„At day time, we don’t go to the village; the mulukwausi would follow us. After dark, we go. Like on the lamina, we march in the same order, one after the other. I go last; I chant a spell over a libu plant. I efface our traces. I put the libu on our track; I put the weeds together. I make the path confused. I say a charm to the spider, that he might make a cobweb. I say a charm to the bush-hen, that she might turn up the soil”.
„We go to the village. We enter the village, we pass the main place. No one sees us; we are in mist, we are invisible. We enter the house of my veyola (maternal kinsman), he medicates some leyya; he spits (magically) on all of us. The mulukwausi smell us; they smell the salt water on our skins. They come to the house, the house trembles. A big wind shakes the house, we hear big thuds against the house. The owner of the house medicates the leyya and spits over us; they cannot see us. A big fire is made in the house; plenty of smoke fills the house. The leyya and the smoke blind their eyes. Five days we sit in smoke, our skin smells of smoke; our hair smells of smoke; the mulukwausi cannot smell us. Then I medicate some water and coco-nut, the usagelu wash and annoint themselves. They leave the house, they sit on the kaukweda (spot before the house). The owner of the house chases them away. „Go, go to your wife”; we all go, we return to our houses”.
I have given here a reconstruction of a native account, as I have often heard it told with characteristic vividness: spoken in short, jerky sentences, with onamatopoetic representations of sound, the narrative exaggerates certain features, and omits others. The excellency of the narrator’s own magic, the violence of the elements at critical moments, he would always reiterate with monotonous insistence. He would diverge into some correlated subject, jump ahead, missing out several stages, come back, and so on, so that the whole is quite incoherent and unintelligible to a white listener, though the native audience follows its trend perfectly well. For it must be remembered that, when a native tells such a story, the events are already known to his listeners, who have grown up gradually becoming familiar with the narrow range of their tribal folklore. Our toliwaga, telling this story over again on the sandbank of Yakum, would dwell on such points as allowed him to boast of his kayga’u, to describe the violence of the storm, to bear witness to the traditional effects of the magic.
It is necessary for an Ethnographer to listen several times to such a narrative, in order to have a fair chance of forming some coherent idea of its trend. Afterwards, by means of direct examination, he can succeed in placing the facts in their proper sequence. By questioning the informants about details of rite and magic, it is possible then to obtain interpretations and commentaries. Thus the whole of a narrative can be constructed, the various fragments, with all their spontaneous freshness, can be put in their proper places, and this is what I have done in giving this account of shipwreck80.
A few words of comment must now be given on the text of the above narrative. In it, a number of magical rites were mentioned, besides those which were described first with their spells. Something must be said more in detail about the spells of the subsequent magical performances. There are some eleven of them. First comes the ritual invocation of the fish which helps the shipwrecked sailors. The spell corresponding to this, is called kaytaria, and it is an important formula, which every toliwaga is supposed to know. The question arises, has this rite ever been practised in reality? Some of the actions taken by the shipwrecked natives, such as the cutting ot the the outrigger float when the boat is abandoned, are quite rational. It would be dangerous to float on the big, unwieldy canoe which might be constantly turned round and round by the waves, and if smashed to pieces, might injure the sailors with its wreckage. In this fact, perhaps there is also the empirical basis for the belief that some fragments of the canoe „eat” the shipwrecked men. The round, symmetrical log of the lamina, on the other hand, will serve as an excellent lifebuoy. Perhaps a toliwaga, arrived at such a pass, would really utter the kaytaria spell. And if the party were saved, they would probably all declare, and, no doubt believe, that the fish had come to their summons, and somehow or other helped in the rescue.
It is less easy to imagine what elements in such an experience might have given rise to the myth that the natives, landed on the shore, magically lift the fish from the shallow waters by means of a charmed pole. This indeed seems a purely imaginary incident, and my main informant, Molilakwa of Oburaku, from whom I obtained the kaytaria spell, did not know the spell of the pole, and would have had to leave the iraviaka to its own fate in the shallows. Nor could I hear of anyone else professing to know this spell. The formula uttered over the stone to be thrown on the beach was equally unknown to the circle of my informants. Of course, in all such cases, when a man carrying on a system of magic would come to a gap in his knowledge, he would perform the rite without the spell, or utter the most suitable spell of the system. Thus here, as the stone is thrown in order to reconnoitre whether the mulukwausi are waiting for them, a spell of the giyorokaywa, the spell of the mulukwausi, might be uttered over the stone. Over the combs, as well as over the herbs on the beach, a giyorokaywa spell would be uttered, according to my informants, but probably, a different spell from the one spoken originally over the ginger root. Molilakwa, for instance, knows two spells of the giyorokaywa, both of which are suitable to be spoken over the ginger and over the beach respectively. Then there comes another spell, to be uttered over the libu plant, and in addressing the spider and the bush-hen. Molilakwa told me that the same spell would be said in the three cases, but neither he, nor anyone else, among my informants could give me this spell. The magic done in the village, while the shipwrecked men remained in the smoky hut, would be all accompanied by the leyya (ginger) spells.
One incident in the above narrative might have struck the reader as contradictory of the general theory of the mulukwausi belief, that, namely, where the narrator declares that the party on the beach have to wait till nightfall before they enter the village. The general belief expressed in all the mulukwausi legends, as well as in the taboos of the kayga’u, is that the witches are really dangerous only at night, when they can see and hear better. Such contradictions, as I have said, are often met in native belief, and in this, by the way, the savages do not differ from ourselves. My informant, from whom I had this version, simply said that such was the rule and the custom, and that they had to wait till night. In another account, on the other hand, I was told that the party must proceed to the village immediately after having performed the several rites on the beach, whether night or day.
There also arises the main question, regarding this narrative, to which allusion has been made already, namely, how far does it represent the normal behaviour in shipwreck, and how far is it a sort of standardised myth? There is no doubt that shipwreck in these seas, surrounded in many parts by islands, is not unlikely to end by the party’s being saved. This again would result in some such explanation as that contained in our narra- tive. Naturally, I tried to record all the actual cases of shipwreck within the natives’ memory. Some two generations ago, one of the chiefs of Omarakana, named Numakala, perished at sea, and with him all his crew. A canoe of another Eastern Trobriand village, Tilakaywa, was blown far North, and stranded in Kokopawa, from where it was sailed back by its crew, when the wind turned to the North-West. Although this canoe was not actually shipwrecked, its salvation is credited to kayga’u magic, and to the kind fish, iraviyaka. A very intelligent informant of mine explained this point of view in answer to some of my cavillings: „If this canoe had been wrecked, it would have been saved also”.
A party from Muyuwa (Woodlark Island) were saved on the shore of Boyowa. In the South of the Island, several cases are on record where canoes were wrecked and saved in the d’Entrecasteaux Islands or in the Amphletts. Once the whole crew were eaten by cannibals, getting ashore in a hostile district of Fergusson Island, and one man only escaped, and ran along the shore, south-eastwards towards Dobu. Thus there is a certain amount of historical evidence for the saving power of the magic, and the mixture of fanciful and real elements makes our story a good example of what could be called standardised or universalized myth — that is, a myth referring not to one historical event but to a type of occurrence, happening universally.