He will fine them and fine them high, perhaps as much as ten dollars,”
answered righteous Charley, feeling, as we all did, for the virtuous
cause. And then I withdrew, not only because I wished to go to Sivá, but
I wished also to meditate upon the principles of eternal justice now
about to be vindicated by Tofae. When the old women are silenced and put
to naught, shall our young man be strengthened in his suit? And will the
young lady triumphantly elope with him? All these contingencies of
events might appear spoiled if I inquired too far, so that I have left
it all alone, and I withdraw. The subject is too pretty as it stands,
and, as I said before, only requires to be set to music.
Vaiala, Jan. 27, 1891.
We are nearer to the cannibal here in Samoa than you would believe at
first; far away as we are from cannibal or “devil” countries, we have in
the hired labourers of the German plantation a wilder set of savages
than would seem from their usual behaviour and the steady work urged out
of them by their German masters. You must not forget that these little
black men, often so gentle and sweetly smiling, whom we see about at
work--in that constant exceptions to all around us--are not absolutely
converted by being taken from their cannibal native lands to work for
the white man in Samoa. The smile of their white teeth, repeated by the
ivory bars or rings in their noses, conceals, like the gentleness of
children, depths of useless cruelty.
The timidity of behaviour of such as I had seen and described to you,
who had escaped from the plantations and were in hiding among distant
Samoan villages, protected by the gentler brown race from recapture and
return to what after all is slavery, is not a permanent index of
character. When they have escaped, and have lived in the bush a life of
bare chance, finding scanty food, continually tracked and hunted by
their masters, often denounced by the Samoans, who do not trust them,
they turn both to ancient, ferocious habits, and to the superstitions
and fears which belonged to their life at home.
They are always suspected of cannibalism; and the event which has made
us all more or less miserable is considered as quite a possible thing,
and likely to occur again. News came to us suddenly, out at Vaiala, that
Faatulia, the wife of our friend Seumanu, the chief of Apia, had learned
a dreadful thing. Her brother, some weeks ago, had sailed from the
little island of Manono, and had neither returned there nor arrived
anywhere. His boat was found upturned, and he was missing. The story
told to Faatulia came from some of the black labourers, or else from
some of those who had escaped out of slavery. Or else it came in the
Samoan way, so that, though you know there is a story, it does not
require to be fathered by any human tongue. “There are no secrets kept
in Samoa,” says Mataafa; “they are always being told.”
This is what she learned: Her brother, in the last storm, had been
driven out of his course; his canoe had been overturned, and he had
barely saved his life by swimming. On reaching land in great distress,
he had found in the bush a hut, occupied by runaway blacks, and had
asked for shelter. He had slept, but fever had taken hold of him, and
for some while he was unconscious. Thereupon came up the dread
temptation to the black man. Here was that menace of superstitious harm
coming from the presence of a sick man, who might die and injure them by
bringing the spirit which kills, into their forlorn abode.
Here was food too, if they killed him. Perhaps--I say it with doubt,
because I have but confused notions of the exact superstitions belonging
to any one of the races I have not met--but the man killed and _eaten_
is not so dangerous in the other world as the man who dies a natural
death.
At any rate, the story went on to say that the blacks killed Faatulia’s
brother in his sleep, ate him, buried the bones, and knew nothing when
inquiries were made. But somehow or other, suspicion excited by
something done or said made the friends of the missing man dig and find
remains which, at the time we heard the story, were being brought down
to Faatulia, for identification.
And now how shall they know? The German firm will send their physician,
and the American ship will send hers, and the question will assume a
political meaning.
It was a sad thing to make our last call on Faatulia, and know that
while she talked to us she was trying to forget the ugly thing lying
behind the hangings of the hut.
Seumanu was undisturbed as usual, and bade us good-bye with all the
coolness of a _tulafale_.
That same afternoon, January 27th, we looked for the last time upon the
royal face of our neighbour Mataafa, while he told us again to tell
Americans that Samoans owed their lives to the United States.
Then I used up my last daylight in painting a study of Maua, one of the
boat’s crew, who endured it in a fidgety way that he took for patience.
He was cold, for every hanging mat had to be opened, to give a little
light on the dark afternoon, under the big roof of our hut.
