Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

A double canoe

“That means ten years in Noumea for him,” said the commissaire, savagely. But after dinner, which I got, when he had meditated upon Flag’s willingness as a cook and his ability to collect taxes, he lessened the sentence to a year at hard labor. I was not surprised to meet Flag at noon the next day with his accustomed white jacket with its red stripe upon the arm. Man cannot live without cooks, and perhaps I had aided leniency by burning a bird.

Flag explained to me, though sheepishly, that, overcome by the litre of absinthe as he was, he would not have injured a hair of Bauda’s head.

“Bauda is tapu. I would meet an evil fate did I touch him,” said Flag, when sober and sorry.

I stumbled on tapus daily. Vai Etienne, my neighbor, gave me a feast one day, and half a dozen of us, all men, sat at table. Vai Etienne, having lived several years in Tahiti had Frenchified ways. His mother, the magnificent Titihuti, who was splendidly tattooed from toe to waist, and who was my adopted mother, waited upon us. Offering her a glass of wine, and begging her to sit with us, I discovered that the glass her son drank from and the chair a man sat in were tapu to her. She took her wine from a shell, but would not sit at table with us. Of course, she never sat in chairs, anyhow, nor did Vai Etienne, but he had provided these for the whites.

The subject of the tapus of the South Seas was endless. The custom, tabu or kapu in Hawaiian, and tambu in Fijian, was ill expressed in our “taboo,” which means the pressure of public sentiment, or family or group feeling. Tapus here were the conventions of primitive people made awe-inspiring for enforcement because of the very willfulness of these primitives. The custom here and throughout society dated from the beginning of legend. Laws began with the rules laid down by the old man of the family and made dread in the tribe or sept by the hocus-pocus of the medicine man. Tapus may have been the foundation of all penal laws and etiquette. The Jews had a hundred niceties of religious, sanitary, and social tapus. Warriors were tapu in Homer’s day, and land and fish were tapu to Grecian warriors, according to Plato. Confucius in the “Li Ki,” ordained men and women not to sit on the same mat, nor have the same clothes-rack, towel, or comb, nor to let their hands touch in giving and receiving, nor to do a score of other trivial things. The old Irish had many tapus and totems, and many legends of harm wrought by their breaking, a famous one being “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.”

In the Marquesas tapus were the most important part of life, as ceremony was at the court of the kings of France. They governed almost every action of the people, as the rules of a prison do convicts, or the precepts of a monastery monks. Death followed the disobedience of many, and others preserved one from the hands of enemies. There being no organized government in Polynesia, tapus took the place of laws and edicts. They were, in fact, spiritual laws, superstition being the force instead of a penal code. They imposed honesty, for if a man had any dear possession, he had the priest tapu it and felt secure. Tapus protected betrothed girls and married women from rakes.

A young woman who worked at the convent in Atuona, near me, was made tapu against all work. She was never allowed to touch food until it had been prepared for her. If she broke the tapu the food was thrown away. From infancy, when a taua had laid the prohibition upon her, she lived in disagreeable idleness, afraid to break the law of the priest. Only in recent years did the nuns laugh away her fears, and set her to helping in their kitchen. She told me that she could not explain the reason for her having been tapu from effort, as the taua had died who chained her, without informing her.

If a child crawled under a house in the building, the house was burned. If I were building a boat, and, for dislike of me, some one named aloud the boat after my father, I destroyed the boat. Blue was tapu to women in Nuku-Hiva, and red, too. They could not eat bonito, squid, popii, and koehi. They might not eat bananas, cocoanuts, fresh breadfruit, pigs of brown color, goats, fowls and other edibles.

Females were forbidden to climb upon the sacred paepaes, to enter the men’s club-houses (this tapu was enforced in America until the last few years), to eat with men, to smoke inside the house, to carry mats on their heads, and, saddest of all, to weep. Children might not carry one another pickaback. The kuavena fish was tapu to fishermen, as also peata, a kind of shark.