White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of “going to the world below,” where he hopes to find real wisdom?

Havaii or Havaiki is, of course, the fabled place whence came the Polynesians, as it is also the name of that underworld to which their spirits return after death. One might read into this fact a dim groping of the Marquesan mind toward “From dust he came, to dust returneth,” or, more likely, a longing of the exiled people for the old home they had abandoned. Ethnologists believe that the name refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed.

Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no suffering, either for good or bad souls. It is simply the place where the dead go. It is ruled by Po, the Darkness.

There is, however, a paradise in an island in the clouds, where beautiful girls and great bowls of kava, with pigs roasted to a turn, await the good and brave. The old priests claimed to be able to help one from Po to this happy abode, but the living relatives of the departed spirit had to pay a heavy price for their services. The Christianized Marquesan fancies that he finds these old beliefs revived when Père David tells him of purgatory, from which prayers and certain good acts help one's friends, or may be laid up in advance against the day when one must himself descend to that middle state of souls.

All Marquesans live in the shadow of that day. They see it without fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it is indescribable.

“I have seen many go as Aumia has gone,” said Father David to me. “All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is passing. Some day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of the dead.”

A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one hundred.

A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults. I visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me.

Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva. One of the tribe of merciless American whaling captains having sent ashore a sailor dying of tuberculosis, the tattooed cannibals received him in a Christ-like manner, soothed his last hours, and breathed the germs that have carried off more than four-fifths of their race, and to-day are killing the remnant.

The white man brought the Chinese, and with them leprosy. The Chinese were imported to aid the white in stealing the native land of the Marquesan, and to keep the Chinese contented, opium was brought with him. Finding it eagerly craved by the ignorant native, the foolish white fastened this vice also upon his other desired slave. The French Government, for forty thousand francs, licensed an opium farmer to sell the drug still faster, and not until alarmed by the results and shamed by the outcry in Europe, did it forbid the devastating narcotic. Too late!