And again in the morning I worked upon the sketch until the boatmen came
up to tell me that the last moment was come. Maua flushed pink with joy,
over his whole naked
[Illustration: MAUA. STUDY OF ONE OF OUR BOAT CREW. APIA, SAMOA]
body, when I told him that I had done. The children on the village green
(_malae_) came to say something and to offer little presents of shells
and sea beans.
The steamer was whistling for me outside the reef--Atamo was on
board---- But I could not be left behind--too valuable a passenger.
I bequeathed my best cocoanut oil to Siakumo and the other girls, said
good-bye to Tofae, our chief, and promised, if I returned, to come back
under his wing. Samau, our boatswain, carried me on his back, into the
boat, and patted my legs, as a respectful and silent good-bye.
The grey water inside the reef was smooth and quiet. For the last time
our Samoan crew pulled close to the shore, to exchange _tofas_
(farewells) with Meli and her girls; and we went on board, where the
sheep from Australia were still huddled on the quarter-deck due to
Tahiti later. In the afternoon the island, wreathed in clouds, was
already melting away behind us.
AT SEA FROM SAMOA TO TAHITI
We have had days of hard winds and grey weather, and all the more do I
make pictures within my mind. For the Otaheite to which we are bound has
a meaning, a classical record, a story of adventure, and historical
importance, fuller than the Typee of Melville, which we may never see.
The name recalls so many associations of ideas, so much romance of
reading, so much of the history of thought, that I find it difficult to
disentangle the varying strands of the threads. There are many boyish
recollections behind the charm of Melville’s “Omoo” and of Stoddard’s
Idylls, or even the mixed pleasure of Loti’s “Marriage.”
Captain Cook and Bougainville and Wallis first appeared to me with the
name of Otaheite or Tahiti; and I remember the far away missionary
stories and the pictures of their books--the shores fringed with palm
trees, the strange, impossible mountain peaks, the half-classical
figures of natives, and the eighteenth-century costumes of the gallant
discoverers. I remember gruesome pictures in which figure human
sacrifices and deformed idols, and the skirts of the uniform of Captain
Cook. What would be the fairy reality of the engravings which delighted
my childhood?
Once again all these pictures had come back to me. _Long ago_ there lay,
by a Newport wharf, an old hulk, relic of former days. We were told that
this had been one of the ships of Captain Cook: the once famous
_Endeavour_. Here was the end of its romance; now slowly rotted the keel
that had ploughed through new seas and touched the shores of races
disconnected from time immemorial. Like the _Argo_, like the little
_Pinta_ and _Santa Maria_, it had carried brave hearts ready to open the
furthest gates of the world. The wild men of the islands had seen it, a
floating island manned by gods, carrying its master to great fame and
sudden death.
For he was not allowed by fate to try for further Japan, and begin, with
the help of Russia, that career of conquest for England which she now
dislikes to share with other nations, even with those to whom she first
proposed the enterprise and half the spoils.
On that little ship, enormous to her eyes, had been Oberea, the
princess, the Queen of Otaheite, whose name comes up in the stories of
Wallis or of Cook, and early in the first missionary voyages.
Oberea was the tall woman of commanding presence, who, undismayed, with
the freedom of a person accustomed to rule, visited Wallis on board his
ship soon after his first arrival and the attempt at attacking him
(July, 1767). She, you may also remember, carried him, a sick man, in
her arms, as easily as if he had been a child. I remember her in the
engraving, stepping toward Wallis, with a palm branch in her hand; while
he stands with gun in hand, at the head of the high grenadier-capped
marines.
And do you remember the parting--how the Queen could not speak for
tears; how she sank inconsolable in the bow of her canoe, without
noticing the presents made her? “Once more,” writes the gallant Captain,
“she bade us farewell, with such tenderness of affection and grief as
filled both my heart and my eyes.”
Surely this is no ordinary story--this sentimental end of an official
record of discovery.
