TAIARAPU, TAHITI]
we can tell (because we have been long away) dressed in some correct
French fashion; looking not at all incongruous, because already we feel
that this is dreamland--that anybody in any guise is natural here,
except a few Europeans, who meet the place halfway, and belong neither
to where they came from, nor to the unreality of the place they are in.
There is no noise, the street is the beach; the trappings of the
artillery horses, and the scabbards of the sabres rattle in a profound
silence, so great that I can distinctly count the pulsations of the
water running from the fountain near us into the sea. The shapes and
finish of the government buildings, their long spaces of enclosure, the
moss upon them, remind us of the sleepiest towns of out-of-the-way bits
of France.
The natives slip over the dust in bare feet, the waving draperies of the
long gowns of the women seeming to add to the stealthy or undulating
movement which carries them along. Many draw up under the arm some
corner of this long, nightgowny dress that it may not trail, or let
their arms swing loosely to the rhythm of their passing by.
Most of the native men wear loose jackets, sometimes shirts above the
great loin-cloth which hangs down from the waist, and which is the same
as the _lava-lava_ of the Samoans, the _sulu_ of the Fijians, and is
here called the _pareu_.
Many of the women have garlands round their necks and
[Illustration]
flowers behind their ears. Occasionally we hear sounds of singing that
come back to us from some cross-street; and as I have ventured to look,
I see in a little enclosure some women seated, and one standing before
them, making some gestures, perhaps of a dance; and I grieve to say,
looking as if they had begun their latest evening very early in the day.
But this I have noticed from sheer inquisitiveness. I feel that in
another hour or so I shall not care to look for anything, but shall sit
quietly and let everything pass like the turn of a revolving panorama.
In this state of mind, which represents the idleness of arrival, we meet
at our Consul’s an agreeable young gentleman belonging to a family well
known to us by name--the Branders; a family that represents--though
mixed with European--the best blood of the islanders. They speak French
and English with the various accents and manners that belong to those
divisions of European society; they are well-connected over in Scotland.
Do you remember the Branders of “Lorna Doone”? At home their ancestry
goes back full forty generations. They are young and pleasant, and we
forget how old we are in comparison. We call on their mother later, a
charming woman, and on an aunt, Mrs. Atwater, who has a similar charm
of manner, accent and expression; and on another aunt, the ex-Queen
Marau; but she is away with her younger sister Manihinihi.
In the evening, with some remnant of energy, we walk still further than
our house upon the beach, passing over the same roads that Stoddard
wearily trod in his “South Sea Idyls.” We try to find, by the little
river that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the
calaboose where Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our
search; no one remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of
woodland that Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm
of light and air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to
bring back home in words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if
composed for Claude Lorraine. Great trees stand up within a few feet of
the tideless sea. Where the shadows run in at times, canoes with
outriggers are pulled up. People sit near the water’s edge, on the
grass. Outside of all this shade, we see the island of Moorea further
out than the far line of the reef, no longer blue, but glowing like a
rose in the beginning of the twilight.
At night we hear girls passing before our little garden; we see them
swinging together, with arms about the flowers of their necks. They
sing--alas! not always soberly, and the wind brings the odour of the
gardenias that cover their necks and heads.
In the night the silence becomes still greater around us, though we can
hear at a distance the music of the band that plays in the square, which
is the last amusement left to this dreary deserted village called a
town. In the square, which is surrounded by many trees, through which
one passes to hidden official buildings, native musicians play European
music, apparently accommodated to their own ideas, but all in excellent
time, so that one just realizes that somehow or other these airs must
have been certain well-known ones. But nothing matters very much.
A few visitors walk about; native women sit in rows on the ground,
apparently to sell flowers, which they have before them. People of
distinction make visits to a few carriages drawn up under the trees.
Occasionally, in the shadows or before the lights, in an uncertain
manner, natives begin to dance to the accompaniment of the band. But it
is all listless, apparently, at least to the sight, and just as drowsy
as the day.
