thirties--that the Samoans had already been able to learn about this
religion that fixed everything--this desirable law called Lotu, which
was to settle everything for them, and make everything straight.
(Lotu[5] also means church, Lotu Tonga, the Tongan Church, etc.) So that
within the very shortest possible time the missionaries succeeded in
converting them, in fact, were waited for and expected, one might say,
by the next chance ship. The terrible reputation of savageness of these
islanders, owing to their having murdered La Peyrouse’s men in Tutuila,
on first acquaintance, so guarded them that even so far back as 1836,
and later, very little was known of them--they were carefully avoided.
But certain outcasts, escaped convicts, terrors of the sea, had come
among them, and had even begun to instruct them to expect this law of
Good. It is one of the most touching, as well as one of the most
atrocious, of small facts. Old Samasone was telling us the stories of
these old times: how some stranded ruffian, unable to return to white
lands, had felt obliged, upon being questioned, to assert his value and
knowledge by some imitation that might not later conflict with the
outside facts. Some brutal, drunken, murderous wretch would choose, some
day, to simulate a Sunday, and sing obscene or brutal forecastle songs,
all the same to those who did not understand a word, as representing the
church service of song which he described.
Samasone, whose American name is Hamilton, and who has been here for the
third of a century, tells us lengthily and in detail such stories, and
gives us long accounts of Samoan manners, in the same way that might be
his if he were still in native New England. And when I shut my eyes, I
can fancy myself sitting on the edge of some Newport wharf, and
listening to Captain Jim or Captain Sam, discoursing wisely, with
infinite detail.
Fifty years have passed since those things, paralleled more or less
elsewhere in the South Seas; and now from the hut of Mataafa, the great
chief, which is next to mine, with the sunset, comes the Angelus, sung
by the people yet nearer to nature than Millet’s peasants. I hear also
the Ave Maria Stella; the cry of the exiled sons of Eve for help in this
vale of tears, for whether Catholic like Mataafa, or Protestant like my
good neighbour Tofae, they are all very Christian. Indeed, my other
neighbour is a preacher, an eloquent one, like a true Samoan, a race
where eloquence is hereditary in families. I hear him thundering on
Sundays against the Babylonians, and all the bad people of Scripture.
They are all steeped in a knowledge of the words of the Bible. In any
serious conversation, in political discussion, we hear the well-known
types of character referred to, and all the analogies pushed to the
furthest extreme.[6] The rather light-minded girls whom we have about us
amuse themselves on Sunday with capping verses from the Bible. The young
men of our boat crew, whose moral views on many subjects would bring a
blush to the cheek of the most hardened clubman, are fond of leading in
prayer, are learned in hymnology, and are apt to be fairly strict
sabbatarians. Here and elsewhere, in many other islands, it is often
very difficult on Sunday to obtain the use of a boat, the only vehicle
possible. Remember that I am, and shall be for a long time, writing from
islands, where all life is along the shore, where only occasionally are
there roads, or what we would call roads; where there are few horses,
somtimes none at all; where the natural road is over the beach, when it
is uninterrupted by rock and cliffs, and where the boat can take you
quietly along inside of the reef. But as I shall make it out clearly
later, the Polynesian likes to have things settled one way or the other,
as all sensible people do.
And then the Bible--I am not speaking of the New Testament--is so near
them; they read so often their own story in the life of Israel of many
centuries back. They are not separated from a civilization of that form
by such and so many changes as our ancestors’ minds have passed through.
