“Turn them to shapes, and give to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
Having accomplished this, he had yet to compose a tune for the words that were soon to move his countrymen to tears or laughter.
It was held by some sagacious cannibals that while the poet slept, his spirit, freeing itself from the flesh, wandered abroad to find and court the muses. Others believed that the gods sometimes suggested pictures, and dictated to the poet’s mind the words to paint them with, the poet himself making hardly any effort at composition. If any part of a poem thus divinely whispered, proved too difficult for the comprehension of poet or people, the bard was sure to lay the blame on his god who was the real author, and therefore the only party responsible. If we accept the poet’s decision, the gods of Cannibal-land have an enormous weight of such responsibility to bear, inasmuch as great numbers of the old compositions are, of all the mysteries of cannibal poetic art, the most mysterious. Not a few of Fiji’s verse-makers did their work by dint of, for them, long-sustained and arduous mental effort. The author of the song of Prince Hightide and his Monster Canoe, must be ranked with this number of laborious workers. Others depended very much on fasting for the more easy production of what they were pledged to supply. Perhaps, however, the notion having the strongest hold on the popular mind, was that the spirits of great poets were permitted to visit that State of the spirit-world known to the people as the “State of Music and Song,” and to bring to earth some of the choicest things sung in that delightful place. To the poet it mattered little where or by what means the song was obtained, so long as it gained the public favour, and its supposed author the public pay. In the best days of the cannibal poets there were songs which so won their way, and gained for themselves such a wide popularity, that voyages were made from the most distant places to obtain them. Trumpet Shell was a very good specimen of his class, and he delivered his lay,—the theme of which was this wonderful canoe and her still more wonderful captain,—with excellent effect.
It being impossible to give the reader anything like an intelligible translation in verse, of the song referred to, it must take the form of a tale in prose. Without doubt it is Cannibal-land’s greatest story, if not its best poetic composition.
I gathered from the poet’s few first words, that the Ebbtide was a monster canoe, in fact, the greatest ever known; and that her captain, Prince Hightide, was a mighty giant and hero-god. The poet, unfortunately I think, tells us not one word about the building of this enormous vessel, but begins her history at the moment when her builders declare her to be ready for launching. This is a great point with the poet, who forthwith proceeds to show that those wise and wonderful builders have, for certain, either woefully over-calculated the needful degree of human muscle and bone power, or undercalculated the size and weight of their big ship. It is quite possible, and even probable that they did both, for such calculations are entirely outside of the range of Fiji’s mathematical science.
This much, however, is clear, that when the day arrived for launching the Ebbtide, she could not be moved from the stocks or rollers, notwithstanding the application to every part of her at once, of
“A blood-power stronger than steam.”
In this fix a whole tribe of soldiers was brought up to add its strength to that of the people now weary with trying. These united forces all tugged and pushed and shouted, and pushed and tugged again and again, but to no purpose. After these repeated failures, another tribe was added to the human engine, and more rollers were placed under the vessel; but in spite of everything, she remained like a rock, planted where she was. This was quite beyond endurance; and the humiliating and piteous cry arose that, for once, men had built a canoe they could not launch,—doomed not to be wrecked at sea, or laid up to decay on land after long and honourable service, but to rot on the very spot where her builders laid her down, and whence they had no power to make her budge an inch.
In this dilemma it was proposed to report progress, or non-progress rather, to the god-descended hero, Prince Hightide, for whom this monster of the deep was built. With this suggestion, ends the first act.