My memory makes the picture for me: the ship moving at last out of the
reef, with the freshened wind, and below her level the canoe and the
savage queen bent over in grief. Then right on without a break Wallis
ends the chapter with these words: “At noon the harbour from which we
sailed bore S. E. 1/2 E. distant about twelve miles. It lies in latitude
17° 30´s. longitude 150° W. and I gave it the name of _Port Royal
Harbour_.” This foreign name has since yielded to the ancient native
one. Besides the charming irrelevancy of these facts with the words
describing the sentiment of eternal parting, Wallis’s conclusion gives
us the place of Tahiti on the map, and will help you to follow me there.
The name of Wallis, the first discoverer, is so much overshadowed by the
personality of Captain Cook, that I think it better to give you again
the story that belongs to each.
Let us go back in mind to the date, the second half of the last century,
1767. The recall to _me_ of the ships of Christopher Columbus emphasizes
the difference between that moment and the end of the fifteenth century.
There were still vast spaces of sea unknown; still the object of
commerce, of war and of discovery, was the connection with the
“easternmost parts of Asia.” What lay between was only guessed at and
often avoided. As when Anson, whom I have just been reading, passed
through the southern seas in 1742, anxious for an unbroken passage
across the great Pacific, in order to strike a blow at the Spaniard in
Asiatic islands, he followed the Spanish charts; and in his own,
“showing the track of the Centurion round the World,” there is nothing
marked in the enormous blank space below the equinoctial line, from
South America to New Guinea, but the fabulous Treasure Islands--the
Isles of Solomon, placed very nearly where Tahiti lies.
When Wallis and Bougainville came upon this island they came as Columbus
did--as discoverers; but the times had changed; and the meeting with a
new race in this island of Tahiti--a fifth race, as it was named in my
boyhood’s school-books--affected European minds very differently from
the manner of three centuries before, when the Spaniards went for the
first time through a like experience.
It is this new introduction of _modern_ and _changed_ Europe to another
fresh knowledge of the savage world, that makes the solemnity of the
discovery.
There is also something in the sudden coming together of the two new
nations, England and France, so different from ancient Spain, upon this
littlest of lands most lost in the greatest spaces of the sea, four
thousand miles from the nearest mainland.
Hence from little Tahiti, whose double island is not more than a hundred
and twenty-five miles about, begins the filling up of the map of
discovery in the Pacific.
When Wallis arrived in June, 1767, Tahiti and its neighbouring island
were under the rule of a chief, Amo or Aamo, as he is called by Wallis
and by Cook. He was their great chief--what we have managed to translate
as king. It was a moment of general peace, and the “happy islanders”
enjoyed in a “terrestrial paradise” pleasures of social life, of free
intercourse, whose description, even at this day, reads with a charm of
impossible amenity. The wonderful island, striking in its shape, so
beautiful, apparently, that each successive traveller has described it
as the most beautiful of places, was prepared to offer to the discoverer
expecting harsh and savage sights a race of noble proportion, of great
elegance of form, accustomed to most courteous demeanour, and speaking
one of the softest languages of man. Even the greatest defects of the
Polynesian helped to make the exterior picture of amiability and ease of
life still more graceful. If, by the time that I return, you have not
read as much about their ancient habits and customs, their festivals,
their dances, their human sacrifices, their practice of infanticide,
their wild generosity, I shall write you fully about it all, or shall
make you read what is necessary. What was visible of the harsher side
added to the picture of the interest of mystery and contradiction. The
residence of this Chief, Amo, and of his wife, Purea or Oberea, as Cook
called her, was at Papara, on the south shore of Tahiti. Both belonged
to a family whose ancestors were gods; and they lived a ceremonial life
recalling, at this extreme of civilization, the courtesies, the
adulation, the flattery, the superstitious veneration of the East. This
family and its allies had reigned in these islands and in the others for
an indefinite period. The names of their ancestors, the poetry
commemorating them were and are still sung, long after the white man had
helped to destroy their supremacy. When Wallis arrived at the north of
the island, Amo and Oberea were not far from Papara in the south. They
heard of the arrival of the floating island, whose masts were trees,
whose pumps were rivers, whose inhabitants were gods in strangeness of
complexion and of dress.
