In a few days I was fully initiated in the mysteries of the native menu. The Fijians usually take two meals in the day. I soon got used to their bill of fare, which is a liberal one. The bread-fruit was served up in an infinite variety of ways; there are a score of different kinds of puddings, and of soups there are at least a dozen sorts, including turtle soup—though they prefer roast turtle. The juice of the cocoanut, the ti-root, and the sugar-cane, make excellent pudding sauces.
The Fijians’ life in the good old times was largely made up of eating and sleeping. If a man keeps at work till mid-day, he likes to bathe a little after that hour, then to take a rather long siesta, hard as his pillow is. Towards evening you may see him strolling in his garden, or along the beach if he lives on the coast, cooling himself in the pleasant breeze. Presently he returns to his snug and well-matted hut to enjoy the warm evening meal. If the song, the dance, and the moonlight do not allure him, the soft cool mat, the wooden pillow, and somebody present to talk, may occupy him even till morning. Wanting the song or the tale, hard sleep is his sole refuge.
The men usually collect in the bures or strangers’ houses, which serve the purposes of an English club, at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon to talk. The married men sleep there till dawn, and then return to their wives. The Fijian in the thinly-peopled hill districts does not sleep with his consort. The nuptial bower is in some secluded part of the woods, known only to the pair, where, as with our first parents, a soft downy bank, damasked with flowers, invites to amorous dalliance. Boys, until they have been publicly recognised as adults, have a sleeping bure to themselves.
Among the occupations of the villagers which interested me greatly was the art of native-cloth making. Strips of the bark of the malo tree, which have been steeped in water, are beaten by women on a log with a grooved mallet. The masi or tapa is pieced together with the starch of the taro. The cloth is then printed in divers patterns with strips of bamboo, several kinds of dye being used. The rhythm of tapa-beating has as cheerful and industrious a sound as that of threshing corn in an English village.
In a very short time I was a familiar friend in all the houses in the valley. Sometimes I extended my walks to a neighboring village, and was always received as an honoured guest. I often felt disposed to say with the poet—
“Among the hills a hundred homes have I,
My table in the wilderness is spread;
In these lone spots one honest smile can buy
Plain fare, warm welcome, and a rushy bed.”
The tropical forest was an unending source of admiration to me. The palm, rearing its polished shafts, stately as a Corinthian column, with its coronal of sighing plumes through which the golden clusters of nuts appear dangling so temptingly far up in the sunshine, is in itself a beautiful object, worthy of imitation in architecture. The Fijians ascend these smooth pillars, with no other aid than that of their hands and feet, with surprising rapidity. Tapping the nuts with their fingers, they know by the sound those which are fit for food. They prefer the young nuts, in which the milk is as clear as spring water, and the flesh of the consistency of cream. When a cocoanut has lain on the ground a short time, a shoot emerges from one of its three eyes and enters the ground. A cord connects it with the nut, and supplies half the nourishment of the young plant till it is strong enough to draw all it requires from the ground. The tree and its products are put to such an infinite variety of uses that without it the natives would be badly off.