which the Tevas were ruled. It is a small principality only fifteen
fathoms long, and is at present all overrun with trees, orange and guava
mostly. But not so long ago, as Tati remembers, it was as it had been
before the little river changed its course and tore it up--a large
_paipai_ or stone platform, edged with stones carefully set, long ones
above, others with oval ends nicely finished below (turtle heads they
are called). Here lived Tauraatua, sixteen generations back, simply and
frugally, refusing to change his habits with increased power, and
contented with cheap fare. Here on the little platform he drank _kava_,
with the river running by; and once, while lying under its influence
(dead drunk, as it were), came near being surprised by the enemy. Some
little while ago the tall cocoanut tree was still standing, which had
served as a lookout and watch-tower against the enemy; and from which
the watcher had descried the invader just in time to save the chief, and
have him carried away like a precious parcel.
For Tati informs me that here _kava_ was not the mild drink of the
Samoan. It is apparently the same root to the sight, but whereas whole
bowlfuls did not affect us, and whites are accustomed to it in Samoa, a
glassful here, according to Tati, was and is a serious drink. Its charm
lay apparently in the drowsiness and dreaminess it produced; people
spoke of their having been dead under it, or of having seen things, as
with opium or haschich (hemp), and to-day opium is killing the last of
the Marquesans. It could be nothing more than to carry out more
completely what seems to us fierce whites the meaning of these lands--to
exist without effort, in indolence, and waiting for nothing to happen.
The narcotic would condense it all, would bring a year of dreams into a
something that could be felt like a single act, like an occurence that
comes to you, instead of your making it, little by little, so that the
beginning is forgotten at the very middle of the tale.
Such happiness was broken into by noise, and chiefs demanded, for their
hours of _kava_ influence, absolute silence about them; not even a cock
might crow. One can understand the objection to it made here by the
missionaries, which seen from our Samoan experience seemed useless and
cruel. Another example of a momentary or local matter becoming built
into a principle.
We went to see the new duchy; Adams took off an orange as a manner of
investiture. I made an effort to see if I remembered it in a previous
existence, but I did not. Tati remembered it, of course, and the place
near by, all overgrown with great mango trees that have crowded over it,
where his mother lived, and where the stone copings mark the base of the
native house and a platform outside.
Later on Queen Marau told us of the trick by which the great Chief of
Amo won influence, having claimed limits which were contested by
powerful opponents. He left the decision to the great god Oro (whose
temple, you know, was at Tautira), and where he was when a voice called
from some unknown place and “gave him right.”
This is the story exactly as Queen Marau told it.
STORY OF THE LIMITS OF THE TEVAS
When Oro was Chief of Papara, Hurimaavehi of Vaieri was ruling over all
this side (Mataeia). A woman brought about the overthrow of Vaieri and
the headship of Papara.
Oro had a son whose friend, named Panee, was the father of a beautiful
daughter, beautiful enough to attract the notice of all, as indeed it
was the glory of the place to do. Hurimaavehi, having heard of her
beauty, had her carried off at night, by men sent for the purpose. Her
father, in his distress, not knowing what had befallen her, but guessing
at it, sought her up to every limit. One day, while he was inquiring at
the limit near Mataeia, he saw two men coming toward him.
“Where from?” said he.
“From Vaiari.”
“And how is Hurimaavehi, and all around him, and what new beauty have
you in Vaiari?”
The two travellers answered. “If you talk of beauty, there is a wonder
has sprung out there, and she belongs to Hurimaavehi.”
“She must be well treated?” inquired the old man suspiciously.
The two said, “No indeed! She has been passed down to the servants
(_Teutunarii_), then sent to the dogs and the pigs and to the fish of
the sea.”
So the father, like a madman, called out all manners of insult against
Hurimaavehi; and he rushed away (like a madman) to the limits of the
district of Vaiari, and meeting five people--Tite and four others
(_iatoais_[13]) under Hurimaavehi, he killed them (“which,” says the
teller of the story, “was a challenge”), and he gave his insults to be
repeated by the travellers to the Chief Hurimaavehi. So that Hurimaavehi
was incensed, and came right over to Papara with his people.