The same tragedy had happened there which begins the recitals of savage
discovery. The islanders had no notion of the resources of the
Europeans, nor had the white men a knowledge of Polynesian customs; so
that soon came up the usual quarrel and the use of fire-arms taken by
the natives for thunder and lightning. Amo received the news, and
notwithstanding the exaggerated accounts, determined to see for himself
the supposed island and test the power of its inhabitants. His was the
attack described by Wallis, in which a large number of natives
surrounded the ship, while Amo and Oberea looked on from a little
eminence above the bay. To shorten the contest and thereby lessen the
mischief Wallis fired on the canoes and the occupants, and finally on
the chiefs themselves. Cannon balls fell at their feet, and tore down
the surrounding trees. The unequal contest was over, and the inhabitants
came with green branches in their hands, even those whose friends had
been killed, to make peace with the English, and offer submission.
Wallis relates how one woman, who had lost her husband and children in
the fight, brought her presents weeping to him, and left him in tears,
but without wrath, and gave him her hand at parting.
And you remember how, just as Wallis had left one side of the island,
Bougainville, the Frenchman, came up to the other, different in its
make, different in the first attitude of the natives; but with the same
story of gracious kindness and feminine bounty; so that the Frenchman
called it the New Cytherea, and carried home stories of pastoral,
idyllic life in a savage Eden, where all was beautiful and untainted by
the fierceness and greed imposed upon natural man by artificial
civilization. So strong was the impression produced by what he had to
say, that the keen and critical analysis of his own mistakes in
judgment, which he affixed to his Journal, was, passed over, because, as
he complained, people wished to have their minds made up.
And immediately upon his leaving, again to another part of the island
came the representatives of another race, another, more solemn and less
near to modern civilization--the Spaniards; who in their accustomed way,
planted the cross next to the sacred grove, which unknown to them was
that of the greedy god Oro, and sailed away, leaving two missionaries,
helpless and solitary, to wait for their return.
For this other side of the island was separated from the places of
landing known to Wallis, by fierce war for which Oberea had given the
signal, by that haughtiest pride which only a woman can show.
The missionaries accomplished nothing; and when a few months afterward
the Spaniards called and took them away, their presence had been but a
dream--another strange side to the romance of the first discovery.
One year later, 1768, came Captain Cook, whose name has absorbed all
others. Twice he visited Tahiti, and helped to fix in European minds the
impression of a state _nearer to nature_, which the thought of the day
insisted upon.
Nor can one here forget Oberea; and how she seemed to him younger than
she had seemed to Wallis, who judged her age by European notions.
And how shall I refer to that “ceremony of nature” to which she invited
the captain and his officers, as an exchange for his having let her be
present at the service of the Church of England?
The state of nature had just then been the staple reference in the
polemic literature of the century about to close. The very refined, dry
and philosophic civilization of the few was troubled by the confused
sentiments, the dreams, and the obscure desires of the ignorant and
suffering many. Their inarticulate voice was suddenly phrased by
Rousseau. With that cry came in the literary belief in the natural man,
in the possibility of--analysis of the foundations of government and
civilization--in the perfectibility of the human race and its persistent
goodness, when freed from the weight of society’s blunders and
oppressions.
My confused memories of eighteenth century declamation and reasoning
bring back to me this one echo. Our little ship is not a library, and I
struggle for references. I can only remember fragments of the
encyclopædists and of Diderot, and the vague impression that this last
romance and analysis of singular writings of Otahite is based upon a
direct information outside of that derived from books: that is to say,
perhaps from the travellers themselves, or the Tahitian, who, like
Cook’s Omai, came to Europe with Bougainville.
Later Byron:
“The happy shores without a law,
Where all partake the earth without dispute,
And bread itself is gathered as a fruit;
Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams:
The goldless age, where gold disturbs no dreams.”
These literary images were used as illustrations of the happiness of man
living in, what people still persist in calling, the state of nature.
There is no doubt, of course, that at the moment of the discovery our
islanders had reached a full extreme of their civilization; that
numerous, splendid, and untainted in their physical development, they
seemed to live in a facility of existence, in an absence of anxiety
emphasized by their love of pleasure and fondness for society--by a
simplicity of conscience which found little fault in what we
reprobate--in a happiness which is not and could not be our own. The
“pursuit of happiness” in which these islanders were engaged, and in
which they seemed successful, is the catchword of the eighteenth
century.
