they’re a disgrace to England,” concluded my informant hotly.
“I am quite sure it is simply because they do not know—how should they?” I asked, trying to defend the absent globe-trotters.