Their habit of life must even be said to antedate the biblical. They do
not have to make excuses for the conduct of God’s chosen people. They
can take all as it is written. They need not suppose some error in the
account of the witch of Endor. In such a valley, buried under trees, or
behind that headland where the palms toss in the roar of the trades,
dwells some woman, wiser and more powerful in the solitude and in the
night than we judge her by day. She can tell what things are happening
elsewhere; what things are likely to come. She brings in the dead by the
hand. She tells of what the dead are now doing, of their wars and their
struggles in the empty outside world. What she revealed some nights ago,
to a chosen few who say they were present, is murmured about the
villages, and makes a feature of conversation not unlike society news. I
have listened at night, in out-of-the-way places, among preachers and
people of confirmed Bible piety, to the last reports from the spirit
world: to the news of war there; to the tale of great fights which had
occurred on such a day of the moon, when the battleground of the reef
was strewn with the corpses of the dead already dead to us. And I
remember once hearing how some spirit ruling over a part of our island
had declined to enter into war because he had not been attacked, and his
religious principles, which were Christian, confined him to the
defensive. Perhaps all these things meant more to my good friends than
they did to me, curious as I was to find in these reports some traits of
their character, some manner of theirs of looking at the things of this
world. I believe that to them these agitations of the outside world were
presages of coming danger, of trouble to their earthly lives; that they
saw omens of victory because the spirits of such and such possible
ancestors had triumphed. But no doubt, in some way not understood by me,
all these vague stories confirmed them in certain directions, or made
them hesitate. At any rate, it kept the land peopled with fears. It
makes the terror of the forest more vivid and more reasonable. The
_po_--the dark, the night--is impressive to the Polynesian; the brave
man may have all the fear of the little boy. And I own that I have never
seen a nature which at night assumed more mystery, a more threatening
quiet. The vegetation never rests. The plants are always growing. The
sighing of the palms so deceptively like rain; the glitter of the great
leaves of the banana, striking one against the other, with a half
metallic clink; the fall of dead branches; the sudden drop of the
cocoanut or the bread-fruit; the perpetual draught, carrying indefinite
sounds from the untrodden interior; the echo of the surf from the reef,
against the high mountains; the splash of the water on the shore; the
flight of the “flying fox” in the branches; the ghostlike step of the
barefooted passerby; the impossibility of the eye carrying far throught
angles of tropical foliage--all these things make the night--the _po_,
not a cessation of impressions, but a new mystery.
With such a landscape about me, I was ready to believe that handsome
young men belated in the passages of the mountains had been met by the
female spirit, whether her name be Sau Mai Afi or not, whose sudden
love is death; and that the same being could be a man when the night
traveller was a woman and beautiful. Had not the brother of one of our
virgin friends been assailed by devils, in some adventurous night
voyage, and had he not returned half crazed, and beaten in such a way
that he had never recovered? All this had happened while we were there;
we might have found him alive had we come a few weeks earlier.
And in the night-fishing how often do the dead, continuing their habits,
fish on the reefs alongside of the living. They are silent, and their
canoes keep apart, but they may silently step from one canoe to another,
only to be known by the chill and anxiety that goes with them. I have
seen with my own eyes, far out on the reef, the solitary torch pointed
out to me as that of the dead. Often, when suspected, the spirit
occupant of a canoe has made for shore and disappeared, _incessu patuit
dea_, and has been assuredly recognized by the track of her torch
through the mountains, where no living man goes. That certainly must
have been our spirit disastrous to young men.
