CHAPTER IV
THE FATE OF A RACE
Again the great coral wall with its skimpy crown of trees; again the mysterious crack in the cliffs that marked Kungava Bay. Buia, who had acquired malaria on his trip, had been running a temperature all night. He was quite normal now, but excited. His eyes glistened, his white teeth shone as he pointed out familiar landmarks. Over there was Ungu Ungu (Head Head) point. He had a place there, but no house; the piece of land he had inherited from his father’s line. On Kanava he had three pieces of land and a fine, big house. Yes, Buia had improved a lot since last night, when he had mourned, “Belly belong me he no good kaikai belong white man. Now me no look him Kanava again.” Part of that depression was malaria, the rest sea-sickness, for the ship had rolled heavily.
Canoes began pulling out toward us. Friends were coming aboard, and the foremost among them was Buia the Bastard, full of news, because the Big Master of Mengehenua was dead. God, who was “Master along Sky,” had cursed the chief for neglecting to send him gifts of food. Another Big Master had also forgotten his God, and was pretty sick. “Sick belong wind, him he too cold.” Whether he was describing influenza or tuberculosis it was hard to say.
After we had anchored inside the reef and come ashore we were permitted to approach Tahua, whom we found seated in state on a soapbox. On behalf of Mr. Crocker I made a presentation speech and laid an adze, a string of red beads, two razor blades and a butcher knife before the Presence. Tahua said simply, “Thank you.” The men of Rennell have no taste for the echo-ringing oratory of Samoa and Tonga.
Because it was raining, Tahua took us to his “house,” merely a tiny shelter, open at one end. “House him all bugger up,” he apologized, and showed a pile of beams cleverly hewn with the axes we had left on our former trip; all ready for the grand new architectural effect he was planning, to be Rennell’s show place, and to Tahua the largest building in the world. There was a ridgepole thirty-five feet long and several curved ribs to support the sloping pandanus-leaf roof. Tahua was getting to be a very rich man.
He was nobody’s fool. When I told him about the needles we wanted to use for the good of the people he understood and said that he would summon many for the stick-medicine. Shrewdly he added that when so many came around he could put them to work building his new house. He obliged Macgregor, there to inquire into racial origins, by reciting twenty-four generations of his ancestors and scraps of mouth-to-mouth history which, I think, had been garbled by European recorders. He told us that all the people of his district were blood kin, related to him. A common ancestor had come from Uvea (Wallis Island, directly to the west) and had crossed Rotumah and the Solomons. Tahua’s history, liberally salted with myth and demonology, might have been partly authentic. Undoubtedly all the Rennellese were first or second cousins; a picture of an inbred people who were far from physically degenerate. Their tabu against incestuous unions was so strict that brother and sister were not allowed to take medicine out of the same glass.
Macgregor, who talked with Tahua whenever he could, told me that the Big Master had named a great many of the islands where his ancestor had touched on his long voyage to Rennell. This was interesting, but threw no light on the racial origin. Their language was so nearly Polynesian that Macgregor could piece out whole sentences; his Polynesian was so like their own tongue that the people thought that he must have come from Rotumah, and took it for granted that he knew much more than he did of their customs and theogony. For this reason they showed him many sacred places hidden in the bush, forbidden to all but the initiate.
Tahua was grimly silent about Mr. Borgas, the missionary who had tagged him “M.V.,” but when the inhabitants came crowding into our ship we soon found that the missionary scandal was the biggest news that had broken on Rennell since the day of the famous murder. Superficially these natives had not changed much, except that they spoke more pidgin and had somehow lost their light-fingered habit of carrying away every little thing they happened to fancy. Already the girls were approaching the personable members of our crew, and by their clamorous “Me want knifie” and “Me want akis (axe)” it was plain to see that the price of love had gone up. Razor blades were coming in, so empty beer bottles had lost their market value.
In all his wide travel Crocker had never seen anything like the Rennellese. Aside from their racial oddity, he said, they were the friendliest people he had yet encountered. I mentioned a doctor I once knew who was so darned sociable—always poking me with a toothbrush—that I learned to dislike him. Crocker didn’t understand my simile—then. Later on he did.