Now the girl’s father had told his friend, the son of Oro, that
Hurimaavehi would be coming to attack, and why. And the son of Oro said,
“Come with me”; and they went to his father Oro and told him, how
Hurimaavehi was coming to kill them, and why.
Oro said to his son, “Hide under this _marae_” (the _marae_ whose
remains or rather whose place we saw at Amo), and to the other, “Do you
go up this tree” (the famous cocoanut that served as a watch-tower),
“and when he comes back attack and beat him.” He came with his men, they
beat him, and Hurimaavehi ran off, with Oro and all his men after him,
following on and taking possession of every limit, until he came to
Teriitua. Then Teriitua said, “No further; this belongs to me.”
(Hitiaa.)
Then the limit was decided, as the famous story tells.
This is the downfall of Vaiari and the rise of Papara.
And the girl, having served her purpose of introducing the war, steps
out of the story.
The daughter of Panee, whose fame for beauty brought on this trouble to
herself and subsequent enlargement of her people, was, as the story
shows, known as a beauty far from home. Our brown ancestors admire
beauty no less than other people; and looked upon it, as we do in many
cases, as a good instrument, besides the credit to the family and the
favour that goes with the possession of any social power. But you must
always remember that our brown forefathers were eminently socialistic,
or rather communistic, as their relatives all over the Pacific are
still. Never forget this for a moment, whenever you think of them or
read about them or any habits of theirs. We have developed from that
point to a degree of individualism that can with difficulty understand
what communism means. So that we are easily deluded and over-pleased, or
horrified, when like views and systems are proposed in the western world
for our descendants.
Now then, the family, in the case of a lovely brown maiden, would not
only be her own family (as we call it directly), but spread further and
back, in all sorts of relatives, and from that spread out to the village
and the tribe; so that her beauty would be a credit to the whole place.
Hence she would become a show-piece; and her immediate parents, with the
good-will of the community, would guard her beauty, would feed her well
and daintily, to make her smooth and fat; would keep her out of the sun
that might darken her skin, fairer than that of others, if still brown
to our snow-blinded eyes.
She would then occasionally be seen; and it was considered a proper and
justifiable extravagance for even a lesser person to have a _paipai_, or
stone exterior foundation to his house, upon which his fair child could
be seen. And at certain intervals she would take her bath in public with
others, and her physical charms be fairly judged. Nor must we think that
all this is brutal--no more than with us to-day.
The girl was also judged by her manners, her courtesy and her modesty;
for she thought no more of showing her legs than do our young women of
showing their necks and bosoms and backs; and she had the same notion
that they have that there are strict limits--even though hers might not
be ours. You will remember, perhaps, in early accounts, the pretty
description of women playing on the shore or in the water, at games of
ball, as did Nausicaa in the days of Ulysses.
Many times have I heard allusions to the habit of keeping in one house a
number of the girls together, beauties of the place. And if I remember
right, it was to such a residence that the celebrated Turi contrived to
pass, notwithstanding the difficulties put in his way--difficulties all
the more interesting as mere delays; for the young women had heard of
his exploits and expected as much of him. But then, if I remember also,
he lived in those days when people, especially the heroes of tales,
could be gifted with the power of changing their forms at will. And who
could have guessed in the decrepit or leprous old man, pitied for his
sorrows by the tender women, the gay Lothario heard of through all
islands. Still less could he be discovered in the fish that was caught
by the old women who supplied the women’s house with food. He it was who
dug the great tunnel through the mountain, in order to approach his love
without detection--her who was Ahupu Vahine of Taiarapu, of whom
Stevenson, in the notes of his Ballads, says that he has not yet been
able to find out who she was. Why! there is a whole “Chronique
Scandaleuse” of that period of earliest history.
Oro then belonged to the younger Vaiari, and seized the power of the
older branch.
Let us take up the story as he pursues his enemy into the territory of
Teriitua, Chief of Hitiaa, who checked his advance, disputing, most
naturally, the limits that were being conquered. So that they left the
decision to the Gods, as I understand, upon Oro’s proposal.[14]
Upon a day appointed they met for the invocation; but Oro had determined
to help himself that he might be helped; as many pious men have done and
will do again. A friend of his, whom tradition names Aia, was concealed
carefully in a hole or hollow place, near the disputed boundary.
