Many and many times I talked my plans over with Salote, and especially my fixed idea that there must be a modernized Central Medical School in Fiji. She was a constructive listener. She looked upon the people as her children, and was grieved by the tricks that had been played upon them by alien races. Once I asked her if politics and religion weren’t the same thing in Tonga, and she said: “Doctor, I think you’re about right.”
A true Christian, she had an intense admiration for Queen Victoria. Once a year, robed for the occasion, she would open Parliament, and be seated in the red chair of state, with her adored Tungi at her side. She insisted on ceremonial black for the parliamentarians assembled, and before the great day there was a tremendous scrambling for European clothes. Once a small boy scampered into a trader’s store and demanded a pair of silk stockings. He was a Queen’s page and had to put on full regalia.
Ancient suits were hired or borrowed for the occasion; dress suits, dinner jackets, antique cutaways and obsolete Prince Alberts, anything so long as it was black. Once I contributed my winter-weight dress clothes to an appealing noble and watched him join the long, sweaty line of lawgivers that filed in to the boiling ceremony. And the minute it was over ministers of state sneaked away crosslots, suffocating coats over their arms, tight shoes in their hands. They were stealing home to their comfortable and sensible lavalavas.
Major-General Sir George Richardson, Governor of Western Samoa, told me of his presentation at court when the Queen was very new to the throne. Richardson, a crusty Britisher who had gone through the mill at the Court of St. James’s, may have exaggerated the incident. In the presence of young Salote, he said, he had approached the throne, made the proper bow and backed the prescribed distance. Out of the silence the Queen clapped her hands: “Johnnie, bring the gentleman a whisky-soda!” She hadn’t yet learned all the European formalities, but hospitality told her what a Britisher seldom refuses.
Salote, with the pride of an ancient dynasty behind her and the problems of a modern world facing her realm, was the connecting link between the old and the new.
Strangers, dropping off at Nukualofa, have looked over the ancient stone relics there, have wondered at their monumental size and have heard, perhaps, smatterings of their legend. They have seen the great Haamonga (Burden on the Shoulders), a trilithon with side pieces fifteen feet high; one piece is twelve feet wide by four feet eight inches thick, the other is nine feet seven inches wide by three feet eight inches thick. These are above-the-ground measurements, as they are set very deep. They stand ten feet apart and are grooved at the top to support a crosspiece that is fifteen feet long, five feet wide and twenty-one inches thick. These stupid, literal measurements describe a colossus, and nobody knows where the stones came from. Tradition says that they were brought from Wallis Island in ancient Tongan canoes.
The great squared arch is the gateway to the old sacred marai (family ceremonial ground) where the Tui Tonga worshipped until the rise of temporal power moved them to another marai, a few miles away. On the old marai where the Burden on the Shoulders stands there is another relic important to the lost religious history of Polynesia. This is called the Leaning Stone, and is a slablike pillar nine feet high, five wide, two thick.
The Tongans, you must remember, were fast losing their old religion when the white man came. They knew that the trilithon and the leaning pillar were of sacred memory, but what they signified was not clear. It was not until I visited the Cook Islands, where I saw similar relics and heard the young chiefs recite their poetic myths, that I realized what Tonga’s stone relics signified in the old paganism.
Almost everywhere in Polynesia the symbols were the same. The arch represented Hina, goddess of fertility, and the leaning pillar was Tangaloa her husband, god of life’s origin. After I found similar pillars and arches on the Cook Islands I concluded that Tonga’s ancient worship must have been phallicism. I submitted my theory to Prince Tungi and he consulted with keepers of the old tradition; they all agreed that this was probably the explanation. Tungi told me that there were caves on Tongatabu which were called Hina because of their archlike shape, and that on Vavau there was a very realistic cleft stone, also called Hina.
When I describe the Cook Islands I shall elaborate a little more on the Hina (or Ina) and Tangaloa myth, for the Cook Islander still remembers.