White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

A pool in the jungle

I rose gladly from the palm-shaded mat on which I had lain vainly hoping for a breath of coolness in the close heat of the day, and girded the red pareu more neatly about my loins. Often I had heard of the kava-drinking days before the missionaries had insisted on outlawing that drink beloved of the natives. The traders had added their power to the virtuous protests of the priests, for kava cost the islanders nothing, while rum, absinthe, and opium could be sold them for profit. So kava-drinking had been suppressed, and after decades of knowing more powerful stimulants and narcotics, the natives had lost their taste for the gentler beverage of their forefathers.

The French law prohibited selling, exchanging, or giving to any Marquesan any alcoholic beverage. But the law was a dead letter, for only with rum and wine could work be urged upon the Marquesans, and I failed to reprove them even in my mind for their love of drink. One who has not seen a dying race cannot conceive of the prostration of spirit in which these people are perishing. That they are courteous and hospitable—and that to the white who has ruined them—shows faintly their former joy in life and their abounding generosity. Now that no hope is left them and their only future is death, one cannot blame them for seizing a few moment's forgetfulness.

Some years earlier, in the first bitterness of hopeless subjugation, whole populations were given over to drunkenness. In many valleys the chiefs lead in the making of the illicit namu enata, or cocoanut-brandy. In the Philippines, where millions of gallons of cocoanut-brandy are made, it is called tuba, but usually its name is arrack throughout tropical Asia. Fresh from the flower spathes of the cocoanut-tree, namu tastes like a very light, creamy beer or mead. It is delicious and refreshing, and only slightly intoxicating. Allowed to ferment and become sour, it is all gall. Its drinking then is divided into two episodes—swallowing and intoxication. There is no interval. “Forty-rod” whiskey is mild compared to it.

I had seen the preparation of namu, which is very simple. The native mounts the tree and makes incisions in the flowers, of which each palm bears from three to six. He attaches a calabash under them and lets the juice drip all day and night. The process is slow, as the juice falls drop by drop. This operation may be repeated indefinitely with no injury to the tree. In countries where the liquor is gathered to sell in large quantities, the natives tie bamboo poles from tree to tree, so that an agile man will run through the forest tending the calabashes, emptying them into larger receptacles, and lowering these to the ground, all without descending from his lofty height.

The namu when stale causes the Marquesans to revert to wickedest savagery, and has incited many murders. Under the eye of the gendarme its making ceases, but a hundred valleys have no white policemen, and the half score of people remaining amid their hundreds of ruined paepaes give themselves over to intoxication. I have seen a valley immersed in it, men and women madly dancing the ancient nude dances in indescribable orgies of abandonment and bestiality.

Namu enata means literally “man booze.” The Persian-Arabic word, nam, or narm-keffi, means “the liquid from the palm flower.” From this one might think that Asia had taught the Marquesans the art of making namu during their prehistoric pilgrimage to the islands, but the discoverers and early white residents in Polynesia saw no drunkenness save that of the kava-drinking. It was the European, or the Asiatic brought by the white, who introduced comparatively recently the more vicious cocoanut-brandy, as well as rum and opium, and it is these drinks that have been a potent factor in killing the natives.

It has ever been thus with men of other races subjugated by the whites. Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography tells that when he was a commissioner to the Indians at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he and his fellow-commissioners agreed that they would allow the Indians no rum until the treaty they earnestly sought was concluded, and that then they should have plenty.