Teriitua’s call upon his gods, being met only by the silence of the
woods, Oro called out, pointing out, I suppose, what he wished, “Is it
here?” And his friend answered, “It is here.”
The cause of Oro won; a little, perhaps, because according to all
tradition, he was a doughty warrior who intended to have his way.
We now belong to both the “Inner” and “Outer” Teva: Te Teva Iuta and Te
Teva Itai, the whole eight, whose clans reached all down this side of
the island, and into the next; for we have been adopted twice, both at
Tautira, and here--into the two divisions.
The place has now for us an increased charm; a still more subtle
influence envelops me when I think that this is the home of Amo and
Oberea, who first met Wallis and Cook; and as I look from the violet
beds of one of the princesses to the solemn hills of dark green crowned
with cloud, I wonder if somewhere there may be the hidden tomb of
Oberea, now my ancestress, the quiet familiar surroundings became solemn
with this great reminder of the mountains and the ocean that faces them.
I listen now, with a curiously new interest, to the explanations of the
meanings of landmarks and to their names full of associations for the
Teva line. We have it explained to us that each chief had a _marae_, a
temple associated with the sacredness of his name; and many rules
concerning its foundation; and the places within it reserved to chiefs
through heredity and heredity alone.
Each chief had also a _moua_ or mountain; an _Otu_ or cape or point of
land; a Tahua or gathering-place, from which he ruled. Every point, says
the island proverb, has a chief.
For the Teva the oldest _marae_ was Farepua in Vaiari, from which, by
taking a stone from it, Manutunu, the husband of the fair Hototu, mother
of the first Teva, founded the _marae_ of Punaauia for his son. (He
called it so because of his uncle, who dead was rolled up like a
fish--_iia_.)
From these two _maraes_, many _maraes_ along the coast, and in Moorea
took their origin and proved the family descent. The Moua of Papara was
Tamaiti; its Outu was Monomano; its Tahua, Poreho; its _marae_, Tooarai.
Our adopted mother’s name is Teriitere Itooarai, which you will remember
is the name of the son of Oberea and Amo.
Taputuarai in the small district of Amo was the original _marae_ of
Papara, and from that Amo took the stones to build the _marae_ of
Tooarai on the point of Mahaiatea.
A poem traditional in the family gives expression to the value of these
points--to the attachment to and desire to be near them again, in the
mind of an exile, one of the Papara family. The family seems to have
been represented by the Aromaiterai and the Teriterai, one of whom ruled
in the absence of the other.
How far back this was composed, nor exactly how it happened that one
brother, Aromaiterai, was banished, I do not know. One or other branch
seems to have been always jealous of the other; but in this case one
Aromaiterai was banished and forbidden to make himself known. He was
sent into the peninsula to Mataoa, from which place he could see across
the water the land of Papara and its hills and cape. The poem which he
composed, and which is dear to the Tevas, revealed his identity:
LAMENT OF AROMAITERAI
From Mataoa I took to my own land Tianina, my mount Tearatapu, my valley
Temaite, my “drove of pigs” on the Nioarahi.[15]
The dews have fallen on the mountain and they have spread my
cloak.[16]Rains, clear away, that I may look at my home! _Aue! Aue!_ the
wall of my dear land! The two thrones of Mataoa[17] open their arms to
me Temarii (or Amo).
No one will ever know how my heart yearns for my mount of Tamaiti.[18]
Could anything be finer than the rallying cry of the Tevas:
“Teva the wind and the rain!”
For a line running back to origins confused with the brute forces of the
world; originating with divine creatures half animal--with the princes
of double bodies, half fish, half man, what more poetic reminder of the
intimacy with parental nature.
I sometimes think of our chiefess as being able to feel with Phaedra,
that the encompassing world is full of her ancestry.[19]
And here the heroic line brought down through ages to the present day,
brings back to my mind the tradition that the lines of the fabulous
Homeric heroes were carried into the new Christian world as far as the
days of St. Jerome. Nor was the suggestion of the thought of Phaedra,
claiming kinship with the universe, so far from the echo of the name of
Queen Marau, whose further name is Taaroa, the great first god whose
relation to the world is given in the verses:
“He was; Taaroa was his name.
