White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

Putting the canoe in the water

In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the Marquesas. The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone, makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the archipelago for centuries. Now it is one of the few places where even a feeble survival of those industries give the newcomers a glimpse of their methods and ideals now sinking, like their originators, in the mire of wretchedness.

Outside the mission gates, in the edge of the jungle, Père Olivier and I came upon two old women making tapa cloth. Shrunken with age, toothless, decrepit, their only covering the ragged and faded pareus that spoke of poverty, they sat in the shade of a banian-tree, beating the fibrous inner bark of the breadfruit-tree. Over the hollow log that resounded with the blows of their wooden mallets the cloth moved slowly, doubling on the ground into a heap of silken texture, firm, thin, and soft.

This paper-cloth was once made throughout all the South Sea Islands. Breadfruit, banian, mulberry, and other barks furnished the fiber. The outer rough bark was scraped off with a shell, and the inner rind slightly beaten and allowed to ferment. It was then beaten over a tree-trunk with mallets of iron-wood about eighteen inches long, grooved coarsely on one side and more finely on the other. The fibers were so closely interwoven by this beating that in the finished cloth one could not guess the process of making. When finished, the fabric was bleached in the sun to a dazzling white, and from it the Marquesans of old wrought wondrous garments.

For their caps they made remarkably fine textures, open-meshed, filmy as gauze, which confined their abundant black hair, and to which were added flowers, either natural or beautifully preserved in wax. Their principal garment, the cahu, was a long and flowing piece of the paper-cloth, of firmer texture, dyed in brilliant colors, or of white adorned with tasteful patterns. This hung from the shoulders, where it was knotted on one shoulder, leaving one arm and part of the breast exposed. Much individual taste was expressed in the wearing of this garment; sometimes the knot was on one shoulder, sometimes on the other, or it might be brought low on the chest, leaving the shoulders and arms bare, or thrown behind to expose the charms of a well-formed back or a slender waist. Beneath it they wore a pareu, which passed twice around the waist and hung to the calves of the legs.

Clean and neat as these garments always were, shining in the sun, leaving the body free to know the joys of sun and air and swift, easy motion, it would be difficult to imagine a more graceful, beautiful, modest, and comfortable manner of dressing.

For dyeing these garments in all the hues that fancy dictated, the women used the juices of herb and tree. Candlenut-bark gave a rich chocolate hue; scarlet was obtained from the mati-berries mixed with the leaves of the tou. Yellow came from the inner bark of the root of the morinda citrifolia. Hibiscus flowers or delicate ferns were dipped in these colors and impressed on the tapas in elegant designs.

The garments were virtually indestructible. Did a dress need repairing, the edges of the rent were moistened and beaten together, or a handful of fiber was beaten in as a patch. Often for fishermen the tapas were made water-proof by added thicknesses and the employment of gums, and waterproof cloth for wrappings was made thick and impervious to rain as the oilcloth it resembled.