To the British colonial official—to any colonial official of the right stamp—the patient coaxing of the
"new-caught sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child"
out of the darkness of their "loved Egyptian Night" is all in the day's work. His maintenance in the field, however, is not dependent upon funds raised by subscription, as in the case of the missionary, and an appeal to popular sympathy is, therefore, unnecessary. For the missionary, to whom the awakening of interest in his successes means more money to carry on his work, publicity is only good business. It is for this reason that the missionary, rather than the no less deserving official, is associated in the popular mind with the reclamation of Fiji. There is honour enough, and to spare, for both workers of the wonder which has been wrought; but it is meet that the quiet, earnest, intelligent efforts of the government official should not be overlooked.
The Fijian is too much of a Polynesian to take kindly to work under the new régime, so that, with 100,000 or more of him sitting idly about in the shade of the coco palms, it has been necessary to bring the plantation labour from the New Hebrides, Solomons, New Guinea and even British India. At first the blacks of the westerly islands, recruited by more or less responsible agents who induced them to contract to work for a term of years at so much a month, were the mainstay of the plantations, but for the last twenty years the industrious Hindu coolie, indentured at a wage equivalent to from four to seven dollars a month, has been employed almost exclusively. The passing of the Melanesian black on the plantations of Fiji and Australia marks the finish of one of the most picturesque, if also one of the cruelest, traffics in the history of the South Pacific, that of "black-birding" or labour-recruiting.
Although the Insular Government makes a great point of maintaining all the ancient tribal observances in its relations with the Fijians, not many of the old customs and ceremonies have survived. Internecine wars are, of course, things of the past, and even when a fight is started up between a couple of mountain villages, it is the musket and not the war club that decides with which party the honours shall rest. The meke-meke or dance—especially that of the women—has not had the vitality to survive the hostility of the missionaries, white and black, though on great occasions, such as the wedding of a chief or a reception to the Governor, some of the ancient war measures are trod by a squad of men. It is a good deal as I heard the captain of a British cruiser on the Australian station put it—"The Fijian has altered scarcely less than the Tahitian under his contact with the white man; only with the latter it has been a case of 'too much French official,' and with the former 'too much missionary.'"
However, the Fijian stood in need of a good deal of making over before his islands were safe for a white man to live in, and even if most of his picturesqueness departed with his deviltry, the balance is still on the right side of the ledger and in favour of the missionary.
The Fijian woman has neither the good looks, the good manners nor the good nature of her Samoan or Tahitian sister. Her lack of amenity is largely due to the fact that her lord and master, in his treatment of her, is more of a Papuan or African than a Polynesian. Such work as is done in the village—mostly fishing and a little crude cultivation—falls to the lot of the women, probably as a survival of the days when the men spent all of their waking hours engaging in or repelling forays. She is always kept in the background when visitors are present and, probably as a consequence of generations of restraint, has none of the natural graces of the woman of pure Polynesian stock.
The suppression of the Fijian woman is especially remarkable in the light of the fact that, through some caprice of Nature, males considerably outnumber females in the group, a condition which, in almost every other similar instance on record, has enhanced the power and prestige of the latter sex. Why it has failed to do so in Fiji is as unexplicable as the condition itself—the predominance in numbers of men in a group of islands which has been one of the worst hot-beds of internecine warfare the world has ever known.
This excess of men in Fiji—the fact that there are not enough women to "go round"—proved one of the most troublesome factors in the pacification of the islands, and in keeping them quiet once that pacification was accomplished. A young warrior without a wife, and with no prospect of getting one save in a foray, is the equal as an inciter of trouble of a deposed Latin American president. Such a one had no wife to lose in an intertribal war, while there was always a chance that he might emerge from such a struggle in full, if transient, possession of that supreme desideratum. The enlistment of many of these restless "left-overs" in the "A. N. C.," the Armed Native Constabulary, has been the best expedient possible under the circumstances. A gun and uniform do not take the place of a wife, however (though, as has been proven, they often are the short cuts to getting one at the expense of some one else), and the problem is going to be a troublesome one until nature equalizes the disparity of sexes by increasing the birth rate of girls, or an interval of intertribal wars supervenes to cut down the excess of men.
The Fijians are less expert in the building and handling of boats than the Samoans, The craft most favoured is of the catamaran type, consisting of two canoes joined by a platform, or occasionally, a single canoe with a platform built on the outrigger. These affairs, while comparatively seaworthy, are of little use for sailing and very difficult to paddle with any speed. The whaleboat, so common in Samoa, is rarely seen in Fiji. Most of the interisland voyages are undertaken in clumsy sloops, though occasional runs with the wind are made with the primitive mat-sailed catamarans.