In the Track of the Trades / The Account of a Fourteen Thousand Mile Yachting Cruise to the Hawaiis, Marquesas, Societies, Samoas and Fijis

by Lewis R. Freeman

They tell you this story at the club in Papeete, and you, politely, laugh—just as you did when you heard the original of that variation ten years before in America. However, the local adaptation is a good one—a Tahitian nymph is indeed as full of airs as a music box, and a vast deal easier to start up and keep going.

The Tahitian is received into the world with a song, he is sped forth from it with a song, and the only time in the interval when there is not a song issuing from his lips is when he is asleep. The beat of the sea is in his blood and a sense of time and an ear for tone are instincts with him. It is as natural for him to hold a tune as it is to walk, and it would be as remarkable for him to sing flat as to fall flat. In fact, be it orange wine or coco toddy, sugar cane rum or simple fatigue that starts his senses or his body reeling, he will commence falling flat long before he starts to sing flat. As often as not he dies with a song on his lips, and even his parting gasp is pretty sure to be in the right key.

In the beginning the South Seas had no musical instruments beyond the hollow-tree drum and the conch. The eukelele, so often spoken of as the native Hawaiian guitar, was originally an importation from Portugal, though it is now made in the islands; the concertina, mouth-organ and jew's harp of the rest of the mid-Pacific latitudes bear their foreign marks upon them. The Kanaka makes music on any one of them the first time he takes it up; but so also does he with two sticks and a coal oil can, or a piece of rolled-up floor mat—he cannot help it.

But the Tahitian's heart is in his singing, not his playing, and in choral rather than solo expression. He sings for the same reason that the rational drinker drinks—sociability. He is, to be sure, usually singing when he is on the road or working alone, but only because there is no one else to sing with him. A native who sings alone by preference is looked upon by his fellows much as we regard a man who is known to be a solitary drinker.

I have never heard the point brought up, but it has struck me on more than one occasion that much of the phenomenal success of the early missionaries in the South Pacific was due to their rare judgment in turning their first meetings into big song-fests. Even a meeting of today is three quarters himine, and in the short intervals of prayer and preaching the congregation is in a continual fidget in its eagerness for the opening notes of the next song. Many a one slips down from his seat, reclines at length on the floor and lights a banana-leaf cigarette. The children run about, not over quietly, and amuse themselves with pranks upon their elders. But at the first long-drawn note of the himine leader—the trumpet call to action—all leap to the seats, throw away their cigarettes and sit at stiff attention, and from then on to the end of the song have no eyes or ears for anything but the business in hand.

All of the missionary hymns, and especially those which have come down from the early days, are translations of old songs of the camp meeting and revival order, and every one of them has the beat and swing of a sailor's chantey. These lively new tunes tickled the natives' fancy as soon as they were introduced, and the fact that the first meetings consisted of even more singing and less preaching than those of today must have done much toward winning the missionary tolerance and even popularity, where the trader and the planter were ever suspended by hair-fine threads above the cooking pots. The natives, won and held through their love of hearing themselves sing, have thereby also been rendered more plastic for spiritual moulding. What could not have been done with them if their passion for dancing could have been similarly played upon?

The two dominant sounds of island life, the boom of the breakers and the hum of the wind in the trees, may be traced through all of the native music, and, through improvisation, in much that one hears in the churches. The sonorous chesty notes of the men's lower registers echo faithfully the thunder of the sea upon the reef, and a high, closed-mouth humming of the women is admirably imitative of the rise and fall of the wind, the rubbing of branches and the lisp of split palm fronds. The resonant over-tones of the bass in a men's chorus is not unsuggestive of the dying rumble of a big hollow-log drum. "The swing and entrain of the whole performance are intoxicating," writes an English woman who made a study of the island music; "the chorus, be it ten or a thousand voices, sweeps onward as resistlessly as a cataract, and the beat of the measure is like the pulse of Father Time himself. There are several parts as a rule, but they wander in and out of one another at will, and every now and then a single voice will break away and embroider a little improvisation of its own upon the melody that is like a sudden scatter of spray from the crest of a rolling breaker. Then the chorus takes it up and answers it, and the whole mass of the voices hurls itself upon the tune like the breaker falling and bursting upon the shore."

Dancing is the natural concomitant of singing in all of the South Sea islands, and the only occasion on which one is enjoyed without the other is at church service. As for dancing, singing is a sine qua non. Not only can a native not dance without a singing accompaniment, but his own voice must also be a part of that accompaniment. To bind a Tahitian's dancer's mouth is equivalent to tying his feet quite as much as tying a Latin's hands is tantamount to binding his mouth.

The first Tahitian dancers of whom there is any authentic record were the members of the "Areo," a secret intertribal organization of the old days, which would undoubtedly be credited to Bacchic inspiration were there any way of tracing a possible connection. The "Areos" were a roystering lot of madcaps, hardly comparable to anything else in history, but partaking something of the character of a modern choral society, a fancy dancing class and a band of brigands, with the avowed encouragement of human sacrifice, murder, cannibalism and general immorality thrown in.

The "Areo" was made up of the elite of each tribe, and the members were carefully tutored in the fine points of singing and dancing, much after the fashion of the geishas of Japan and the nautch girls of India. They travelled from valley to valley and village to village like a college glee-club, and the fact that their shows were open to all-comers free of charge brought them unbounded popularity and made them welcome guests in the palace of the king at the capital, or in the huts of the meanest fishing hamlet on the island. What they desired they took, and so powerful and popular were they that there was none to gainsay them. What wonder that the budding youth of Tahiti centred his ambition on growing up to become an "Areo" with an intensity that the American youth, tossed on the horns of the inevitable pirate-captain-or-president dilemma, can never know?