People were far then from the cruel ideas of Hobbes; and the more
amiable views of the nature of man and of his rights echo in the
sentimentality of the last century, like the sound of the island surf
about Tahiti.
Nor am I allowed to forget the assertion of those “self-evident truths”
in which the ancestor of my companion, Atamo, most certainly had a hand.
So that the islands to which we are hastening with each beat of the
engine, are emblems of our own past in thought, as they have played a
part also in the history of which we see the development to-day, the end
of the old society, the beginning of the new, the revolutions of Europe
and of America, all which lies in my mind obscurely as I recall, every
few moments, my vague emotions at the name of _Otaheite_.
I believe too that our feelings are intensified because they are
directed toward a far-off island; a word, a thing of all time marked by
man as something wherein to place the ideal, the supernatural; the home
of the blest, the abode of the dead, the fountain of eternal youth,
Circe and Calypso, the haven of man tired of weary sea, the calm smile
of the ocean when the winds have ceased. The word sings itself within my
mind, and the dreams I have been recalling give me interior light during
these gray days of adverse wind, as in Heine’s song of the “Land of
Perpetual Youth”:
“Little birdling Colibri,
Lead us thou to Tahiti!”
February 12th.
Six days of grey weather and dark nights, and in the last evening, quite
late, the sun setting, lit up for a moment an island, Moorea, which is
distant from Tahiti only some dozen miles. It made an enchanted vision
of peaks and high mountains, as strange as any which you may have seen
in the backgrounds of old Italian paintings, far enough to be vague in
the twilight haze and yet distinct in places high up, where the singular
shapes were modelled in pink and yellow-green. The level rays of the sun
pierced through the forest coverings, and came back to my sight, focused
from underlying rocks, in a glistening network of rainbow colours. Then
all faded in a cloudy twilight, half lit by the struggling moon, and we
saw a vague space of island, like a dream, edged by a white line of
reef; this was Tahiti. All night we ran east and west, waiting for the
day, which would allow us to pass through the reef that lies in front of
the so-called City of Papeete, which is a large village, the “capital”
of the island, and the centre of the French possessions in Oceanica.
TAHITI
When we rose in the early morning our ship had already passed the reef,
and we were in the harbour of Papeete. There was the usual enchantment
of the land, a light blue sky and a light blue sea; an air that felt
colder than that of Samoa, whatever the thermometer might say; and when
we had landed, a funny little town, stretched along the beach, under
many tall and beautiful trees. From under their shade the outside blue
was still more wonderful, and at the edge where the blue of sky and sea
came together opposite us, the island of Moorea, all mountain, peaked
and engrailed like some far distance of Titian’s landscapes, seemed
swimming in the blue.
Near the quay neatly edged with stone steps, ships lay only a few rods
off in the deep water, so that their yards ran into the boughs of the
great trees. Further out, on a French man-of-war, the bugle marked the
passing duty of the hour. Everything else was lazy, except the little
horses driven by the _kanakas_. Natives moved easily about, no longer
with the stride of the Samoans, which throws out the knees and feet, as
if it were for the stage. People were lighter built, more _efface_; but
there were pretty faces, many evidently those of half-breeds.
White men were there with the same contrasting look of fierceness and
inquisitiveness marked in their faces; these now that we see less of
them, look beaky and eager in contrast with the brown types that fill
the larger part of our sight and acquaintance.
We were kindly received by the persons for whom we had introductions;
and set about through various more or less shady streets marked
French-wise on the corners: _Rue des Beaux-Arts_, _Rue de la
Cathédrale_, etc.; first to a little restaurant, where I heard in an
adjacent room, “Buvons, amis, buvons,” and the noise of fencing; then to
hire furniture and buy household needs for the housekeeping we proposed
to set up that very day, for there are no hotels. The evening was ended
at the “Cercle,” where we played dominoes, to remind ourselves that we
were in some outlying attachment of provincial France. By the next
morning we were settled in a little cottage on the wonderful beach, that
is shaded all along by worthy trees; we had engaged a cook, and Awoki
was putting all to rights. As we walk back into the town there are
French walls and yellow stuccoed houses for government purposes. A few
officers in white and soldiers pass along.
A few scattered French ladies pass under the trees; so far as