After a while the acolyte joined us, and I put them all many questions.
The Paumotuans were a quiet people, dour, or at least serious and contemplative. They were not like the Tahitians, laugh-loving, light-hearted, frenzied dancers, orators, music worshipers, feasters. The Tahitians had the joy of living, though with the melancholy strain that permeated all Polynesia. The folk of the Dangerous Archipelago were silent, brooding, and religious. The perils they faced in their general vocation of diving, and from cyclones, which annihilated entire populations of atolls, had made them intensely susceptible to fears of hell-fire and to hopes of heaven. The rather Moslem paradise of Mormonism made strong appeal, but was offset by the tortures of the damned, limned by other earnest clerics who preached the old Wesley-Spurgeon everlasting suffering for all not of their sect.
Had religion never affected the Paumotuans, their food would have made them a distinct and a restrained people. We all are creatures of our nourishment. The Tahitians had a plentitude of varied and delicious food, a green and sympathetic landscape, a hundred waterfalls and gentle rills. The inhabitants of these low isles had cocoanut and fish as staples, and often their only sustenance for years. No streams meander these stony beds, but rain-water must be caught, or dependence placed on the brackish pools and shallow wells in the porous rocks or compressed sand, which ebbed and flowed with the tides.
To a Tahitian his brooks were his club, where often he sat or lay in the laughing water, his head crowned with flowers, dreaming of a life of serene idleness. Once or twice a day he must bathe thoroughly. He was clean; his skin was aglow with the effect of air and water. No European could teach him hygiene. He was a perfect animal, untainted and unsoiled, accustomed to laving and massage, to steam, fresh, and salt baths, when Europeans, kings, courts, and commoners went unwashed from autumn to summer; when in the “Lois de la Galanterie,” written for beaux and dandies in 1640, it was enjoined that “every day one should take pains to wash one’s hands, and one should wash one’s face almost as often.”
Environment, purling rivulets under embowering trees, the most enchanting climate between pole and pole, a simple diet but little clothing, made the Tahitian and Marquesan the handsomest and cleanest races in the world. Clothes and cold are an iron barrier to cleanliness, except where wealth affords comfort and privacy. Michelangelo wore a pair of socks many years without removing them. Our grandfathers counted a habit of frequent bathing a sign of weakness. In old New England many baths were thought conducive to immorality, by some line of logic akin to that of my austere aunt, who warned me that oysters led to dancing.
The Paumotuan, before the white man made him a mere machine for gathering copra and pearl-shell and pearls, had a very distinct culture, savage though it was. He was the fabric of his food and the actions induced in him by necessity. Ellis, the interesting missionary diarist of Tahiti and Hawaii, recorded that in 1817, when at Afareaitu, on Moorea, he was printing for the first time the Bible in Tahitian “among the various parties in Afareaitu ... were a number of natives of the Paumotu, or Pearl Islands, which lie to the northwest of Tahiti and constitute what is called the Dangerous Archipelago. These numerous islands, like those of Tetuaroa to the north, are of coralline formation, and the most elevated parts of them are seldom more than two or three feet above high-water mark. The principal, and almost only, edible vegetable they produce is the fruit of the cocoanut. On these, with the numerous kinds of fishes resorting to their shores or among the coral reefs, the inhabitants entirely subsist. They appear a hardy and industrious race, capable of enduring great privations. The Tahitians believe them to be cannibals.... They are in general firm and muscular, but of a more spare habit of body than the Tahitians. Their limbs are well formed, their stature generally tall. The expression of their countenance, and the outline of their features, greatly resemble those of the Society Islanders; their manners are, however, more rude and uncourteous. The greater part of the body is tattooed, sometimes in broad stripes, at others in large masses of black, and always without any of the taste and elegance frequently exhibited in the figures marked on the persons of the Tahitians.”
One who traveled much in the isolated parts of the world was often struck by the unfitness of certain populated places to support in any comfort and safety the people who generation after generation persisted in living in them. For thousands of years the slopes of Vesuvius have been cultivated despite the imminent horror of the volcano above. The burning Paumotu atolls are as undesirable for residences as the desert of Sahara. Yet the hot sands are peopled, and have been for ages, and in the recesses of the frozen North the processes of birth and death, of love and greed, are as absorbing as in the Edens of the earth. Hateful as a lengthy enforced stay in the Paumotus might be to any of us, I have seen two Paumotuan youths dwelling abroad for the first time in their lives, eating delicious food and hardly working at all, weep hours upon hours from homesickness, a continuous longing for their atoll of Puka-ruhu, where they had half starved since birth, and where the equatorial typhoon had raped time and again. Nature, in her insistence that mankind shall continue, implanted that instinct of home in us as one of the most powerful agents of survival of the species. Enduring terrible privation, even, we learned to love the scenes of our sufferings. Never was that better exemplified than in these melancholy and maddening-atolls of the half-browned Archipelago.
CHAPTER IV
The copra market—Dangerous passage to shore at Kaukura—Our boat overturns in the pass—I narrowly escape death—Josephite Missionaries—The deadly nohu—The himene at night.