In the very early morning we drive to the end of the bay at Point Venus,
to see the stones placed by Wilkes and subsequent French navigators, in
order to test the growth of the coral outside. And we make a call on a
retired French naval officer, who has been about here more or less since
1843, the time of Melville. We drive at first through back roads of no
special character. We pass through a great avenue of trees over-arching,
the pride of the town; we cross a river torrent, and the end of our road
brings us along the sea, but far up, so that we look down over spaces of
palm and indentations of small bays fringed with foam, all in the shade
below us. On the sea outline, always the island of Moorea, and back on
Tahiti, the great mountain, the Aorai, the edge apparently of a great
central crater; a fantastic serrated peak called the “Diadem,” also an
edge of the great chasm; and on either side along slopes that run to the
sea, from the central heights, and recall the slopes of Hawaii. But all
is green; even the eight thousand feet of the Aorai, which look blue and
violet, melt into the green around us, so as to show that the same
verdure passes unbroken, wherever there is a foothold, from the sea to
the highest tops. This haze of green, so delicate as to be namable only
by other colours, gives a look of sweetness to these high spaces, and
makes them repeat, in tones of light, against the blue of the sky,
chords of colour similar to those of the trees and the grass against the
blue and the violet of the sea.
Nearer us the slopes are all broken up into knife edges of green velvet
streaked right near us by clay, which in contrast seems almost like
vermilion. So far the roads were good, though the slippery clay might be
very different when the great rains came down; and as our driver forced
his horses at a gallop near the edges of the cliffs hanging over the
lovely pictures of the secluded trees and water, we felt that a more
sandy, more prosaic road would better suit the South Sea habits of
carriage travel.
All the trees were about us that we knew in Samoa; and many more rounded
mango trees, with red fruit hanging on long stems, or lying green by the
road. All this was to be seen with cool air full of life, and under a
sky more like ours than the Samoan, but exquisitely blue and gay.
Little has been done by us, even of going about; Atamo has written many
letters; I have tried to sketch a little from our verandah, in front of
which, on the shore, grows a twisted _purau_, called _fau_ in Samoa.
Through its branches I see the sea and the reef, and the island of
Moorea, in every tint of blue that keeps the light, even in the evening
or in the afterglow, when the sunset lights up in yellow and purple the
sky behind it. And yet there is a reminiscence in my mind of something
not foreign to us, even at this moment, when the haze of light seems
new, and the pale blue sea is spangled with little silver stars, as far
as I can see distinctly.
We have called on the ex-King; and in the evening, at the club, I have
seen him--a handsome, elderly man, somewhat broken and far from sober.
He was playing with a certain
[Illustration: THE DIADEM MOUNTAIN. TAHITI]
Keke, a black Senegambian in the French service, a prince of his own
negro land, who speaks excellent French, and whom I surprised sitting on
the sill of his house one evening (while we were taking a rainy walk).
Keke wore in this retirement a pair of marvellous trousers, of a
brilliant yellow, with red flamboyant pattern--something too fine for
the ordinary out-of-door world. Many of the officials are coloured men
from the French colonies, and so is the governor more or less. Of course
the idea is infinitely respectable and humanitarian, as so many French
things are, but I fear that the Republic is unwise in sending people
whom the native here cannot look up to as he does to a white man.
Of course they are all French and have votes, as the natives here can
have also; but whether it is for the real good of a population
accustomed to dependence I am not so sure. There are many curious
anomalies: our American friends of Samoa speak, with our natural way of
looking at things correctly, of the preposterous way the French have of
backing the Catholic missions and protecting their missionaries, even as
we would. But here I find the Catholic mission dependent upon the gifts
of the faithful, while the Protestant missions are supported by the
French government, as the Protestant clergy would be in France.