He rested in the void.
No land, no sky,
No sea, no man,
And he alone existing took the shape of the universe.
“The pivots are Taaroa:
The rocks,
The smallest sands are Taaroa.
Thus he called himself.
“Taaroa is the light,
He is the germ.
He is the base,
The strong who created the world:
The great and holy world
The shell of Taaroa.
He moves it, he makes harmony.”
The records of the past are all in words handed down; and the absence of
any outer form to antiquity makes me seek it all the more in the nature
which surrounds me, in the imaginary presence of the people who lived
within it.
One great disappointment awaited me: I had hoped to find some form in
the great _marae_ or temple built by Oberea, in her pride of place,
which Cook speaks of as the principal building of the island, and
describes as an imposing monument. We found it only a vast mass of loose
coral stones, treacherous to the foot and retaining but a vague and
unimpressive outline. Still it was upon the shore, by the beautiful sea,
and the funereal _aito_ or ironwood trees sacred to temples still grew
upon it. Stewart, the planter who for a term of years was able to keep
up a great estate, at the head of a company behind him, planned on a
grand scale, and who then failed, was allowed to use the stones of the
_marae_ as a quarry for his roads and walls. Even before that time
neglect and the destruction brought about by the enmities to the old
paganism must have changed its shape and destroyed its outline. To-day
it is impossible to recognize the form described by Cook. It was made,
he says, of a series of steps rising in pyramid way, to a top layer
ridged like a roof; and its long sides, which hollowed in slightly, were
some two hundred and thirty feet in length. Now it is a sad ruin,
shapeless and barbarous.
As I left it I remembered that Moerenhout, visiting here some sixty
years ago, says that few natives except the great Chief Tati saw without
superstitious fear the cutting down of the majestic trees which had
witnessed for centuries the ceremonies of the forbidden worship, and had
survived the decadence of the temples which they adorned. When he adds,
the great trees had been cut down which shaded the _marae_ further
inland, specially sacred to the chiefs of Papara, which had been that of
Tati himself and of his children, a rumour spread about the country that
the water of the little river, the river that ran through our ancestral
domain of Amo, had reddened, and blood had trickled from the trunks of
the prostrate trees.
Last month, at Tautira, the absence of all vestiges of the great _marae_
of the God Oro, was more impressive than the formless mass of stone
associated with the name of Oberea. It is always a disappointment to
notice how little this race has turned to the arts of form. I mean this
race as I have seen it, in Samoa and in Tahiti. Elsewhere it may have
done something, but here the form of music only has been reached--the
earliest mode of expression. And though the Polynesian still shows good
taste in colour and choice in arrangement, he seems to have taken but
the very first steps in the adornment of surfaces or the arrangement of
masses. It is possible that there is something strenuous and needing
sustained effort in the plastic arts which these sensuous races, urged
by no contrarieties to find some escape out of the present, were too
indolent and contented to achieve.
* * * * *
I have made many notes that I shall string together as I best can; but I
am ineffably lazy, and this is the place for me in the house of Tati. I
sleep in the rooms where his great-uncle Tati, the great Chief, died: he
who ruled here at the beginning of the new dispensation, who was a child
in the days of the first discoverers, and who lived well into the
fifties. He was saved from the massacre of the Papara family when a
child, through some recognition of the behaviour of Manea the high
priest when he saved the pride of Tetuanui in her contest with the pride
of Oberea.
So that the revenge of Tetuanui spared this boy, who became an important
man representing the great Teva house. But that was only after the son
of Amo and Oberea had died by accident, leaving to the Pomaré Chief no
equal rival; and after Tati’s brother Opufara had died in battle bravely
defending the Pagan side against the Pomaré, helped by the rifles of the
Christians.
