Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

"My greatest trouble has been to get some idea of regularity into their heads. These people cannot understand why we prefer to eat our dinner at the same hour every day. Where contact with the white man has not changed their habits, they eat whenever they are hungry—at midnight or at four in the morning, if they chance to be awake. Even here they can't understand my feelings when dinner is an hour or two late."

The cousin of Apakura took away the remnants of a dish of raw fish and brought us a platter heaped with roast breadfruit, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes, served with a pitcher of tai akari—the sea water and coconut sauce, worthy of a place on any table. It is only the uncivilized white who turns up his nose at native food; the island's vegetables are both wholesome and delicious, and cannot be cooked better than in a Maori oven. A certain amount of European food is necessary to health, but the sallow, provincial white man, who takes a sort of racial pride in living on the contents of tins, need not be surprised that the climate of the islands does not agree with him. It is the same type, usually with no other cause for pride than the fact that he chanced to be born white, whose voice is most frequently heard declaiming on the subject of color. Everywhere in the islands, of course, the color line exists—a subtle barrier between the races, not to be crossed with impunity; but the better sort of white man is ready to admit that God, who presumably made him, also made the native, and made of the Polynesian a rather fine piece of work. Tari had stepped across with eyes open, counting the cost, realizing all that he must relinquish. He is not a man to make such a decision lightly; in his case the step meant severing the last material tie with home, giving up forever the Englishman's dreams of white children and an old age in the pleasant English countryside. His children—if children came to him—would have skins tinted by a hundred generations of hot sunlight, and look at him with strange, dark eyes, liquid and shy—the eyes of an elder race, begotten when the world was young. His old age would be spent on this remote and forgotten bit of land, immensely isolated from the ancestral background to which most men return at last. As the shadows gathered in the evening of his life there would be long days of reading and reflection—stretched in a steamer chair on this same veranda, while the trade hummed through the palm tops and the sea rumbled softly on the reef. At night, lying wakeful as old men do, in a hush broken only by the murmur of a lonely sea, his thoughts would wander back—a little sadly, as the thoughts of an old man must—along a hundred winding paths of memory, through scenes wild and lovely, savage, stern, and gay. Dimly out of the past would appear the faces of men and women—long since dead and already only vaguely remembered—the companions of his youth, once individually vibrant with the current of life, now moldering alike in forgotten graves. They would be a strangely assorted company, Tari's ghosts: men of all the races, scholars, soldiers, sportsmen, skippers of trading vessels, pearl divers of the atolls, nurses of the Red Cross, Englishwomen of his own station in life, dark-eyed daughters of the islands, with shining hair and the beauty of sleek, wild creatures—bewitching and soulless, half bold and half afraid. Whether for good or ill, wisely or unwisely, as the case might be, no man could say that Tari had not lived; I wondered what the verdict would be when, in the days to come, he cast up the balance of his life....

Apakura ceased her plaiting and began to measure off the narrow braid, delicately woven in a pattern of black and white, which would eventually be sewn in spirals to make a hat—my hat, by the way, for it had been promised to me weeks before. One fathom, two fathoms, three fathoms—another two fathoms were needed, work for the odd moments of a month. Some day—in an uncertain future and on a distant island, perhaps—the cabin boy of a schooner would step ashore and present me with a box containing this same hat, superbly new, decorated with a gay puggree and lined with satin bearing my initials in silk. Meanwhile, though I would have given much for a new hat, there was nothing to do but wait. Like other things of native make, a hat cannot be bought with money; the process of manufacture is too laborious to be other than a matter of good will. Think of the work that goes into one of these hats. First of all—far off in the mountains—the stalks of aeho (Erianthus floridulus) must be gathered. These are split when thoroughly dry, and the two halves scraped thin as paper before being split again into tiny strips of fiber less than a sixteenth of an inch wide. A certain amount of the aeho, depending on the pattern to be woven, must now be dyed—usually black or in a shade of brown. From a dozen to twenty of these strands—dyed and undyed—are plaited into the flexible braid of which the hat is built up—a task requiring extraordinary patience and skill. Such hats are made only for relatives and close friends; if an unmarried girl gives one to a man the gift has the same significance as the pair of earrings he would give in return. When a native boy appears with a new and gorgeous hat, the origin of which is veiled in doubt, village gossip hums until the truth is known; even the classic sewing circle of New England can show no faster or more efficient work than these artless brown women, standing knee deep in the waters of some dashing stream, prattling, laughing, shattering the reputations of absent sisters, as they pound and wring the soapy clothes.