All these sides of common belief, or what perhaps we might call
superstition, were shown to us little by little. On the outside our good
friends believe roughly as we do, and all this that I am talking about
is what remains attached to Christianity, or more properly, never
disentangled from it. And I should suppose that it must have been
difficult for the missionaries to expel these survivals of the past, in
the same way that the old Church found it impossible, in certain corners
of Europe, to wipe out the belief in fairies--the “little men,” the
“good folk,” the “wee folk,” the “good neighbours”; the sacredness and
influence of places. And here the practical mind of the savage, in its
first reaction, after having received a set form of worship and faith as
a great relief, would argue that the written Law, the Book, countenances
most of the things they _cared_ for in their older worship. A very few
years after the first christianization which began in the Society
Islands, sects were formed, based upon the Bible, or using it as an
excuse, with all the security of any theological difference. I have a
vague feeling that many of my brown friends think that the Christian,
even the missionary, does not carry out properly his belief, and that
they themselves are nearer to the letter as well as to the spirit. If
the missionaries have let loose among them the famous question of the
lost tribes, I have no doubt that many of them must be imbued with the
certainty of that descent. Many of their practices are so much like
those of the early Jews, that, according to old-fashioned ways of
historical criticism, an uninterrupted tradition might be argued. In
fact, I am quite sure that many of the missionaries have so reasoned,
and implanted among them a great feeling of confidence. And the
Polynesian, having a perfectly healthy mind, likes to have everything
settled. Anything more like the typical respectable Englishman I have
never met. With the brown man one sees the natural healthy desire of
having the questions of religion, of politics, of society, all settled
on the same basis; there is such a thing as good form, and that settles
it. After the first start, the islanders were much troubled at finding
that there were many ways of looking at things, and that religion might
be right and manners bad: that the wife of the missionary, who insisted
on poke bonnets, was not dressing according to the most aristocratic
forms of her own land. And when they find that their written religion
does not provide for all their little wants, it must be very natural to
supply the smaller ones, which are the everyday ones, with some of the
older forms more fitted for individual and temporal advantages. It must
be a comfort to many of them to know that the flight of certain birds
indicates what they had better do to-morrow; that the coming of certain
fish may mean, nay does mean--some change in family history; and they
may still prefer to treat respectfully the animals and plants that were
associated with their origins--what we might roughly call, their totem.
The shark has been respected or the bread-fruit, or the owl; and in
certain cases certain mysterious powers and sanctities might follow the
line of descent, though concealed from the public, more especially the
white men. Of this, I ought perhaps to say that I am confident; and that
the powers would be recognized in certain people even when, as I have
seen it, they belong to opposing Christian sects.
The missionaries were Wesleyans, or, rather, men of the London
Missionary Society. The form seems to have suited the Samoans. It was a
service in which every one took part. There was preaching and eloquence
and oratory, and to a certain extent the community was invited into the
church--not allowed to enter into the church as a favour. So that
notwithstanding their fondness for externals, the Catholic service gives
them less of their old, natural, ancestral habits by centring everything
in the ministrations of the priest, and by cutting off all chance of any
members of the congregation becoming themselves orators, deacons or
preachers, and leading in turn themselves. The chiefs also would
hesitate in a choice of humiliations; the missionary, white at first and
now a native obtaining a position of equal and sometimes superior
influence, and that without any civil preparation for the same--indeed
with less fitness from the relative isolation of his days of study.
Later on I may explain to you more fully how absolutely the chief is
the pivot of all social good. He has been for indefinite ages the cause
of all action; he has been personally superior both in body and mind.
The entire aristocracy is a real one, the only one I know of. It is
impossible to enter into it, though one may be born into it. With our
ideas of more or less Germanic origin we suppose a ruler gifted with the
power of bestowing part of his value upon certain men lower than
himself, and actually making such people essentially different. A
Polynesian knows no such metaphysical subtlety. The actual blood of
physical descent is essential to supremacy, except in a most vicarious
and momentary manner, or as by marriage so that the children may become
entitled to whatever the sum of the blood of parents represents. With
them an heir to aristocratic privileges or power or influence or
prestige represents nothing more than the arithmetical sum of his
father’s and mother’s blood. I have had lately a Sunday afternoon visit
all to myself, from a charming little girl who is the daughter and sole
child of the king; a nice little girl with pretty little royal ways, who
explains to me that she does not like things here so well as she did
where she was taught English, where she had been at school, in the
British colony of Fiji. There she was a king’s daughter, and any English
ideas around her would be more flattering to her consequence than even
the kindly feeling of the subjects of her father. For her mother is not
of equal blood, besides being a foreigner. The great chief Malietoa
Laupepa, whom we have made a king, cannot make his wife, according to
Polynesian ideas, any more than what she was before he married her; and
the little daughter has only in her veins the royal blood on one side,
and a certain respectability on the other. To the true Polynesian mind,
such a one of her cousins, of less high descent on the father’s side,
may be of higher descent on the mother’s, and the sum of those descents
may be very much greater than the sum of the descents of the daughter of
Malietoa Laupepa. Hence it requires a great stretch of loyalty to look
at such a little person with the veneration that the Polynesian feels
for “chiefy” origin; and you can understand what a disastrous and bloody
muddle we have made it for them when we have told them that the word
_king_ represented anything that they had themselves or could have. With
them _Rex nascitur non fit_.
