Next day I landed in Aoba, at “Albert’s.” He was an American negro, who, after having been a stoker and sailor, had settled here as a coprah trader. His language was of the strangest, a mixture of biche la mar, negro French and English, and was very hard to understand. With the help of two native women he kept his house in good order, and he was decidedly one of the most decent colonists of the group, and tried to behave like a gentleman, which is more than can be said of some whites. He seemed to confirm the theory that the African is superior to the Melanesian. Albert sheltered me to the best of his ability, although I had to sleep in the open, under a straw roof, and his bill of fare included items which neither my teeth nor my stomach could manage, such as an octopus. There were several other negroes in Aoba; one was Marmaduke, an enormous Senegalese, who had grown somewhat simple, and lived like the natives, joining the Suque and dancing at their festivals. He occasionally came to dinner at Albert’s; this was always amusing, as Albert thought himself far superior to Marmaduke, and corrected his mistakes with still more comical impossibilities. Both were most polite and perfectly sober. The talk, as a rule, turned on stories of ghosts, in which both of them firmly believed, and by which both were much troubled. Marmaduke was strangled every few nights by old women, while a goblin had sat on Albert’s chest every night until he had cleared the bush round his house and emptied his Winchester three times into the darkness. This had driven the ghosts away,—a pretty case of auto-suggestion. I was interested in hearing these stories, though I should hardly have thought a sensible man like Albert could have believed such things.
COOKING-HOUSE ON AOBA.
The people of Aoba are quite different from those of the other islands,—light-coloured, often straight-haired, with Mongolian features; they are quite good-looking, intelligent, and their habits show many Polynesian traits. The Suque is not all-important here: it scarcely has the character of a secret society, and the separation of the sexes is not insisted on. Men and women live together, and the fires do not appear to be separated. As a result, there is real family life, owing in part to the fact that meals are eaten in common. The gamal is replaced by a cooking-house, which is open to the women; generally it is nothing but a great gabled roof, reaching to the ground on one side and open on the others. Here the families live during the day, and the young men and guests sleep at night, while the married couples sleep in their huts, which are grouped around the cooking-house.
The position of the women, so much better here than elsewhere, is not without effect on their behaviour. They are independent and self-possessed, and do not run away from a stranger nor hide in dark corners when a white man wants to speak to them. Because of their intelligence they are liked on plantations as house-servants, and so many of them have gone away for this purpose that Aoba has been considerably depopulated in consequence; few of these women ever return, and those who do are usually sick. Some Aoba women have made very good wives for white men.
The people of Aoba are remarkable for their cleanliness, the dwellers on the coast spending half the day in the water, while those from the mountains never miss their weekly bath, after which they generally carry a few cocoa-nuts full of salt water up to their homes. The women are very pretty, slim and strong; their faces often have quite a refined outline, a pointed chin, a small mouth and full but well-cut lips; their eyes are beautiful, with a soft and sensual expression; and the rhythm of their movements, their light and supple walk, give them a charm hardly ever to be found in Europe. The men, too, are good to look at. Considering the intelligence and thriftiness of the race, it is doubly regrettable that alcoholism, recruiting and consumption have had such evil effects of recent years.
I roamed about in the neighbourhood of Nabutriki and attended several festivals; they are much the same as elsewhere, except that the pigs are not killed by braining, but by trampling on their stomachs, which apparently causes rupture of the heart and speedy death.
As I mentioned elsewhere, a man’s rise in caste is marked on every occasion by the receipt of new fire, rubbed on a special stick ornamented with flowers. Fire is lighted here, as in all Melanesia, by “ploughing,” a small stick being rubbed lengthwise in a larger one. If the wood is not damp, it will burn in less than two minutes: it is not necessary, as is often stated, to use two different kinds of wood. To-day matches are used nearly everywhere, and the natives hardly ever “plough” their fire, except for ceremonial purposes; but they are still very clever about keeping the fire burning, and often take along a smouldering log on their walks.
FIRE RUBBING.