Tati had apparently refused to avail himself of the offer of Pomaré,
before his death, to appoint him regent, nor did he consent to our
chiefess being made queen: for he seems in many ways to have asked for
the best interests of his nation, and always with higher motives. There
are interesting descriptions of his influence and of his dramatic
eloquence, which Moerenhout compares to the action of Talma, the
greatest of French actors. I read about him in Moerenhout’s volumes; I
make sketches during the day, and talk to the Tati of this moment,
enjoying the sound of his voice and his laugh, and the freedom of the
children, and the movement of the servants.
There is one who is always hard at work doing everything, who is really
Marau’s, a girl of good family, a sort of relation of mine now, and who
is called Pupuri (if I catch it right), “Blonde”; and she is blond; her
hair is absolutely gold, and when she has her back turned and her hair
down you would suppose some foreign visitor from northernmost Europe.
She is fair, a little red, like an Irish woman, with whitish lashes, and
eyes that do not stand the light well.
Madame sits at one end of the piazza; the ladies flit in and out of
their rooms and sometimes talk to us.
Next to our house, where some women have beds and others mats for
sleeping, there are other houses for cooking, and for
[Illustration: YOUNG TAHITIAN GIRL]
servants who are in reality dependents. Sometimes members of the family
eat there, in native fashion, of native cooking, instead of coming to
the table at which we sit on one end of the verandah. Near by is a
little garden growing on what was once the enclosure of a house; and the
little river runs rapidly a few yards off, hidden in part by trees; at
which women go down to wash, and which men and boys cross to bathe, and
in which splash the horses when they are washed in the morning. It is
all delightful and rustic.
We are arranging with Tati about going to Moorea, the island opposite
Tahiti, where we can be in the mountains that come right down to the
water.
As the island makes a perfect triangle, the clustering together of its
mountain peaks, seen from Papeete, used to look like some background of
early Venetian pictures, inspired by the Dolomites that Titian knew when
a boy. Tati has a plantation and house there to which we shall go; and
the family are strong in the island, having antique rights and
inheritances in different districts.
We shall stay only a few days here, and then sail or row across to the
fantastic island that has made a distance of blue and gold to our days
in Papeete, and behind which the sunsets used to sink in every variety
of indescribable splendour or delicacy.
Papeete, May 22, 1891.
We did not leave by the steamer; by some curious chance unknown before,
it was filled with passengers. It is true that it does not take a large
number to fill it. We feared discomfort, and hurrying back from Moorea,
we nevertheless lazily let it get away from the point on the coast to
which it had gone for its cargo of oranges. Whether or no Tauraatua had
already presented to his mind the alternative that opened to us I do not
know, but we turned at once to a longer sea trip and a less probable
one: to taking a little schooner that had just come from Raiatea, and
getting its captain to carry us to Fiji. Thus we should also now be able
to call at the leeward islands, Raiatea, Huahine, and Bora Bora, and
leave, as it were, our cards. For it seems sad enough to give up the
Marquesas; especially as every day we hear something in detail about
them. Captain Hart tells us too that there is one _Typee_ perhaps still
alive; and gives me something of the story of a savage whose photograph
is on the bookcase of his office--a gentleman whom Stevenson met, and a
lover of human flesh. Indeed, the story goes, that once upon a time he
had had thoughts of dining upon the captain--after a previous murder, of
course. Now, to know a cannibal and perhaps to become his brother--for
that would be a natural result of his acquaintance, as our relationship
is just now in
[Illustration: PEAK OF MAUA ROA, ISLAND OF MOOREA, SOCIETY ISLANDS,
TAHITI]
demand through these latitudes--is an awful temptation. Were there
anything more to it--were there anything said that might lead one to
believe that he or any other such might really become known and
understood--perhaps might one think that the two weeks’ sail against the
wind would not be too much sea to travel over for a result. But I can
make out no such probability from any cross-questioning that I have been
able to conduct; and the portrait of the _indigène_ in question suggests
a heavy, sullen brutality not at all romantic. I should not care to use
him as a model for any picture of _Typee_, where the eating of man was
apparently something like a duty or a necessity, not a mere _gourmet_
liking for a certain richness of taste. No; we need, after all, more
inducement than that one.
The portrait of the Queen is more of an invitation: there is something
in her face and the impression we receive from “Prince” Stanislas
Moanatini that warrants that we shall be well treated.