Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

This Edenic condition astounded the Yankee Porter, who went to sea at sixteen, and who slew scores of Marquesans, for he put in his log:

The Hawaiians, Tahitians, and New Zealanders had by residence among whites become corrupt; they had fallen into their vices and ate the same food. They were no longer in a state of nature; they had, like us, become corrupt, and while the honest, guileless faces of the Marquesans shone with benevolence, good nature and intelligence, the downcast eye and sullen look of the others marked their inferiority and degeneracy. Guilt, of which by intercourse with us they had become sensible, had already marked their countenances. Every emanation of their souls could not be perceived upon their countenances as with those of the naked Marquesans.

War, murder, mutiny, desertion, and horrible orgies marked the reaction of these forecastle denizens, scourings of slums and dull villages, to the spontaneity, ease, and liberty they found here, in contrast with their ugly and restricted lives aboard ship or in the hard climes and rough grooves of their homes. The sight of such intense individual happiness, glowing vitality, and exquisite bodies, of a coöperative existence without kings or commoners, business or money, palaces or hovels, disease or dirt, prudery or prostitutes, shocked them by the abrupt differences from their own countries. They wrote the Marquesans down as barbarians, as the Greeks did the Romans; and church, government, and trade made haste to hack down their achievement, and to make over the pieces as the wretched patchwork of their own hands. They hated it, subconsciously, for its giving the lie to their own boasted institutions. They ended it that it might not mock the degradation and futility of their own conduct and the opposition between their decalogue and their deeds. The merchant condemned and altered it to make a market for what it did not then need or desire.

The first approach to change after subjugation and conversion was through clothing, because the most obvious difference between the whites and the browns was that the latter largely exposed their bodies. The missionary paved the way for the dealer who had cottons to sell by saying that God abhorred nakedness. Livingston himself acted likewise. The Marquesans, in truth, had a small variety of clothing. Much of the time both sexes wore only the single garment, the pareu or loin-cloth. Their clothes of Tapa or bark were, except mattings, the only stuffs made by the Marquesans. They were of a remarkable texture and coloring, considering the materials available. The inner barks of the banian, breadfruit, and particularly the mulberry trees were used. The outer rind was scraped off with a shell, and the inner slightly beaten and allowed to ferment. It was then beaten over wooden forms with clubs of ironwood about eighteen inches long, grooved coarsely on one side and finely on the reverse, a process that united so closely the fibers that in the finished cloth one could not guess the processes of its making. Bleached in the sun on the beaches to a dazzling white, this fabric was either dyed black or brown, yellow or red, or fashioned as it was into the few varieties of garments they affected. All wore the pareu about the loins; a strip two yards or more in length, and a yard wide, which is passed twice about the waist and tucked in for holding, as the sarong of the Malay. It hangs above the knees, and like the fundoshi of Japan, worn by royalty and beggar, is capable, for strenuous movements, such as swimming, of being gathered up to form a diaper or breech-cloth.

The cahu or ahu, a long and flowing piece of tapa, was worn by the females, hanging from the shoulders, knotted about or covering one or both breasts at the whim of the wearer. For the coloring of this and the pareu, rich and alluring dyes were found in the plants and trees and even the sea-animals of the beaches. The outlines of the hibiscus flowers and carven objects were imprinted upon these tapas, and astronomical, mystic, or tribal signs or records drawn upon them in fantastic but artistic design.

The method of wearing the cahu for hiding or disclosing the charms of the female was as varied as the toilettes of Parisian fashion. The conceit of the girl or woman, the occasion, and the weather decided its being draped in any one of a score of manners. A belle might think it ungenerous to cover too much, and an old or homely woman find the entire surface too scant. When human nature has freest fling, prudery is the fig-leaf of ugliness, here, as in the salon of Mayfair, or behind the footlights of Broadway.

For the men, while the pareu, always as now, was the common apparel, they had a hundred ornaments, in a diversity more numerable than those of the females. Whenever man has not sacrificed his masculine craving for adornment to religious or economic pressure, he is the gaudier of the sexes. From the fiddler-crab with his rampant claw to the mandrill with his crimson and lilac callosities, nature has so ordained it, and man rejoiced in his privilege. Not until European man felt the iron hand of the machine age, when the rifle displaced the bow and the pistol the sword, the factory the home loom, and the foundry the smithy; not until money became the chief pursuit of all ranks, and puritanism a general blight upon brilliancy of costume, did the white man relinquish his gewgaws to the parasitic woman. Then he made it a vicarious pride by decorating her with his riches and making her the vehicle of his pomp in ornature, and the advertisement of his prosperity.

The Marquesans, struck by the glitter of brass buttons and gold braid, of broadcloth and fur, unfamiliar with metal, and admiring everything foreign, fell facile victims to vestures, and when the new-fangled religions that followed hot upon the discoverers, enforced covering by dogma and even by punishment, they clothed themselves and sweated in fashion and sanctity. But clothes irk the Marquesans as they do all people living close to a kindly nature. Our own babes resent even the swaddles which bind them in the cradle. The first years of childhood are a continuing struggle against garments, until, having lost plasticity and the instant response of muscle to mind that distinguishes the Marquesans, the result is rationalized by adolescents into modesty and convention. After youth, clothing is welcomed by us to enhance imperfect charms and to hide defects, to screen our unhandsome and puny bodies. The lean shanks, protuberant abdomens, and anatomical grotesqueries in a public bath bear witness to our sacrifice. Marriage is often a disclosure of unguessed flaws.

“The gods are naked and in the open,” said Seneca.

Pigalle sculptured the frail old Voltaire in the nude, yet attained dignity. Even Broadway smiles at frocked heroes in bronze, and must have its ideals in marble or bronze undraped.