When dinner was over and Tari was filling his pipe in the living room I took up the lamp for a glance at the titles on his shelves of books. Side by side with the transactions of the Polynesian Society and the modern works of S. Percy Smith and McMillan Brown, I found Mariner's Tonga, Abraham Fornander's Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migration, Lieut. William Bligh's Voyage to the South Seas for the Purpose of Conveying the Bread-fruit Tree to the West Indies, in His Majesty's Ship the "Bounty," and the Polynesian Researches of William Ellis. I took down a volume of Ellis; Tari crossed the room to glance over my shoulder at the quaint title page—it was evident that he loved his books.

"Tahiti was the most interesting of all the islands," he said, as we sat down, "and the best accounts of old Tahiti are those of Bligh and Ellis. Bligh wrote from the standpoint of a worldly man and, though he was unable to speak the language fluently and stopped only a few months on the island, he has left an extraordinarily vivid and detailed picture of the native life before European religion and trade began their work of change. Ellis was a missionary of the finest sort—broad-minded as religious men go, inspired by the purest of motives, a close and sympathetic observer, and able to appreciate much of the beauty and interest of the old life. If you believe that one branch of mankind is justified in almost forcibly spreading its religion among the other races, and that trade should follow the Bible, you will enjoy every page of Ellis. His point of view concerning temporal matters is summed up in this volume, at the end of a chapter on Hawaii. Here it is: 'Their intercourse with foreigners has taught many of the chiefs to prefer a bedstead to the ground, and a mattress to a mat; to sit on a chair, eat at a table, use a knife and fork, etc. This we think advantageous, not only to those who visit them for purposes of commerce, but to the natives themselves, as it increases their wants, and consequently stimulates to industry.' There you hear the voice of the mechanical age, which began a hundred years ago and ended—I rather fancy—when we fired the last shots of the war. Increase their wants, advertise, speed up production—whatever the impalpable cost, make the way smooth for the swift wheels of progress—those are the germs of a disease from which the world may need another century to recover. But the change in these islands was only the insignificant corollary of a greater change throughout the world; Ellis and his kind were no more than the inevitable instruments of a harsh Providence.

"Ellis's book was published in eighteen thirty-one. During the eighty-nine years that have passed since that date we have seized the islands and profited largely by them—as coaling stations, as naval bases, as sources of valuable raw material, as markets for our surplus manufactured goods. What have we done for the natives in return? Instead of the industrious, piously happy, and increasing communities foreseen by the missionaries as the result of their efforts, one finds a depressed and dying people, robbed of their old beliefs and secretly skeptical of the new. We who conduct our wars in so humane and chivalrous a spirit have taught them to abolish human sacrifice and to stop the savage fighting which horrified the first messengers of Christianity, but, in the case of the islands of which Ellis wrote, the benefits of civilization end here. Infanticide is now a punishable crime and rarely practiced, but perhaps it is as well to have children and to kill a certain number of them, as to be rendered sterile by imported disease. After all, infanticide, repulsive though it may be, is only a primitive form of the birth control which is making its appearance in Europe and America, as the continents—the white man's islands—approach the limit of population.

