Our approach was duly heralded, and fitting preparations were made for the reception of the vasus. Once more I stood in the square fronting the chief’s house, where a year ago I had lain, bound hand and foot, and expecting immediate death. I thought of my unhappy companions, cut off in the prime of life, of the vile use to which their bodies had been converted, and of the probability that their friends and relatives would never learn their fate. At that moment what I took for two singularly light colored natives, wearing the ordinary malo, and naked otherwise, approached me.
“By all that’s wonderful,” said one of them.
“Jeerusalem! Tom Whimpy, is that you?” shrieked the other.
The recognition was mutual. To my infinite delight I saw before me in perfect health, Jacob Turner and Silas Cobb, the master and mate of the Molly Asthore, whom I had mourned as dead.
They had much to tell me of their adventures among the natives. I gathered from them in subsequent conversations that the body of the man who pursued me so closely after I had burst my fetters, and whom I had killed, was found and buried by his friends, and that the general opinion was that I had either died in the woods or been eaten by the kai tholos, or mountaineers.
The return to life of Turner and Cobb was more wonderful than my escape. It seemed that when they fell under the clubs, having good thick skulls, they were only stunned. On regaining consciousness, the cannibal oven was ready to receive them. They had been stripped, and were just about to be thrust in, when the captain, recalling his previous slight knowledge of the country, remembered the words of the prayer which is said by the priest, before the final act of sacrifice. The man who has used those words is sacred, and must not be eaten. He repeated the brief formula, and taught it to the mate who said it after him. They accordingly escaped death, and were adopted by the tribe, all of whom had behaved well to them since. Hot-Water had from the first desired that the white men should live, and the success of the ruse adopted gave him great pleasure.
As I entered the square with Lolóma and was formally presented to Hot-Water, who said he was glad I had come to join his tribe, I was no longer glared upon by a defiant crowd, but was waited upon by a cringing and obsequious populace. We were received with the homage due to vasus.
Two Matas[[14]] were sent to us by the King, holding by either end a mat. They crawled up to us, and having spread the mat, we sat upon it. An official, whose rank was that of an ambassador, now shouted in a high key, the proper greeting, “Sa tiko!” (They sit.) “Sa tiko! Sa tiko! Sa tiko!” repeating the cry with increasing rapidity, and in descending tones for about a dozen times. Having rested long enough to recover breath, the man shouted again, “Sa tawa!” (Inhabited.) This was a compliment implied in the graceful insinuation that the place was empty before our arrival, but that it was now inhabited, the presence of such august personages being in itself security against social retrogression. “Sa tawa! Sa tawa!” was repeated many times quickly. Then half a dozen Matas advanced slowly towards us in sitting posture. When within a few feet of us, they bowed till their beards swept the ground. Rising, and clasping their beards with their hands, they cried, “Sa uru!” (Furled are your sails) “Sa uru! Woi! Woi!” Then they returned to the positions they had formerly occupied near their master.
[14]. Ambassadors.
I made a short speech to the chief, the people clapped their hands several times in the way peculiar to the Fijians, and the ceremony ended. Henceforth, this formal homage having been done us, we were honored guests, and at liberty to do almost as we chose. Such is the power of the vasu lévu, or great privileged.