Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Preparations were being made on an elaborate scale. The children were gathering green nuts for drinking and fronds for the cloth at the feast. Women and girls were grating the meat of ripe nuts, pressing out the milk for the miti haari; cleaning fish; preparing shells for dishes. Some of the men and the older boys were building native ovens—eight of them, each one large enough for roasting a pig. All of this work was being carried out under Puarei's direction and to the accompaniment of Kaupia's accordion. I wish that I might in some way make real to others the unreal loveliness of the scene. It must be remembered that it took place on one of the loneliest of a lonely cloud of islands which lay in the midmost solitude of an empty ocean. The moonlight must be remembered, too, and how it lay in splinters of silver on the motionless fronds of the palms as though it were of the very texture of their polished surfaces. And you must hear Kaupia's accordion, and the shouts of the children as they dove into the pool of silvered foam. The older ones, out of respect to me, I think, wore wisps of parou cloth about their loins, but the babies were as naked as on the day they were born. Tereki was standing among these five-and-six-year-olders, who were too small for the climb to the diving place, taking them up, sometimes two at once, and tossing them into the pool among the others, where they were as much at home as so many minnows. Watching them, I thought with regret of my own lost opportunities as a child. I felt a deep pity for all the children of civilization who must wear clothing and who never know the joy of playing at midnight, and by moonlight too. Mothers' clubs and child-welfare organizations would do well to consider the advisability of repealing the old "to bed at seven" law, the bugbear of all children. Its only merits, if it may be so called, is that it fosters in children, a certain melancholy intellectual enjoyment in such poems as, "Up the ladder and over the wall," where the forbidden pleasures are held out to them as though they were natural ones—which most of them are, of course—and quite possible of attainment.

I was sorry that Tino, supercargo of the Caleb S. Winship, could not be present to see how blithely the work went forward. He had called the people of Rutiaro a lazy lot, and he was right—they were lazy, according to the standards of temperate climates. But when they worked toward an end which pleased them their industry was astonishing. Tino's belief was that man was made to labor, whether joyfully or not, in order that he might increase his wealth, whether he needed it or not, and that of the world at large. I remember meeting somewhat the same point of view in reading the lives and memoirs of some of the old missionaries to the islands. It seems to have irked them terribly, finding a people who had never heard that doleful hymn, "Work, for the Night Is Coming." They, too, believed that the needs of the Polynesians should be increased, but for ethical reasons, in order that they should be compelled to cultivate regular habits of industry in order to satisfy them. Although I didn't agree with it, Tino's seemed to me the sounder conviction. The missionaries might have argued as reasonably for a general distribution of Job-like boils, in order that the virtues of patience and fortitude might have wider dissemination. But neither trade nor religion had altered to any noticeable extent the habits of life at Rutiaro. The people worked, as they had always done, under the press of necessity. Their simple needs being satisfied, their inertia was a thing to marvel at. I have often seen them sitting for hours at a time, moving only with the shadows which sheltered them. There was something awe-inspiring in their immobility, in their attitude of profound reverie. I felt at times that I was living in a land under a perpetual enchantment of silence and sleep. These periods of calm—or, as Tino would say, laziness—were usually brought to an end by Puarei. It was a fascinating thing to watch him throwing off the enchantment, so gradual the process was and so strange the contrast when he was thoroughly awakened and had roused the village from its long sleep. Then would follow a period of activity—fishing, copra making, canoe building, whatever there was to do would be done, not speedily, perhaps, but smoothly, and fasts would be broken—in the case of many of the villagers for the first time in two or three days. My house was built during such a period. I was still living with Puarei on the village island, wondering when, if ever, I was to have the promised dwelling. Then one afternoon, while I was absent on a shell-gathering expedition, the village set out en masse for Soul-Eaters' Island, cut the timbers, branded the fronds, erected, swept, and garnished my house, and were at the settlement again before I myself had returned. That task finished, here they were back for the warming festival, and the energy spent in preparing for it would have more than loaded Tino's schooner with copra. I couldn't flatter myself that all of this was done solely to give me pleasure. They found pleasure in it too, and, furthermore, I knew that an unusually long interval of fasting called for compensation in the way of feasting.

Puarei was in a gay mood. Religion sat rather heavily upon him sometimes—by virtue of his Papeete schooling, he was the chief elder of his church; but once he sloughed off his air of Latter Day Saintliness he made a splendid master of revels; and he threw it aside the moment the drums began to beat, and led a dozen of the younger men in a dance which I had not seen before. It was very much like modern Swedish drill set to music, except that the movements were as intricate and graceful as they were exhausting. Three kinds of drums were used—one, an empty gasoline tin, upon which the drummer kept up a steady roll while the dance was in progress. The rhythm for the movements was indicated by three others, two of them beating hollowed cylinders of wood, while a third was provided with an old French army drum of the Napoleonic period. The syncopation was extraordinary. Measures were divided in an amazing variety of ways, and often when the opportunity seemed lost the fragments joined perfectly just as the next one was at hand. The music was a kaleidoscope in sound, made up of unique and startling variations in tempo, as the dance moved from one figure to the next.

