Not inferior to her in courage and endurance, and her superior in literary qualifications, is Miss Gordon Cumming, who, I think, among female travellers has no rival except Ida Pfeiffer. The worthy representative of a name famous in the annals of adventure and enterprise, she has put a girdle round about the world with unfailing ardour, and plunged into the remote and almost inaccessible regions of the great Asiatic table-land. Her first book, "From the Hebrides to the Himalayas," attracted a great deal of attention by the freshness of its sketches, the grace of its style, the unconventionality of its treatment, and by the space which its author devoted to popular superstitions and antiquities. Her pictures of life in Tibet, of the scenery of the Himalayas, of the manners and customs of the Indian people, of Benares and Hurdwar and Agra, were all so bright and clear as to indicate the pencil of no ordinary artist. Miss Gordon Cumming next betook herself to the Pacific, and spent two years "at Home in Fiji;" two years which she utilized in the collection of much interesting material. She was preparing in 1880 to return to England, when an opportunity was offered to her of effecting that return in a manner which could not but be delightful to a lady of adventurous disposition, with a proper scorn for social "Mrs. Grundyism." A French man-of-war, the Seignelay, which was carrying a Roman Catholic bishop on a cruise round his oceanic diocese, arrived at Levaka, and its officers making the acquaintance of Miss Cumming, courteously invited her to accompany them on the remainder of their cruise. There was a delightful originality in the invitation, and a no less delightful originality in the acceptance of it. The French officers fitted up a pretty little cabin for her accommodation, and without more ado she took up her quarters on board the Seignelay, with no other escort or chaperonage than that of the good bishop.
From Fiji the Seignelay proceeded to Tonga, in the Friendly Islands, where, in the usages of the population and in the insular antiquities, Miss Cumming found much to interest her and her readers. As might be expected, the old picturesqueness of the native life is fast disappearing under the pressure of Western civilization, and we have reason to be thankful to those travellers who do their best to catch its waning features, and transfer them as faithfully as may be to the printed page. The chief archæological curiosities here are the tombs of the old Tongan kings, cyclopean monuments built up of huge volcanic blocks, which seem to have been brought from the Wallis group of islands in open canoes, and erected on their present site with an immense expenditure of human labour. Scarcely less remarkable is the great solitary dolmen, which still exists intact, though of its origin nothing is known, even in tradition. But that it marks the last resting-place of some great chief or hero may be inferred from the fact that until within the last few years an immense Kana tent stood upon the transverse capstone of the dolmen, and that feasts were celebrated on the spot. As Miss Cumming reminds, similar celebrations take place in many parts of Britain and Brittany "at the stones" to the present day.
From Tonga Miss Cumming was conveyed to Samoa, where she was very hospitably received by the Samoan notables, and might have enjoyed herself greatly, but for the civil war in which the group is always plunged. It is to the credit of the inhabitants, however, that they agree to abstain from fighting on at least one day of the week. In their manners and customs they retain more of the primitive simplicity than is found now-a-days in most of the Polynesian islands.
Her descriptions of Tahiti, the Eden of the Pacific, are not less glowing than those of her predecessors, from Wallis and Bougainville down to "the Earl and the Doctor." They are full of warm, rich colour, as might have been expected from one who is an artist as well as an author, and set before us such a succession of vivid and enchanting landscapes as hardly any other portion of this wide, wide world can parallel; for with the bold majesty of Alpine peaks is combined the luxuriant grace of tropical forests, and valleys as beautiful as that of Tempe open out upon a boundless ocean as blue as the sky it glasses. Add to this that the vegetation has a charm of its own—the feathery palm and the bread-fruit tree lending to it a quite distinctive character. Here is a vignette, which will give the reader some notion of this enchanting Tahitian scenery:—"We rode along the green glades, through the usual successions of glorious foliage; groves of magnificent bread-fruit trees, indigenous to those isles; next a clump of noble mango-trees, recently imported, but now quite at home; then a group of tall palms, or a long avenue of gigantic bananas, their leaves sometimes twelve feet long, meeting over our heads. Then came patches of sugar or Indian corn, and next a plantation of vanilla, trained to climb over closely-planted tall coffee, or else over vermilion bushes. Sometimes it is planted without more ado at the root of pruned guava bushes. These grow wild over the whole country, loaded with large, excellent fruit, and, moreover, supply the whole fuel of the isles, and good food for cattle.... Amidst all this wealth of food-producing vegetation, I sometimes looked in vain for any trees that were merely ornamental; and literally there were only the yellow hibiscus, which yields a useful fibre, and the candle-nut, covered with clusters of white blossoms, somewhat resembling white lilac, and bearing nuts with oily kernels, whence the tree derives its name."[45]
Here is a larger picture, taken on one of the smaller islands of the Society archipelago:—
"I fear no description can possibly convey to your mind a true picture of the lovely woods through which we wander just where fancy leads us, knowing that no hurtful creature of any sort lurks among the mossy rocks or in the rich undergrowth of ferns. Here and there we come on patches of soft green turf, delightfully suggestive of rest, beneath the broad shadow of some great tree with buttressed roots; but more often the broken rays of sunlight gleam in ten thousand reflected lights, dancing and glancing as they shimmer on glossy leaves of every form and shade—from the huge silky leaves of the wild plantain or the giant arum to the waving palm-fronds, which are so rarely at rest, but flash and gleam like polished swords as they bend and twist with every breath of air.
"It has just occurred to me that probably you have no very distinct idea of the shape of a cocoa-palm leaf, which does not bear the slightest resemblance to the palmettes in the greenhouses. It consists of a strong mid-rib about eight feet long, which, at the end next to the tree, spreads out very much as your two clenched fists, placed side by side, do from your wrists. The other end tapers to a point. For a space of about two feet the stalk is bare; then along the remaining six feet a regiment of short swords, graduated from two feet to eighteen inches in length, are set close together on each side of the mid-rib. Of course, the faintest stir of the leaf causes these multitudinous swordlets to flash in the sunlight. Hence the continual effect of glittering light.
"A little lower than these tall queens of the coral-isles rise fairy-like canopies of graceful tree-ferns, often festooned with most delicate lianas; and there are places where not these only, but the larger trees, are literally matted together by the dense growth of the beautiful large-leaved white convolvulus, or the smaller lilac ipomaæ, which twines round the tall stems of the palms, and overspreads the light fronds like some green waterfall. Many of the larger trees are clothed with parasitic ferns; huge bird's-nest ferns grow in the forks of the branches, as do various orchids, the dainty children of the mist, so that the stems are well-nigh as green as everything else in that wilderness of lovely forms. It is a very inanimate paradise, however. I rarely see any birds or butterflies, only a few lizards and an occasional dragon-fly; and the voice of singing-birds, such as gladden our hearts in humble English woods, is here mute; so we have at least this compensation for the lack of all the wild luxuriance which here is so fascinating."
From Miss Cumming's animated pages we might continue to borrow with advantage to our readers. But we must rest satisfied with one more picture, and this shall be a view of the Tahitian market-place at Papeete:—