Hardly one of these garments survives in the Marquesas to-day. They have been driven out by the gaudy prints of Germany and England brought by the traders, and by the ideas of dress which the missionaries imported together with the barrels of hideous night-gown garments contributed by worthy ladies of American villages.
The disappearance of these native garments brought two things, idleness and the rapid spread of tuberculosis. The tapa cloth could not be worn in the water or the rain, as it disintegrated. Marquesans therefore left their robes in the house when they went abroad in stormy weather or bathed in the sea. But in their new calicos and ginghams they walked in the rain, bathed in the rivers, and returned to sleep huddled in the wet folds, ignorant of the danger.
As the tapa disappeared, so did the beautiful carvings of canoes and paddles and clubs, superseded by the cheaper, machine-made articles of the whites. Little was left to occupy the hands or minds of the islanders, who, their old merrymakings stopped, their wars forbidden, their industry taken from them, could only sit on their paepaes yawning like children in jail and waiting for the death that soon came.
The Marquesans never made a pot. They had clay in their soil, as Gauguin proved by using it for his modeling, but they had no need of pottery, using exclusively the gourds from the vines, wooden vessels hollowed out, and temporary cups of leaves.
This absence of pottery is another proof of the lengthy isolation of the islands. The Tongans had earthen ware which they learned to make from the Fijians, but the Polynesians had left the mainland before the beginning of this art. Thus they remained a people who were, despite their startling advances in many lines, the least encumbered by useful inventions of any race in the world.
Until hardly more than a hundred years ago the natives were like our forefathers who lived millenniums ago in Europe. But being in a gentler climate, they were gentler, happier, merrier, and far cleaner. One can hardly dwell in a spirit of filial devotion upon the relation of our forefathers to soap and water, but these Marquesans bathed several times daily in dulcet streams and found soap and emollients to hand.
It was curious to me to reflect, while Père Olivier and I stood watching the two aged crones beating out the tapa cloth, upon what slender chance hung the difference between us. Far in the remote mists of time, when a tribe set out upon its wanderings from the home land, one man, perhaps, hesitated, dimly felt the dangers and uncertainties before it, weighed the advantages of remaining behind, and did not go. Had he gone, I or any one of Caucasian blood in the world to-day, might have been a Marquesan.
It would be interesting, I thought, to consider what the hundred thousand years that have passed since that day have given us of joy, of wealth of mind and soul and body, of real value in customs and manners and attitude toward life, compared to what would have been our portion in the islands of the South Seas before his white cousin fell upon the Marquesan.
CHAPTER XXXI
Fishing in Hanavave; a deep-sea battle with a shark; Red Chicken shows how to tie ropes to shark's tails; night-fishing for dolphins, and the monster sword-fish that overturned the canoe; the native doctor dresses Red Chicken's wounds and discourses on medicine.