Tonga’s third wonder is the Royal Tombs, the Langi. There are five Langi, generally pyramidal in shape, and covered with from three to five layers of stone. They measure about two hundred feet on a side; their outer stones, some of them twenty feet long, are nicely squared and fitted. Each was built for a Tui Tonga.
During one of our back-porch conferences Queen Salote told me that she had recently allowed one of her relatives to be buried there, because he was of the Tui Tonga line. The Queen was also of the same ancient family, so she was the only witness, except the Haatufunga, honorable buriers of the royal dead. The chamber into which the body was to be lowered was deep down in the center of the Langi. It was covered with an immense slab that had lain there four hundred years, and was raised with great difficulty. They found a vault, about twelve feet long by four wide and three deep, walled with artfully fitted stonework.
I beg Her Majesty’s pardon if I misquote her, but this is what I remember her saying: “I saw the body go down into the dark vault. When it was first opened we found the skeletons of three men. One lay face down, and must have belonged to a very powerful man. The other two were more slender, and their bones showed that they died in a sitting position.”
The seated skeletons were probably those of the Haatafunga, whose duty it was to prepare the bodies and wrap them in fine mats. In the old days they were permitted to remove the costly cerements and take them away as perquisites of office—if they could work fast enough. They were given just the time it took to poise the slab over the tomb, and lower it. The pair squatted on either side of the noble skeleton had been a minute too slow, and had been sealed in.
Later Tonga grew more humane, and the funeral workers were not permitted to touch the mats; they were given safe exit before the lid fell. Certain valuable things, equivalent to the funerary spoils, were set aside as their reward. The Queen told me that Joeli, lineal descendant of the Tui Tonga, had opened a tomb a short time before and found a beautifully carved ivory pillow. She had wanted to present it to the scientific world, but Joeli had re-interred it.
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The Tongan people, always having lived under communism qualified by an aristocracy, still offered an example of socialized medicine in daily practice. Sickness was treated free. If it was often not treated at all, that fact was partly due to the wide scatteration of little islands, and partly to the incapacity of an understaffed medical department. Voyaging around the small, forgotten islands I groaned over dirt and flies and the ignorance of simple hygiene which spread yaws, dysentery and typhoid. General weakening from these diseases had made the people easy prey to the influenza epidemic of 1918, which swept away eight per cent of the population. What they needed most was proper soil sanitation, proper water supplies, and education in these necessities. So many deaths were unattended by a physician that it was difficult to estimate the mortality figures covering typhoid, for instance.
The question of infant mortality—deaths of children under five—was to grow less crucial year by year. I have learned that by stimulating one branch of public health the physician is apt to stimulate many others. Our hookworm campaigns in Fiji, for example, worked toward the reduction of infant mortality; from 200 per 1,000 it fell below 100, and in one banner year was as low as 89.
The Tongans were a pithy breed with a will to live and an eagerness to learn—if you got around their ancient prejudices and the new peculiarities imparted by various mission sects. Proselytizing Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists had confused the issue. The Adventists had been popular when natives found that this faith gave them two workless days a week. They were less ardent believers, however, when their preachers forbade smoking and the eating of pig. The Mormons were anti-tobacco, too. Visitors at the mission stations of either sect had to keep cigarettes and tobacco locked away from light-fingered converts.
I sometimes wondered if civilization had done these people any good at all, except to shake off the abuses of the nobles. The ancient communism with nobody rich, nobody poor in a self-contained island group that fought away intruders—would that be the simple answer today? Over a hundred years ago Mariner thought so, when he asked good Dr. Martin to write into his book: “Captain Cook brought the intermittent fever, the crooked backs and the scrofula.” (Probably tuberculosis.)