Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

The house was set on a little rise of land, with a view of the lagoon at the end of an avenue of tall coconut palms. The broad veranda, set with steamer chairs and scarlet-bordered Aitutaki mats, gave on a garden of small flowering trees—"Frangipani," "Tiare Tahiti," "Maid of Moorea," "Queen of the Night." Tari showed me to a corner room, and mixed a rum punch while his wife put buttons on a fresh suit of drill.

Dressed in his clothes, I strolled into the living room to wait while he was changing for dinner. The place was large, and one might have spent hours examining the things it contained—the fruit of twenty years in the South Seas. There were wreaths of bright-colored shell—the favorite parting gift of the islands—from the Paumotus, from Raiatea, from Aitutaki, and Mangaias. There were fans from Manihiki, woven in patterns of dyed pandanus, and Savage Island fans, decorated with human hair. Ranged on a series of shelves, I found a notable collection of penus—the taro-mashers of eastern Polynesia, implements in which the culture of each group expresses itself. I was able to recognize the pestle of Mangaia, eight-sided and carved with almost geometrical perfection from a stalactite of pink lime; the Marquesan penu of dark volcanic stone with its curious phallic handle; the implement of old Tahiti, gracefully designed and smoothly finished by a people far removed from savagery; the rare and beautiful penu of Maupiti—unobtainable to-day—perfect as though turned on a lathe, and adorned with a fantastic handle of ancient and forgotten significance. Mother-of-pearl bonito hooks from a dozen groups were there, and on a table I saw a rare Toki Tiki from Mangaia, an odd thing which, for want of a better name, might be called a Peace Adze. It is a slender little tower of carved wood, set with tiers of windows and surmounted by a stone adze head, lashed on with wrappings of sennit, above which extend a pair of pointed ears. The carving—in the close-grained yellow wood of the Pua—is exquisitely done; I recognized the standard patterns of the islands—-the Shark's Teeth, the Dropping Water, and the intricate Tiki Tangata. The significance of the Peace Adze was religious and ceremonial; the story goes that when, at the end of a period of fighting, two Mangaian clans decided to make peace, the adze played a leading part in the attendant ceremony. A handful of earth was dug up with its head to show that the ground might now be cultivated, and the people were told that they might come and go unmolested, freely as the air through the windowlike openings on its sides. Tari had real adzes as well—the tools with which trees were chopped down and canoes hollowed out—stone implements of a perfection I have never seen elsewhere, carved out of basaltic rock, hard and close as steel, smoothed by processes at which one can only guess, sharp and symmetrical as the product of modern machines.

The Marquesan curiosities interested me most of all—relics of those dark valleys which harbored the most strangely fascinating of all the island peoples. There were ornaments of old men's beards, arranged in little sennit-bound tufts, crinkled and yellowish white; beaked clubs of ironwood, elegantly carved and smooth with countless oilings; ear pendants cut in delicate filigree from the teeth of sperm whales; grotesque little wooden gods, monstrous and bizarre; ceremonial food bowls of Tamanu, adorned with the rich and graceful designs of a culture now forever gone. One felt that the spirits of forgotten artists hovered about the place, beckoning one back to days a century before Melville set foot in the valley of Taipi, to scenes of a strange beauty on which mankind will never look again. Some day—perhaps in a future less remote than we like to fancy—nature's careless hand may once more set the stage for a similar experiment, but the people sequestered in those gloomy islands will be of another blood, and the result can never be the same. The Marquesans themselves—if one is to believe the students of antique mankind—were the result of a racial retrogression; their continental forebears knew iron and pottery and the culture of rice—things lost in the eastward push which brought them to the Nine Islands of Iva.

One curious trinket—labeled "Fatu Hiva"—caught my eye; a squat little figure carved in a sawn-off length of yellow ivory. I examined it closely; it had the air of being at least a hundred years old, and the concentric rings of the section showed it to be the tooth or tusk of some large animal. Where could the Marquesan carver have obtained such a lump of ivory on which to exercise his skill? Could it be possible that this was the tusk of an elephant, carved not one hundred but many centuries ago, and preserved by the people of these distant islands—an immemorial relic of the days when their ancestors left Persia or the Indian hills? I looked again; it was large enough to be part of a small tusk, but the section was flatter than any elephant ivory I had seen. What could it be? Not the tooth of a hippopotamus—it was too large for that; not the sword of a narwhal, which shows a betraying spiral twist. Then I thought of a walrus tusk, and the story seemed clear. Seventy-five or a hundred years ago some whaling vessel, after a venture in the northern ice, must have sailed south and put in at Fatu Hiva for water or wood or fruit. They had killed walrus off Cape Lisburne or in the Kotzebue Sound and, as was the habit of whalers, some of the tusks had been kept for scrimshaw work. Knowing the Polynesian passion for ivory (in Tonga it was death for any but those of the highest rank to take the teeth of a stranded sperm whale) it is not difficult to imagine the rest—a lantern-jawed Yankee harpooner, perhaps, trading his walrus tusk for a canoeload of fruit or the favors of an exceptionally pretty girl.