"As for true religious faith of the kind which the missionaries sincerely hoped to instill, that plays in the life of the Kanaka a part of about the same importance as in the life of the average white man. Don't think I am cynical in saying this—I respect and envy men who possess real faith; they are the ones by whom every great task is accomplished. But the religion of the native is less than skin deep; his observance of the Sabbath day a survival of the old tapu; his churchgoing and singing of hymns—satisfying the social instinct, the love of gossip, the desire to be seen in fine clothes—replace the old-time dance, wrestling matches, and exhibitions of the areoi. You have seen something of the outer islands, where the people are half savage even to-day, still swayed by what we call heathen superstition. Now consider Tahiti, where the people for more than a hundred years have been subjected to exhortations of an intensity almost unparalleled. If it is possible to inject our religion into their blood, it must have been accomplished in Tahiti, but in my opinion the efforts of three generations of missionaries have produced a result surprisingly small on this island—the most civilized of the South Pacific—where heathen superstition is far from dead to-day.

"Before the schooners took to Penrhyn Lagoon we used to spend the hurricane season in Papeete; I never cared much for towns; I usually put in the time wandering about the more remote districts. Civilization has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti. Men who wear trousers and go to church by day would fear to sleep at night unless a lamp burned in the house to repel the varua ino and ghastly tupapau of their ancestors. If a girl falls ill the native doctor—a lineal descendant of the heathen priest—is called in. 'What have you done during the past week?' he asks.... 'You spoke harshly to that old woman? Ah, I knew there was a cause!' He administers a remedy in the form of a certain bath or a sprinkling with the water of a young coconut, and takes his leave. If the girl recovers it is a remarkable instance of the doctor's skill; if she dies it is proof that her offense was too grave to be remedied. Perhaps a ghost walks and the native doctor is again consulted. 'It is your wife who comes to trouble you at night? How was she buried?' Eventually the grave is opened and the body found to be lying face down; when turned on her back and again covered with earth the lady is content, and ceases her disreputable prowlings.

"I am not convinced that all of these things are absurdity.... I told you, when we were on the schooner, about some of my curious experiences in this group. There are happenings fully as strange on Tahiti and Moorea. You must have heard of what the natives call varua ino—a vague variety of devil, a sort of earth spirit, quite unhuman and intensely malignant. The people are not fond of discussing this subject, and their beliefs have become so tangled that it is impossible to get a straightforward story, but as nearly as I can make out, numbers of these varua ino are thought to lie in wait wherever a man or woman is dying, struggling fiercely with one another in their effort to catch and devour the departing human soul. If the spirit makes its escape the first time the ravening watchers do not give up hope, but linger about the body, to which the soul is apt to return from time to time during the day or two following death. The human soul, at this stage, is considered nearly as malignant and dangerous as the varua ino—you can see what a garbled business it is. Sometimes an earth spirit enters the corrupted body and walks abroad at night. On one subject the natives all agree: the struggles of the preying spirits and the human soul are apt to be marked by splashes and pools of blood—whose blood I have never learned to my satisfaction.

"A friend of mine—an educated and skeptical Englishman, in whose word I have the utmost confidence—was the witness of one of these blood-splashing affairs. He lived on Moorea, just across from Tahiti; Haapiti was the village, I think. One afternoon he whistled to his fox terrier and strolled to a near-by house, where the body of a native (an old fellow he had liked) lay in state, surrounded by mourning relatives. As he stood on the veranda the dog began to growl furiously, and at the same moment the oldest man present—a sort of doctor and authority on spiritual matters—shouted out suddenly that everyone must leave the house. The native explained afterward that he had caught a glimpse of something like a small comet—a shapeless and luminous body, trailing a fiery tail—rushing horizontally toward the rear of the building. The people gathered outside in a bit of a panic; the fox terrier seemed to have gone mad on the porch—alternately cowing and leaping forward with frenzied growls toward some invisible thing. All at once there was a great racket of overturned furniture inside the house, and next moment the Englishman saw gouts of what looked like blood splashing over the outer wall and the floor of the veranda. The dog was covered—it was a week before his coat was clean. The net result of the affair was that the veranda needed a cleaning, a couple of tables were overturned, and the body of the old man considerably disturbed; but its most curious feature is the fact that my friend—suspecting native trickery and the desire to impress a white man—took a specimen of the blood across to Papeete, where he got the hospital people to examine it. It was human blood beyond a doubt. What do you make of that?