Flying foxes—large bats, or vampires—are sacred animals to the Tongan. Some distance from Nukualofa is a grove of large trees, and in the daytime thousands of the bats will be hanging from the limbs by their claws, heads down. At sunset they all wake up and fly over the island and make raids on fruit plantations. At sunrise they will return to the same grove and hang downward all day. These bats are as large as cats, with furry bodies, and the native believes something terrible would happen were he to kill one.
Tongans are more advanced, intellectually, than any of the South Sea races, not excepting the Maori, who is of the same race. A college in Nukualofa is well attended by natives.
Kaikai is the name of food in the South Sea Islands, as it is also in New Zealand.
Tongan women do not work like those of other South Sea Islands races. The men say it makes women ugly to work all day in the sun, and they prefer their wives to be good-looking and good-natured. Men even do the larger share of the housework.
White drill clothes are worn by all Europeans in Tonga, and every man has a tropical evening dress suit. The suit shows a wide spread of white shirt, generally starched, and high collar. Vests and trousers are white. The coat is a jacket, however, that stops a trifle below the waist line. At the back the jacket comes to a point. It is like a ship steward's jacket.
"Teddy Bears" are as universal as American oil and American sewing-machines. In any part of the world one may observe European children with "Teddies" in their hands.
Europeans living in the tropics become so enervated that such a thing as failing to keep an appointment is thought nothing of. The blood becomes thin, and the easy life they live practically unfits them for work they would be called on to do in a cooler climate. Then, again, they are looked up to in the sparsely settled white communities, and when they return to the Northland and practically become nonentities they painfully miss the pampering they received from natives. Most of these would prefer to live a sickly life in the tropics to a healthful one, contingent on hard work, in their native land. It is hard to rise above the pressure of environment.
We are about to start on Leg Five, but before doing so we wish to explain our divergence of travel in Australasia. On reaching Melbourne from Perth a day's time was all that was spent in the city at that time. We went to Tasmania, New Zealand, and then to Sydney. From New South Wales we started on the South Sea Islands trip. From Nukualofa we journeyed to Auckland, our second time in that city. Recrossing the Tasman Sea to Sydney, we journeyed to Melbourne by rail, the second time also we were in that city. Stopping there but a few hours, a start was made for Adelaide; then from Adelaide to Ballarat, and back to Melbourne, where some time was spent, from which port we sailed on our return trip to South Africa, and from which place we start Leg Five.