At the close of it Kaupia took up her accordion again, and dancing by some of the women followed. At length, Rangituki, grandmother though she was, could resist the music no longer. The others gave way to her, and in a moment she was dancing alone, proudly, with a sort of wistful abandon, as though she were remembering her youth, throwing a last defiance in the teeth of Time. Kaupia sang as she played to an air which had but four changes in it. The verse was five words long and repeated endlessly.

Tu fra to potta mi,

Tu fra to potta mi.

Both the words and the air had a familiar sound. They called to mind a shadowy picture of three tall, thin women in spangled skirts, all of them beating tambourines in unison and dancing in front of a painted screen. I couldn't account for the strange vision at first. It glimmered faintly, far in the depths of subconscious memory, like a colored newspaper supplement, lying in murky water at the end of a pier. Suddenly it rose into focus, drawn to the surface by the buoyant splendor of a name—the Cherry Sisters. I remembered then a vaudeville troupe which long ago made sorry capital of its lack of comeliness; and I saw them again on the island where the souls were eaten as clearly as ever I had as a youngster, knocking their tambourines on bony elbows, shaking their curls, and singing

"Shoe, fly, don't bother me,"

in shrill, cracked voices. Kaupia's version was merely a phonetic translation of the words. They meant nothing in the Paumotuan dialect; and—old woman though she was—Rangituki's dance, which accompanied the music, played in faster and faster time, was in striking contrast to the angular movements of the Cherry Sisters, tripping it in the background, across the dim footlights of the eighteen nineties.

Other canoes were arriving during this time, and at last a large canoe, which had put off from the ocean side of the village island, was seen making in toward the pass. It was loaded with pigs and chickens, the most important part of the feast, and had been eagerly awaited for more than an hour. Shouts of anticipation went up from the shore as the boat drew in with its wished-for freight; but these were a little premature. There was a stretch of ugly, broken water to be passed, where the swift ebb from the lagoon met the swell of the open sea. The canoe was badly jostled in crossing it, and some of the chickens, having worked loose from their bonds, escaped. Like the dogs of the atolls, the chickens are of a wild breed, and they took the air with sturdy wings. The chase from the shore began at once, but it was a hopeless one. Soul-Eaters' Island is five hundred yards long by three hundred broad, and there is another, on the opposite side of the pass, which is more than a mile in extent. We made frantic efforts to prevent them from reaching it. We threw sticks and stones, tried to entice them with broken coconuts, the meat temptingly accessible. It was to no purpose. They had been enticed before; their crops were full, and several hours of captivity had made them wary. Furthermore, like all Polynesian chickens, they seemed to have a racial memory of what they had been in other times, in less congenial environments—of the lean days when they had been caught and eaten at will, chased by dogs, run down by horses. They were not so far from all that as to have lost conscious pride in their regained prerogative of flight. The last we saw of them they were using it to splendid advantage over the rapid stream which separated the two islands. One old hen, alone, remained perched in the top of a coconut tree on Soul-Eaters' Island. She was in no hurry to leave. She knew that she could follow the others whenever she liked, and she knew that we knew it. She seemed drunk with a sense of freedom and power, and cackled proudly, as though more than half convinced that the nuts clustered in the nest of foliage beneath her were eggs which she had laid.

Knowing the wholesomeness of the Paumotuan appetite, I could understand why the loss of the chickens was regarded seriously. A dozen of them remained, and we had eight pigs weighing from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds each, to say nothing of some fifty pounds of fish. All of this was good, in so far as it went, but there was a gloomy shaking of heads as we returned from our fruitless chase. Not that the Paumotuans are particularly fond of chicken; on the contrary, they don't care greatly for fowl of any sort, but it serves to fill odd corners of their capacious stomachs. It was this they were thinking of, and the possible lack, at the end of the feast, of the feeling of almost painful satiety which is to them an essential after-dinner sensation. In this emergency I contributed four one-pound tins of beef and salmon, my entire stock of substantial provisions for the adventure in solitude; but I could see that Puarei, as well as the others, regarded this as a mere relish—a wholly acceptable but light course of hors-d'oeuvre. Fortunately there was at hand an inexhaustible reservoir of food—the sea—and we prepared to go there for further supplies. I never lost an opportunity to witness those fish-spearing expeditions. Once I had tried my hand as a participant and found myself as dangerously out of my element as a Paumotuan would be at the joy stick of an airplane. I saw a great many fish, but I could not have speared one of them if it had been moored to the bottom, and after a few absurd attempts was myself fished into the boat, half drowned. I lay there for a few minutes, gasping for breath, my ear drums throbbing painfully from the attempt to reach unaccustomed depths.