I was examining a paddle from Manihiki—a graceful, narrow-bladed thing, carved out of porcupine wood and set with diamonds of mother-of-pearl—when Tari came in.

"A pretty paddle, isn't it?" he remarked. "You won't find a more curious one in the Pacific. Notice the way that reinforcing ridge runs down the blade from the haft? Everything has a meaning in primitive stuff of this sort; the original pattern from which this has descended probably came from a land of little trees, where the paddles had to be made in two pieces—blade lashed to handle. Look at the shape of it—more like a Zulu assegai than anything else; it is a weapon, primarily; a thrust of it would kill a naked man. The Manihiki people spend a lot of their time in canoes on the open sea—after bonito by day and flying-fish by night—and those waters swarm with sharks. They have developed their paddle into a weapon of defence. The Samoans carried a special shark club for the same purpose."

I asked his opinion on the disputed question of sharks—whether, in general, the shark is a real menace to the swimmer or the paddler of a small canoe.

"I've heard a lot of loose talk," he said; "how learned societies have offered rewards for a genuine instance of a shark attacking a man, but I have seen enough to know that there is no room for argument. Some idiot goes swimming off a vessel in shark-infested waters, and talks all the rest of his life, perhaps, of the silly fears of others—never realizing that he owes his life to the fact that none of the sharks about him chanced to be more than usually hungry. The really hungry shark is a ravening murderer—dangerous as a wounded buffalo, reckless as a mad dog.... I have seen one tear the paddle from the hand of a man beside me and sink its teeth, over and over again in a frenzy, in the bottom of a heavy canoe. How long do you suppose a swimmer would have lived? And it's not only the big sharks that are dangerous. I remember one day when a lot of us were bathing in Penrhyn lagoon. Suddenly one of the boys gave a shout and began to struggle with something in the waist-deep water—clouded with blood by the time I got there. A small tiger shark, scarcely a yard long, had gouged a piece of flesh out of his leg, and continued to attack until a big Kanaka seized it by the tail and waded to the beach, holding the devilish little brute, snapping its jaws and writhing frantically, at arm's length. As he reached the dry sand the native allowed his arm to relax for an instant; the shark set its teeth in his side and tore out a mouthful that nearly cost the man his life."

The voice of Apakura was summoning us to eat. "Kaikai!" she called: "Aere mai korua!" Tari's dining room was a section of the side veranda, screened off with lattices of bamboo, where we found a table set for two, fresh with flowers and damask. Apakura sat cross-legged on a mat near by; she was weaving a hat of native grass and looked up from her work now and then to speak to the girl who served us—admonishing, scolding, and joking in turn. Tari followed my glance, and smiled as he caught the eye of his wife.

"It probably strikes you as odd that she doesn't sit with us," he said to me. "I tried to get her into the way of it at first, but it's no good. For generations the women of her family have been forbidden to eat in the presence of men, and the old tapu dies hard. Then she hates chairs; when she sits with me she is wretchedly uncomfortable, and bolts her food in a scared kind of way that puts me off my feed. It is best to let them follow their own customs; she likes to sit on the floor there and order her cousin about; when we've finished they'll adjourn to the cook house for dinner and discuss you till your ears tingle. Housekeeping down here is a funny, haphazard business—hopeless if one demands what one had at home; easy and pleasant if one is willing to compromise a bit. To a man who understands the natives at all the servant question does not exist; they will jump at a chance to attach themselves to your household—the trouble is to keep them away. It isn't wages they are after; I pay these people nothing at all for cooking and washing and looking after the place. They like to be where tea and sugar and ship's biscuit are in plenty, and they like to be amused. An occasional stranger, coming and going like yourself, gives them no end of food for talk; I have a phonograph I let them play, and a seine I let them take out for a day's fishing now and then. Once a month, perhaps, I kill a pig and give a bit of a party, and once or twice in a year I get a bullock and let them invite all their relatives to a real umukai. In return for all this they look after my fifty acres of coconuts, make my copra, do my housework, cooking, and laundry, and provide me with all the native food I can use. It strikes me as a fair bargain, from my point of view, at least. It is understood that they are not to bother me; unless there is work to do or they want to see me they never set foot in the house.