The King, upon whom we called and whom we met at the club in affable
mood, surrendered his rights to the French, a few years ago, under long
pressure and with some advice from the missionaries. In exchange he
received an annual income, and retained his honours and certain
privileges. This end I suppose to have been inevitable. His mother, the
famous Queen whose name was known to all sea-going people in that half
of the globe, whose resistance to French pretensions had come,
apparently, for a moment, near bringing France and England into a
quarrel, had lived for many years under French authority, a government
under the name of protectorate. Such, I suppose, must always be the end,
as it has been everywhere that the English have been; as it has been in
Fiji; as it will be to-morrow, probably, when King George of Tonga dies;
as it will be in Hawaii, whenever the whites there determine to use
their power. Nor is the line of the Pomaré, any more than that of the
Hawaiian rulers, so connected with all antiquity as to be typical of
what a Polynesian great chief might be to the people whom he rules. The
Pomarés date only from the time of Cook. They were slowly wresting the
power from the great family of the Tevas, by war and by that still more
powerful means--marriage, which in the South Seas is the only full and
legitimate source of authority.
You know from all that I have told you of Samoa that in Polynesia
descent is the only real absolute aristocracy; there is no ruling except
through blood. Hence the absurdity of the kingships that we have
fostered or established, which in our own minds seemed quite legitimate,
because they embodied the European ideas which belong to our ancestry.
Hence the general discomfort and trouble that we have helped to foster.
Hence also--and far worse--the breaking down, in reality, of all the
bases upon which these old societies rested, the saving of which in part
was the only hope remaining for the gradual education of the brown man
for his keeping to ideas of order different from our own, it is true,
but still involving the same original foundations. Hence the
demoralization, the arbitrary “white laws,” always misunderstood, always
bringing on the vices which they were meant to control; hence the end of
the “brown” man by himself.
The missionaries’ good-will has never gone so far as to try to
understand him as a being with the same rights to methods of thinking as
we claim for ourselves. Part of this sad trouble is of course owing to
the unfortunate moment which gave birth both to greater missionary
enterprise, to a first acquaintance with these races, and to the
disruption of authority in the West. Perhaps, indeed, it might then have
required more comprehension than could be asked of any but the most
exceptional mind to realize that what we call savagery was a mode of
civilization. So must have been the European world when the civilization
of antiquity broke down, and things of price went into the night of
forgetfulness, along with the mistaken beliefs and superstitions that
were joined to them. So here, where, as in all civilizations, religious
views, manners, customs, superstitions were woven about every bit of
life, the exterminating of anything that might seem pagan involved many
habits, and some good ones, which necessarily, from their fundamental
antiquity, had been protected by religious rites. Hence we brought on
idleness and consequent vice; for idleness is as bad for the savage,
whom we innocently suppose to be idle, because we do not understand how
he busies himself, as it is for the worker in modern civilization. It is
not the actual doing that is important, but such occupation as may
determine a habit of useful or harmless attention, which prevents the
suggestion of untried moral experiments.
Even tattooing was a matter which like any society duty involved
attention, considerable self-abnegation and suffering, so as to suit the
supposed requirement of civilization, and a recognition of some manly
standard, however childish it might seem to us, even if it seems as
absurd as some of our society standards might seem to the so-called
savage.
These reflections came from reading a law of missionary civilization
which I find in the records of the year 1822, in the neighbouring island
of Huahine; in which a man or woman who shall mark with tattoo, if not
clearly proved, shall be tried and punished, and made, for the man, to
work on the road, for the woman, to make mats; in a proportion of which
the only exact measure that I find is that for the man it is about the
same as that for bigamy; for the woman just the same as adultery.
With the coming of the missionaries, with the coming of the white men
traders, coincided the first attempts of the ambition of these Pomaré
chieftains. They had already done a good deal for themselves before Cook
left for the last time. He had seen Oberea, of whom I first spoke, a
great person. When he left, her line of family was already on the
decline; war and massacre had weakened it. Pomaré--the Pomaré of that
day--with the support of the guns of the white men, established his
final superiority, and becoming the great chief was solemnly crowned and
oiled by the missionaries, like a new king of Scripture. And this man is
the last of the line. His first great ancestor, Otu, just appears with
the first discoverers’ records of the details of the ceremonials and
etiquette belonging to high chieftainship, which are recorded in the
first missionary accounts.
