Now and then a rifle cracked. Musicians were whistling on reeded Pan’s pipes; oom, oom sounded the enormous wooden drums. Over the spectacle towered graven images, demoniacal human shapes and forms of swooping birds. It was a barbaric choral scene, everything centered on the star performers. Then I turned my eyes—and saw it. A painted man stood on a high stone pulpit, gesturing and counting. Below him another painted man wielded a mallet. Victims were being hauled up, screaming, only to be silenced by a crack on the skull. There was a chanted hymn of praise. The donor, who had contributed the sacrifice, held an honored place apart. Crack went the mallet again. Another body was dragged away....
They were killing pigs.
******
This is a glimpse of the New Hebrides as I saw them in 1925. On other groups we had already launched curative campaigns as wide as our numbers would permit. My plans for an advanced School to train Native Practitioners had not come to anything definite, and there I stood alone on one of Oceania’s plague spots. Well, not alone, for I had Malakai with me.
I had come full of curiosity, hoping to check up some of the causes of racial decay in the New Hebrides, that unfortunate double chain of islands where the population had been dwindling for well over a hundred years. Jogging shoulders with suave Samoa on the one hand and tamed Fiji on the other, these thirty wild islands remained the lawless stepchildren of a bad government called the Condominium (aptly nicknamed “Pandemonium”), a sort of Siamese-twin arrangement made between England and France in 1907. There was a Frenchman in one Government House, a Britisher in the other. The only occasions I ever saw the Condominium get together were on the King’s Birthday and July Fourteenth.
The heroic pig-killing was a rather open session of one of the native secret societies, which have controlled the New Hebrides from time immemorial. In my study of depopulation I was glad to have seen it. Because it was a cause of racial decline? Quite to the contrary. For uncounted generations it had been the social pulse of tribal life. European meddling was weakening the fabric of these mystic orders and giving the native no substitute. Let me remind you again that races die out for three established reasons: imported disease, the decay of custom, and a lack of will to live. Imported disease is easily the most important of the killers, but the three together produce results dismal to behold.
It was on the tiny island of Atchin, off wild Malekula, that I saw the pig ceremony. My survey was half over, and I had already seen enough demoralization to understand what happens when the ruling white man is too indifferent or poorly equipped to take up his burden. In Vila, the little capital where M. D’Arbousier, a cultured mulatto gentleman, governed for the French, and Mr. Smith-Rewse, a kindly Britisher, did his lonely best to hold up his end, I had seen a comic-opera demonstration of authority. The French half of the twin, it seems, was selling the natives their worst enemies, liquor and firearms. It wasn’t lawful, but what of the law? The native liked to drink and shoot, so why not accommodate him? The British pretended to frown on this. How much their frowns meant is herein illustrated:—
We were playing tennis behind the neat British Residency when a police official was suddenly called from the game. He sauntered away and found the trouble, a noisy altercation over a police patrol which, for unexplained reasons, he had set in front of a trading store. Trader Le Meskime was in a dither; the show of arms was scaring away natives who had come to buy toddy. A large number of them, mixed with Tonkinese, were huddled outside, not daring to approach. Incroyable! What an outrage to keep an honest Frenchman from his honest profits! So the accommodating British police official moved his guard and the dark customers filed in to spend a week’s wages on a Saturday-night jag, as usual.
The sale of booze and bullets to a Stone Age people made the French very popular, you may be sure. French ships with supplies of opium for the Tonkinese, and some for the natives, were popular, too. Ask a discouraged official if there were no laws in the New Hebrides and he’d groan, “Plenty of them.” Perhaps he would show you a “Joint Resolution,” passed in May, 1922, for the Island of Tanna and beginning, “The Joint Order of January 2nd is repealed.” It was a nice piece of paper, which seemed to cover everything in the way of land claims. The only trouble was that the French and British settlers between them had put in more claims for property than there was land in the New Hebrides. In the old days any pioneer who came along would trade a bauble with a native chief for “all the land from here to there and as far back as I can see.” The native, who probably had no claim on the land, would cheerfully make his mark on a piece of paper, call in a friend as witness—and another rainbow sale would be more or less on record.
The Joint Court was supposed to settle the quarrels that rose over shaky claims. But since the Court postponed its meetings from year to year, the witness who opposed a claim was usually dead before they met. The judicial body could not function unless all members were present, and some were always on leave. Soreheads proclaimed that the Court preferred it that way—the fewer witnesses the less trouble.