In the Strange South Seas

by Beatrice Grimshaw

There are no graveyards on the island. Every man is buried on his own land, very often alongside the road, or close to his house. The thrifty islanders plant onions and pumpkins on the earth close about the tomb, and enjoy the excellent flavour imparted to these vegetables by the essence of dead ancestor which they suck up through the soil. In odd contradiction to this economical plan, a “tapu” is placed upon all the cocoanut trees owned by the deceased; and for a year or more valuable nuts are allowed to lie where they fall, sprouting into young plants, and losing many tons of copra annually to the island. Groups of palms unhealthily crowded together, bear witness everywhere to the antiquity of this strange practice.

The main, and indeed the only good road, across the island, owns a spot of fearsome reputation. On a solitary tableland, swept by salt sea-winds, stand certain groups of clustered cocoa-palms, sprung from tapu’s nuts on dead men’s lands. Here the natives say, the ghosts and devils have great power, and it is dangerous to walk there at night alone, even for white men, who take little account of native spirits. Many of the white traders of the island are shy of the spot; and some say that when riding in parties across the island at night, their horses shy and bolt passing the place, and exhibit unaccountable fear. Only a year or two ago, a terrible thing happened in this desolate spot, as if to prove the truth of local traditions. There was one native of the island, a “witch-doctor,” learned in charms and spells, who professed not to be afraid of the devils. He could manage them, he said; and to prove it, he used sometimes to walk alone across the island at night. One morning, he did not return from an excursion of this nature. The villagers set out in a body to look for him in the broad light of the tropical sun. They found him, at the haunted spot, lying on the ground dead. His face was black and his body horribly contorted. The devils had fought him, and conquered him—so the natives said. And now no gold would induce a Savage Islander to pass the fatal spot after dark.

I asked the white missionary doctor resident at the time of my visit on the island, if he could account for the death. He said that he had not held a post-mortem and therefore could not say what the cause might be; but the appearance of the corpse was undoubtedly as described by the natives.

Being anxious to investigate the truth of these stories, I determined to spend a night on the spot, and see what happened. The natives were horrified beyond measure at the idea; and when an accident on a coral reef laid me up from walking exercise until just before the schooner called again at the island to take me away—thus preventing me from carrying out the plan—they were one and all convinced that the fall was the work of devils, anxious to prevent me from meddling with their doings!

The problem, then, remained unsolved, and rests open to any other traveller to investigate. But as Savage Island lies far off the track of the wandering tourist, its ghosts are likely to remain undisturbed in their happy hunting-grounds for the present.

Mrs. Joe Gargery would certainly have liked Niué, for it is a place where there is none of the “pompeying” so obnoxious to her Spartan soul. And yet, if you stay there long, you will find out that Savage Island practises certain of the early Christian virtues, if it has dropped a few of its luxuries manufactured by civilisation. If you want a horse to ride across the island—a gentle, native creature that goes off at both ends, like a fire-cracker, when you try to mount, biting and kicking simultaneously, and, when mounted, converts your ride into a sandwich of jibbing and bolting, you will call in at the nearest trader’s, and tell him you want his horse and his neighbour’s saddle and whip. All these will appear at your door, with a couple of kindly messages, in half an hour. You will time your arrival at the different villages so as to hit off some one’s meal-hours, walk in, ask for a help of the inevitable curried tin, and carry off a loaf of bread or a lump of cake, if your host happens to have baked that morning and you have not. When a ship comes in—perhaps the bi-yearly steamer from Samoa, with real mutton and beef in her ice-chest—and the capital gorges for two days, you, the stranger within their gates, will meet hot chops walking up to your verandah between two hot plates, and find confectioners’ paper bags full of priceless New Zealand potatoes, sitting on your doorstep. You will learn to shed tears of genuine emotion at the sight of a rasher of bacon, and to accept with modest reluctance the almost too valuable gift of one real onion. Hospitality among the white folk of Savage Island is hospitality, and no mistake, and its real generosity can only be appreciated by those who know the supreme importance assumed by “daily bread,” when the latter is dependent upon the rare and irregular calls of passing ships.

For, like a good many Pacific Islands, this coral land is more beautiful than fertile. Its wild fantastic rocks, which make up the whole surface of the island, produce in their clefts and hollows enough yam, taro, banana, and papaw to feed the natives; but the white man wants more. Tins are his only resource—tins and biscuits, for flour does not keep long, and bread is often unattainable. Fowls or eggs can seldom be bought, for the reason that some one imported a number of cats many years ago; these were allowed to run wild in the bush, and have now become wild in earnest, devouring fowls, and even attacking dogs and young pigs at times. Why, then, if the island is valueless to Europeans, and the life hard, do white men live in Savage Island and many similar places? For the reason that fortunes have been piled up, in past years, by trading in such isolated spots, and that there is still money to be made, though not so much as of old. Trading in the Pacific is a double-barrelled sort of business. You settle down on an island where there is a good supply of copra (dried cocoa-nut kernel, manufactured by the natives). You buy the copra from the islanders at about £8 a ton, store it away in your copra-house until the schooner or the steamer calls, and then ship it off to Sydney, where it sells at £13 to £14 a ton. Freight and labour in storing and getting on board, eat into the profits. But, in addition to buying, the trader sells. He has a store, where cheap prints, violent perfumes, gaudy jewellery, tapes and buttons and pins and needles, tins of beef, shoes, etc., are sold to the natives at a price which leaves a very good profit on their cost down in Auckland.

The laws of all the Pacific Colonies forbid the white trader to buy from the natives, except with cash; but, as the cash comes back to him before long over the counter of the store, it comes to much the same in the end as the old barter system of the early days, out of which money used to be, quickly and easily made. Sometimes the trader, if in a small way of business, sells his copra to captains of calling ships at a smaller price than the Auckland value. But nowadays so many stores are owned by big Auckland and Sydney firms that most of the stuff is shipped off for sale in New Zealand or Australia. “Panama” hats, already mentioned, are a very important article of commerce here. Every island has some speciality of its own besides the inevitable copra; and the trader deals in all he can get. The trader’s life is, as a rule, a pleasant one enough. Savage Island is one of the worst places where he could find himself; and yet the days pass happily enough in that solitary outlier of civilisation. There is not much work to do; the climate is never inconveniently hot; the scenery, especially among the up-country primaeval forests, is very lovely. There is a good deal of riding and bathing, a little shooting, and a myriad of wild and fantastic caves to explore when the spirit moves one. The native canoes are easy to manage and excellent to fish from.