All this has been explained by the supposition of two different races,
one of which, that of the chiefs, had subdued the other. There is no
such tradition, however, and no apparent reasons to explain the enormous
superiority of the aristocratic lines except the simple physical ones of
choice in breeding and of better food and less suffering, continued for
centuries and centuries. Even at a distance a chief can be distinguished
by his size and his gait, and a successful collection at some political
entertainment brings back the dream of lines in the Homeric catalogues
of heroes. Great size of limb, great height, consequent strength and
weight, a haughty bearing, a manner of standing, a manner of throwing
his legs out in walking, like the step of a splendid animal, a habit of
sitting upright--all these points tell the chief.[7]
Upon these superior beings, then, brought up to command, considered as
sacred by themselves and by all below them, devolved perpetually the
duty of deciding everything that was to be done. Even in a detail so
minute to our minds as that of a day for fishing, the chief decided, and
does yet, what the community should do. The good fortune of all was
dependent upon his wise choice. As the chief has often explained to us,
when the women began to talk too much, and fix their minds upon harmful
gossip, a healthy diversion was that of ordering them to make the native
cloth--an absorbing process. With all the refinement of political
leaders, excuses would be found for such an enforcement of industry: the
occasion of some visit to be made or received, when every one entitled
to it should appear with many changes of dress; when the visitor or the
visited should receive presents of beautiful cloth. Let me say how
elsewhere, in another group of islands, the earlier missionary
interfered and broke up the industry of women, without evil intention,
making them idle, and opening thereby the gate to ruin. In Polynesian
life, as I am trying to explain, things were intimately connected. There
were religious forms or words--or shall I rather say, forms and words of
good omen?--accompanying all ordinary human action. Had the missionaries
realized this perfectly, they might almost have interfered with the
savages’ breathing; but they fastened on the pagan forms connected with
the making of cloth, and the women gave it up, and bought cotton from
the white man, and paid for it the Lord knows how.
The chief, then, sent the young men to fish and the women to work, when
it was needed both for physical and moral good. War, of course, they
always had, as a last resource, just like the great politicians of
Europe. The constant interference, involuntary very often, very often
most kindly meant, of the missionary or the clergyman, diminished this
influence of the chief--an unwritten, uncodified power, properly an
influence, something that when once gone has to be born again.[8] And
the brown clergyman, continuing the authority of the white one, has
something further, less pure, a feeling of ambition, a desire to assert
himself against former superiors; and he is perhaps still more a
dissolvent of the body politic into which he was born.
I see no picture about me more interesting than the moral one of my next
neighbour, the great Mataafa. To see the devout Christian, the man who
has tried to put aside the small things that tie us down, struggle with
the antique prejudices--necessary ones--of a Polynesian nobleman, is a
touching spectacle. When a young missionary rides up to his door, while
all others gently come up to it, and those who pass move far away, out
of respect; and then when the confident youth, full of his station as a
religious teacher, speaks to the great chief from his saddle, Mataafa’s
face is a study. Over the sensitive countenance, which looks partly like
that of a warrior, partly like that of a bishop or church guardian,
comes a wave of surprise and disgust, promptly repelled, as the higher
view of forgiveness and respect for holy office comes to his relief.
But Mataafa is not only a chief of chiefs, he is a gentleman among
gentlemen. My companion, difficult to please, says, “La Farge, at last
we have met a gentleman.”
