The missionary dictionaries of the Polynesian dialects, preserving only a very limited number of the words once existing, and hardly any of the light and shade, the idioms and picture phrases, of these close observers of nature, remind one of Shakespeare’s criticism, “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”
The English missionaries put the Marquesan sounds into English letters, but when their day was done in Tahiti, and the French came to power because of French Catholic missionaries being expelled at the instigation of Protestant clerics, the poor Marquesans had to unlearn their English and take up French.
In Marquesan there never was an English dictionary circulated that I know of, and so the natives’ first European language was French as far back as books and schools were concerned; but the commerce has been mostly in English, the whalers and the traders talk English, and all Polynesia is stamped by the heel of the Saxon.
A German army officer who traveled with me lamented that in German Samoa the language used is English when not Samoan, even the German officials being forced to use it.
On the schooners all commands are in English, though the captains are French and the crews Tahitian, whose English is confined to these words alone. At the German traders’ in Taha-Uku the accounts are in English or American. It is the effect of the long dominance of the English on the sea and in commerce.
A chief difficulty of the makers of the written Polynesian languages was the adjectives. Primitive peoples have not the wealth of these that civilized nations possess, and fine shadings here are often expressed by intonation, grimace, or gesture.
CHAPTER XIX
Tragic Mademoiselle Narbonne—Whom shall she marry?—Dinner at the home of Wilhelm Lutz—The Taua, the Sorcerer—Lemoal says Narbonne is a Leper—I visit the Taua—The prophecy.
AS long as I live, I shall have, as my avatar of tragedy, Mademoiselle Narbonne. Fate had marked her for desolation. The grim drama of the half-caste whose spirit is riven by heredity and environment, fighting for supremacy of the soul, was enacted here in scenes of rare intensity and mournful fitness. While I did not await its final dénouement I saw enough to stamp its pitiable acts upon my memory, and later I learned of the last blows of an inevitable destiny.