You may remember the picture painted by Robert Smirke, Royal
Academician, where the high-priest of Tahiti cedes the district in which
we now are to Captain Wilson of the missionary ship the _Duff_, for the
missionaries. In the centre, with a background of palms and peaks, two
young people--Pomaré, the son of Otu, and his queen--are represented on
men’s shoulders. That was the old fashion of Tahiti, the great chief not
being allowed to touch the land with his feet, lest it become his by
touch.
[Illustration: POMARE REX]
And therein also is shown the peculiar political arrangement by which
the young chief took his father’s place when a child, and ruled, in
appearance at least; for there in the picture alongside of the two young
sovereigns, called kings by us, stand father and mother uncovered to the
waist, out of respect to their child’s higher position. Otu and Iddeah,
the dear lady whose notions about infanticide troubled the good
missionaries to such an extent, but whose courtesy was willing to go so
far as to promise that she “never would do it again,” when once she had
done as she pleased. As I understand it, the Pomarés, then, pass away
with the present King, but the great line whose place they took--the
Tevas or their representatives--remain. In that line continues a
descent from that Queen Oberea, whose figure, in another picture that I
have referred to and which I beg you will look up in the volume
containing Wallis’s discovery, is so charmingly made a type for an
imaginary kingdom, like those of the operas and the tapestries of the
eighteenth century, in which nothing is untouched by fancy but the
muskets and grenadier caps and uniforms of Wallis and his men.
I have almost been tempted, as you see, to begin a sort of explanation
of the history of the island; but I think that I can manage later to
give you certain stories which will have the advantage of a more
personal knowledge of acquaintance with what might be called the text,
than these vague reminiscences of the books that I have read and which
are nearer to you than they are to me. Meanwhile, let me tell you that
last evening, at the club, His Majesty, who was in extreme good humour,
singled us out, told us how he liked us, that he liked Americans, who
themselves liked Tahitians, and that the French, who stood all about
him, were all d--d--d----
This he said in English, in a proper reminiscence of nautical terms of
reproach, and added blandly, “But I don’t understand English.”
He has a fine, aristocratic head, and must have been a very handsome
man. He has for an adopted son one of the young gentlemen of the
Branders, who will succeed to an empty honour; though there might
perhaps yet be a part to fill, for the family that represents all that
there has been far back and recently.
Next week we shall go into the country, further along the coast, and
make a visit to the old lady who is the head of the house, grandmother
of these young men, and who is the chiefess representing that great line
of the Teva, alongside of which the Pomaré--the kings through the
foreigner--are new people. Then I may write lengthily, or at least with
some detail, about matters that I only see confusedly, but which must be
curiously full of ancient, archaic history, however lost or eclipsed
to-day.
I notice in my habits, now forming, as I write out my journal for you, a
tendency to dream away into a manner of philosophizing which evidently
has for its first beginning the appreciation of the remote forms of
these savage civilizations; so that as I grow to understand them better,
it is necessary for my individual happiness of thought to be able to
consider the earlier ways of man as not unconnected with the present,
and even to be willing to consider all foundations of society as passing
methods suitable to the moment, and perhaps in the great future to vary
as much from the present as the past is strangely different. The good
missionary, who simply looked upon a good deal of this past as
strangely resembling the antiquities of the Bible, consoled himself, and
persuaded many of his brown brethren in the belief that they, at last,
were the famous lost tribes, who still kept, in many ways and details,
that very peculiar manner of life which the Bible sets out in many
details.