His is a sad fate: to have done all for Samoa; to have beaten the
Germans and wearied them out; to have been elected king by almost
unanimous consent, including that of the present King, who wished him to
reign; then to be abandoned by us; and to feel his great intellectual
superiority and yet to be idle and useless when things are going wrong.
And more than all, however supported by the general feeling to-day, if
he moves to establish his claims, the three foreign nations who decide
Samoa’s future, not for her good, but for their comfort or advantage,
will certainly have to combine and crush him.
He is a hero of tragedy--a reminder of the Middle Ages, when a man could
live a religious life and a political one.
And his adversaries among the natives are among our friends; and we like
them also, though there is none to admire like Mataafa standing out for
an idea for the legitimacy of right.
For all the soft Communism of which I spoke, the chiefs were the
stiffening, and are so still in as far as the new ideas, or rather want
of ideas, do not affect their real authority.
As I tried to explain, these are chiefs, lesser or greater, hereditary,
essential; nothing can replace them, no commoner come into their
position or a similar one. Alongside of them an European monarch is a
half-caste or a parvenu. When, as you will see, we, that is to say the
English and Americans, made one of them a king, we made a thing unknown
before, unthinkable in reality among their social machinery.
For however true it is that the chief is so by birth, by authority of
nature, you know that in Samoa he is also elective. A council of chiefs
of his own race determine whether or no he shall “bear the name.” For
smaller chiefs, their own names; for certain great ones, such a name as
Aana or Malietoa.
With these names goes the power over certain places large or small, but
each having a traditional value. Should a chief of sufficient blood have
all these five names (and he cannot get them without such natural
inheritance and the name may remain empty), should he have all five
names, then he is of necessity king, that is to say, chief of chiefs.
But if he have only three, then imagine the confusion made in the true
Samoan mind by our making him king.
Mataafa has held more names than any other, and would no doubt be to-day
elected king by the majority of the Samoans; and absolute agreement
would probably always be impossible. But though the treaty between
Germany, England, and the United States, as promulgated in the Island,
decided that the Samoans should elect their king, and thereby Mataafa
would be the man; yet a secret arrangement, or what is prettily called a
_protocol_, not published to the Samoans, decided that Mataafa
especially and alone should not be allowed. He was the only man who had
successfully defended Samoan independence as far as it could be, by word
and by action; he had fought the Germans and defeated them, and that was
the reason.
According to American ideas Mataafa would be the only proper person, but
Germany and England have arranged for some time back all matters of
influence and policy; and whatever we have wished, or might have wished,
we have always been obliged to vote over against them, and must continue
to do so.
But the German cause is such a bad one, so foul at the origin, and so
brutally helped on, that it has been impossible for Great Britain to
ignore justice absolutely, and we have done something in the cause of
humanity and so far served God.
Money can have no feeling; political ambition only what may help; and
the cause of all this trouble which has made this little island known to
the entire world is the hope of saving some money badly invested.
A great Hamburg firm with a French name, the Godeffroys, had some years
ago established itself in most islands of the Pacific; it was the great
firm--the German firm. But as often happens, speculations in other
matters, or Russian-Westphalian securities broke the great man, the
former friend of Bismarck, and when a German company, known as “The
German Company,” succeeded to his assets in the South Seas, they found
the greater part of them sunk in the Hares-plantations of the firm in
the Islands of Samoa.
Everywhere else there was no hope, but here if sales could be proved
valid, if by any means the present labour system of black imported
savages from other islands could be replaced by a system of “peonage,”
for the natives, if taxes could be placed upon the community which can
only be taxed by making the industrious support the idle, if in fact,
the firm could control the islands, money might again be made and
perhaps the millions sunk be made to pay or fully recovered. Elsewhere
in islands where French or English ruled, it was so much the worse for
the adventurous if things went wrong, and there are cotton plantations
and sugar plantations, which have gone to pieces as it became impossible
to keep them up, industries and speculations which first started into
life with our war.