White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

So in the dance my Marquesan neighbors returned to the old ways and expressed emotions dying under the rule of an alien people. With the making light of their reverenced tapus, the proving that their gods were powerless, and the ending of their tribal life, the dance degraded. They did not care to dance now that their joy in life was gone. But the new and jolly governor, craving amusement, sought to revive it for his pleasure. So the drums were beating on the palace lawn, and afternoon found the trails gay with pareus and brilliant shawls as the natives came down from their paepaes to the seat of government.

Chief Kekela Avaua, adopted son of the old Kekela, and head man of the Paamau district, called for me. He was a dignified and important man of forty-five years, with handsome patterns in tattooing on his legs, and Dundreary whiskers. He was quite modishly dressed in brown linen, beneath which showed his bare, prehensile-toed feet.

Kirio Patuhamane, a marvelous specimen of scrolled ink-marks from head to foot, who sported Burnside whiskers, an English cricket cap, and a scarlet loin-cloth, accompanied us down the road.

A hundred natives were squatting in the garden of the palace, and rum and wine were being handed out when we arrived. Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale, the man under sentence for making palm brandy, were once more the distributors, and took a glass often. The people had thawed since the dance at the governor's inauguration. As Kirio Patuhamane explained, they had waited to observe the disposition of their new ruler, the last having been severe, dispensing no rum save for his own selfish gain, and having a wife who despised them.

My tawny feminine friends resented keenly white women's airs of superiority, and many were the cold glances cast by Malicious Gossip, Apporo, and Flower at the stiffly gowned Madame Bapp, who sat on the veranda drinking absinthe. They scorned her, because she beat her husband if he but looked at one of them, though he owned a store and desired their custom. Poor Madame Bapp! She thought her little man very attractive, and she lived in misery because of the openly-displayed charms of his customers. She loved him, and when jealous she sought the absinthe bottle and soon was busy with whip and broom on the miserable Bapp, who sought to flee. It was useless; she had looked to doors and windows, and he must take a painful punishment, the while the crockery smashed and all Atuona Valley listened on its paepaes, laughing and well knowing that the little man had given no cause for jealousy.

She greeted me with cold politeness when I mounted to the veranda, and the governor dispensed glasses of “Dr. Funk,” a drink known to all the South Seas. Its secret is merely the mixing of a stiff drink of absinthe with lemonade or limeade. The learned man who added this death-dealing potion to the pleasures of the thirsty was Stevenson's friend, and attended him in his last illness. I do not know whether Dr. Funk ever mixed his favorite drink for R.L.S., but his own fame has spread, not as a healer, but as a dram-decocter, from Samoa to Tahiti. “Dr. Funk!” one hears in every club and bar. Its particular merits are claimed by experts to be a stiffening of the spine when one is all in; an imparting of courage to live to men worn out by doing nothing.

The governor in gala attire was again the urban host, assisted by André Bauda, now his close friend and confidant. Bauda himself had been in the island only a few months, and knew no more Marquesan speech than the governor. Both these officials were truly hospitable, embarrassingly so, considering my inability to keep up with them in their toasts.

Soon the demijohn of rum had been emptied into the glasses passing from hand to hand in the garden; Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale again evoked the thrumming beat of the great drums, and the dance began. This was a tragedy of the sea, a pantomine of danger and conflict and celebration. For centuries past the ancestors of these dancers had played it on the Forbidden Height. Even the language in which they chanted was archaic to this generation, its words and their meanings forgotten.

The women sat upon the grass in a row, and first, in dumb show, they lifted and carried from its house to the beach a long canoe. The straining muscles of their arms, the sway of their bodies, imitated the raising of the great boat, and the walking with its weight, the launching, the waiting for the breakers and the undertow that would enable them to pass the surf line, and then the paddling in rough water.

Meantime at a distance the men chanted in chorus, giving rhythmic time to the motions of the dancers and telling in the long-disused words the story of the drama. And the drums beat till their rolling thunder resounded far up the valley.