Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

"A toru toata," muttered the proprietor of the melon, indifferently. ("Toata" means a franc, but is obviously a corruption of quarter, for the dollar passed current here long before the money of France.)

"Look at my clothes," pleaded the deceitful girl, changing her tactics suddenly. "I am a poor woman who cannot afford to pay the prices you expect from the chief. Come, dear Tinito, give me the melon for two francs."

The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders and glanced at me. The glint in his narrow eye might have meant, "Ah, these women—what's the use!" He sighed; for a moment, while Tehinatu looked at him pleadingly, he was silent.

"Take the melon," he said, "and give me two francs; I must be on my way. But do not think you have deceived me, cunning woman; I know that you are not poor, for only yesterday your brother sold the copra from your land."

Without a sign of embarrassment the girl opened her hand and held up a hundred-franc note. "Ah, you are rich," remarked the Chinaman, as he undid an oilcloth wallet and stripped the change from a substantial roll of bills. "I knew it. Are you not ashamed to practice such deceit?" But Tehinatu only tucked the melon under her arm with a triumphant smile.

It is a curious study to watch the contact of Chinese and Polynesian, races separated by the most profound of gulfs, yet possessing the meeting ground of a common love of bargaining. All through the French islands you will find Chinamen, scattered singly or in little groups—through the windward and leeward Societies; the Marquesas; among the distant atolls of the Paumotu; in the remote Gambiers; in Tupuai, Rurutu, and lonely Rimatara. They are keepers of small stores, for the most part, where you may see them interrupted at their eternal task of copra making to exchange a box of matches for a single coconut or to haggle for a quarter of an hour over a matter of five sous. Patient, painstaking, and unobtrusive—existing in inconceivable squalor, without the common pleasures which enable most of us to tolerate our lives—they seem to be impelled by motives far more profound than the longing for material gam, by a species of idealism equally incomprehensible to the native and to the visitor of European race. It is not beyond possibility that in the course of a few more generations it will be the native islander who lingers here and there, isolated in communities principally Chinese; for the islanders, superb physically, are the least prolific of men, while the weedy little Tinito, who brings his own women with him, or succeeds, with his own peculiar knack, in obtaining women from a population which regards him with amused contempt, surrounds himself with children in as short a time as nature allows. I have sometimes thought that the secret of the Chinaman's dogged and self-denying labors might lie here—traceable to his cult of ancestor worship: to become a revered ancestor one must have children, and in order to bring up properly a large family of children one must spend one's life in unceasing toil.

I doubt that Europeans in large numbers will ever be tempted to make the islands their home; the life is too alien, the change too great. As things are, the relation of Polynesian and Chinese amounts to a subtle contest for the land—a struggle of which both parties are aware. The native, incapable of abstract thought, feels and resents it vaguely; to the Chinaman, whose days are spent in meditation undisturbed by the automatic labors of his body, the issue is no doubt clear cut. The native is by far the more attractive of the two—clean, kindly, selfish, jolly, childish, well bred, and pleasing to the eye; but the Chinaman possesses the less attractive qualities which make for the survival of a race—the industry, the unselfishness, the capacity to live for an idea—and in the end, if only by force of numbers, he will win. Looking into the future, one can see the Eastern islands populated by Chinese, as our own islands of Hawaii have been peopled with immigrants from Japan. "They are dying, anyway, and they won't work," the commercial gentleman will tell you; "here is rich cane land, needing only labor to produce bountifully—and the world needs sugar." Perhaps this view is correct—for myself, I feel that the question is debatable. There are certain parts of the world—like our American mountains, deserts, and lonely stretches of coast—which seem planned for the spiritual refreshment of mankind; places from which one carries away a new serenity and the sense of a yearning for beauty satisfied. Ever since the days of Cook the islands of the South Sea have charmed the white man—explorers, naturalists, traders, and the rough crews of whaling vessels; the strange beauty of these little lands, insignificant so far as commercial exploitation is concerned, seems worthy of preservation. And the native, paddling his outlandish canoe or lounging in picturesque attitudes before his house, is indispensable to the scene. If the day comes when his canoe lies rotting on the beach and his house is tenanted by industrious Chinese—though the same jagged peaks rise against the sky and the same sea thunders lazily along the reef—when the anchor drops and the call comes to go ashore, I, for one, shall hesitate.

In the Cook group, six hundred miles west of Tahiti, the prospect is less depressing, for the British have adopted a policy of exclusion and made it impossible for the native to sell his land. The Cook-Islander, reinforced here and there with a dash of white blood, and undiscouraged by a competition he is not fitted to meet, seems to be holding his own. The reason is clear—the native has been little tampered with, left in possession of his land, and protected rigidly against epidemics like the influenza of 1918, which ravaged the island populations wherever infected vessels were permitted to touch. Imported disease, exploitation of the land, and coolie immigration—these are the destroying forces from which the native must be preserved if a shadow of the old charm is to linger for the enjoyment of future generations of travelers.

Following Tehinatu toward the house, I thought to myself how wonderfully the island charm had been preserved here on the peninsula of Taiarapu. We were within fifty miles of Papeete, where business is carried on, and steamers call, and perspiring tourists walk briskly about the streets; yet here, in this lonely settlement by the lagoon, civilization seemed half a world away. When I walked abroad the sight of a white man brought the people to their doors, and bands of children followed me, staring and bright eyed, with interest.

On the veranda children surrounded us while the girl cut and distributed thin slices of her melon. There is a fascination in watching these youngsters, brought up without clothes and without restraint, in an environment nearly as friendly as that of the original human pair. Once they are weaned from their mothers' breasts—which often does not occur until they have reached an age of two and a half or three—the children of the islands are left practically to shift for themselves; there is food in the house, a place to sleep, and a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool—that is the extent of parental responsibility. The child eats when it pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself with no other resources than its own. As it grows older certain light duties are expected of it—gathering fruit, lending a hand with fishing, cleaning the ground about the house—but the command to work is casually given and as casually obeyed. Punishment is scarcely known; yet under a system which would ruin forever an American or English child the brown youngster flourishes with astonishingly little friction—sweet tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom quarrelsome. The small boy tugs at the net or gathers bait for the fishermen, seemingly without a thought of drudgery; the small girl tends her smaller sister in the spirit of playing with a doll. Perhaps the restless and aggressive spirit which makes discipline necessary in bringing up our own children is the very quality that has made the white race master of the world; perhaps the more hostile surroundings of civilization have made necessary the enforcement of prohibitory laws.