One evening in Samoa, the great Baker, the former missionary and ruler
of Tonga, finding me interested and credulous in regard to many
superstitions which he described, and many facts quite as extraordinary
that he vouched for, unfolded to me, as a regard of confidence, his firm
belief that in these islands of the Pacific, Reuben, Simeon, Levi,
Judah, Zebulon, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh
and Benjamin had found a home. And if a man so worldly wise, such a
producer of money, such a controller of weaker minds, dwelt in this view
with satisfaction, as a relief from the sordid necessities of power, I
think that a mere dreamer like myself can be excused for turning to more
scientific and accurate arrangements of men’s history.
These words come to me more distinctly suggested by the place in which I
am, not because I am thinking of the ancient ways that I touch, but
because I remember how Melville passed from those records of exterior
life and scenery to a dwelling within his mind--a following out of
metaphysical ideas, and a scheming of possible evolution in the future
of man.
Papara, April 7th.
This is a land where to live would have made you happy. Outdoors and in
the water, and in no compulsory dress, would have been your usual way of
passing a great part of the time. I thought of you while I looked this
morning at the children playing in the water of the little river, or in
the surf that rolls into it or along the shore. The girls, little wee
things, swam in the stream near its mouth, where it is safe, and plunged
in and out, and swam under water, their feet and backs showing within
the light and dark of the currents; for the river has been very full,
and the surf and tide have been heavy, so that the children take their
turn with the current. The boys were out in the surf, on the border of
which occasionally the girls played, edging sideways to it, and running
back with swinging arms. The boys and one of the men plunged out with
surf boards, ducking under or riding over the waves that did not suit
them; then turning just before the wave that suited, they were carried
along the shore leaning on their boards. The currents of the sea carried
them past us looking on. Of course they knew all about them, and rough
as the surf was, one of them had got past one of the lines of the
breakers and tried fishing in some bottom both higher and less vexed. It
was a pretty sight, the brown limbs and bodies all red in the sun and
wet, coming out of the blue and white water like red flowers. The girls
were yellower and more golden than the boys--less tanned I suppose.
They have been running about with less clothing, perhaps because the
family is away. They left yesterday, and the daily life is the same.
That is to say that only Tati and his family, including one of the boys
whose holiday is prolonged, are here with us. The old lady (Hinaarii)
the Queen (Marau), Miss Piri (pronounced Pri, short for Piritani,
Britain), Miss Manihinihi, and the two young men all went off together;
the ladies to spend some time at their house in Faaa, the most rustic, I
believe, of their residences.
Pleasant as it is to talk with Tati or do nothing, I miss the ladies.
The old chiefess is admirable, and is willing to talk to us of legends
and stories with the utmost patience. I wish I had a portrait of her.
She has a most characteristic and strong face, upon which at times comes
a very sweet smile; as I saw yesterday, when she was asked which she
preferred, Moorea, the island she comes from, or Tahiti, where her life
has been mostly spent. “Tahiti!” she said decidedly, resuming in the
inflection of her voice all the memories of a long life that has seen
so much, and so much that is different and contradictory.
Queen Marau has been very affable and entertaining, telling us legends
and stories; Miss Piri has been ailing, Miss Chiki, smiling. The women
of the family are all extremely interesting, of various types, but each
one with a charm of her own; from Marau’s strong face, fit for a queen,
to Manihinihi’s bright cordial smile. And such beautiful voices as they
have, and rich intonation! It is a remarkable family and a princely one.
When you read the next few lines you will say that I am prejudiced about
my own people, and anxious to have you admire them also; but I don’t
care, I am glad to have such relations. For, a little before her
departure, the old lady sent word that she wished to see us; and when we
had come to sit beside her, she told us that she had decided to confer
family names upon us, choosing the names which had given the power and
which belonged to the ruling chief. Consequently Atamo takes the name of
Tauraatua, Chief of Amo, meaning Bird Perch of God, and I of Teraaitua,
Captain of that ilk, meaning Prince of the Deep. The old lady said all
this with great sweetness and majesty, and we were greatly touched by
the compliment.