The copra market—Dangerous passage to shore at Kaukura—Our boat
overturns in the pass—I narrowly escape death—Josephite
Missionaries—The deadly nohu—The himene at night.
WORD we got at Anaa of a few tons of copra at Kaukura sent us hurrying
there. The wind was against us, and we drew long sides of a triangle
before we reached that atoll, which was, as our starting-point, at the
base of the isosceles. Kaukura was a divergence from our intended
course, but these schooners were like birds of the air, which must take
their sustenance as fortune wills. Copra was scarce, and competition in
buying, fierce. The natives received about four cents a pound, but as
payment was usually in goods, the Tahiti traders, who shipped copra to
America and Europe, profited heavily. There were grades in copra, owing
to the carelessness of the natives in drying it. Green or poorly-dried
nuts shrank, and the nuts parched in kilns developed more undesirable
creosote than sun-dried. All copra was sold by weight and quality, and
it continually lessened in weight by evaporation of oil. Time was the
essence of a good bargain. The sooner to the presses of the mainland,
the greater the return. Crude mills in the Paumotus or Tahiti crushed
out the oil formerly, and it was sealed in bamboo lengths, and these
exported. These tubes, air-tight, were common mediums of exchange, as
wampum among Indians, or gold-dust in Alaska. Modern processes extracted
double the oil of the old presses, and the eight-foot sections of the
long grass were almost obsolete for cocoanut-oil, and used mostly for
sauces sold in the Papeete market-place.
“Trade ain’t what it was,” said McHenry. “There’s more traders than
natives, almost. I remember when they were so crazy to exchange our
stuff for their produce, we’d have the trade-room crowded all day, an’
had to keep guns handy to chase the mob away, to add up the bloody
figures. Now every atoll has its store, and the trader has to pat his
copra-makers an’ divers on the back, instead o’ kickin’ them the way we
used to. The damn Frogs treat these Kanakas like they were white people,
an’ have spoiled our game. We can’t trade in the Paumotus unless the
schooner has a French registry and a French captain,—Lyin’ Bill is a
Frog citizen for not stealin’ a vessel he had a chance to,—an’ when you
leave the Papeete you’ve got to register every last drop o’ booze you’ve
got aboard. It’s supposed to be only for us on the schooner, and for the
whites in the Paumotus, or a few chieves who have permits, for bein’
Froggy. But it’s the rotten missionaries who hurt us, really. We could
smuggle it in, but they tell on us.”
We had not caught a fish from the schooner, despite having a tackle
rigged most of the days. I had fixed a bamboo rod, about eighteen feet
long and very strong, on the rail of the waist of the vessel, and from
it let trail a hundred feet or so of tough line. The hook was the most
perfect for the purpose ever made by man. It was cut out of the
mother-of-pearl lining of the Paumotuan pearl-oyster shell. It was about
six inches long, and three quarters wide, shaped rudely like a
flying-fish, and attached to it on the concave side was a barb of bone
about an inch and a half in length, fastened with _purau_ fiber, and a
few hog’s bristles inserted. The line was roved through the hole where
the barb was fastened, and, being braided along the inner side of the
pearl shank, was tied again at the top, forming a chord to the arch.
Unbaited, the hook, by the pull of the schooner, skipped along the
surface of the sea like a flying-fish. I had made a telltale of a piece
of stick, and while McHenry and I talked and Jean Moet slept it snapped
before my eyes. To seize the rod and hold on was the act of a second. I
let out the entire five hundred feet of line, before the fish tired, and
then it took four of us to drag him to the deck. He was a _roroa_, a
kind of barracuda, about ten feet long, and weighing a couple of hundred
pounds.
The fish made a welcome change in our diet and was enough for all,
including a number of Paumotuans who were returning to Takaroa for the
opening of the diving season. Chocolat nibbled a head, but preferred the
remnants of a can of beef. He improved daily in his tricks and in his
agility in avoiding being hurtled into the water by the roll or pitch of
the schooner. He had an almost incredible instinct or acquired knowledge
of the motion of the _Marara_, and when I felt sure we had lost him—that
he would fall overboard in another instant—he would leap to the deck and
frolic about the wheel. The spokes of it were another constant threat to
his health, for one blow when they spun fast might kill him; but he was
reserved for a more horrid fate.
Kaukura rose from the sea at dawn, after a night of wearing and tacking.
It was an atoll, irregularly annular in shape, twenty-six miles long and
ten wide, wooded in patches, and with vast stretches where only the
dazzling coral shone. It, too, had been spoiled in prosperity by an
inimical wind and tide, and the cocoa-palms had been annihilated that
had once grown upon all its many component islets. The cocoanut-tree
lives more than eighty years, and does not fruit until seven years old,
so that the loss of thousands of these life-giving palms was a fearful
blow. Each tree bore a hundred nuts annually, and that crop was worth to
the owner for copra nearly a dollar, besides being much of his food.
Landmarks we gradually discerned; a village, two churches, and a row of
houses, and then the French tricolor on a pole. The surf broke with a
fierce roaring on the reef, and when McHenry and I left the schooner,
Moet stayed aboard, as the wind was ominous. There was no pass into the
lagoon at this village, and even the pit in the barrier-reef had been
made by French engineers. They had blown up the madrepore rock, and made
a gateway for small boats.
The schooner did not take our painter, for the breeze was too stiff for
the venture, and so we had a half-mile to row. When we neared the reef
and entered the pit, I felt that it was touch-and-go, for we rose and
tottered on the huge swells, and dived into their hollows, with a
prophetic certainty of capsizing. I could hardly keep on the box under
me, and swayed forebodingly. Then suddenly the steering oar caught under
a bank of coral. I barely heard the cry of Piri a Tuahine, “_E era!_
There she goes!” when the boat rose on its stern with a twisting motion,
as if a whale had struck it with its fluke, and turned turtle. I was
slighted into the water at its topmost teeter, falling yards away from
it, and in the air I seemed to see the Tahitians leaping for safety from
its crushing thwarts and the cargo.
McHenry’s “What the bloody——!” as we both somersaulted, was in my ears
as I was plunged beneath the surface.
With the fear of encountering the boat, the dark bulk of which I saw
dimly above me, I swam hard under the water a dozen strokes, and rose to
find myself beneath the reef, which grew in broken ledges. When my head
in stunning contact with the rock knelled a warning to my brain, I
opened my eyes. There was only blackness. I dived again, a strange
terror chilling me, but when I came up, I was still penned from air in
abysmal darkness.
Now fear struck me weak. I realized my extraordinary peril, a peril
glimpsed in nightmares. I had penetrated fifteen or twenty feet under
the ledge, and I had no sense of direction of the edge of the coral. My
distance from it was considerable; I knew by the invisible gloom. With a
fleeting recollection of camera films in my shirt pocket, came the
choking dread of suffocation, and death in this labyrinth.
I supposed I invoked God and his Son to save me. Probably in my agony I
promised big things to them and humanity if I survived. I kept my eyes
open and struck out. After swimming a few yards I felt the coral
shelving inwardly. I realized that I had gone farther from my only goal
of life. I felt the end was close, but still in desperation moved my
limbs vigorously.
Then I felt the water lashing about me. Something seized my arm. Shark
stories leaped from my memory’s cold storage to my very soul. My blood
was an icy stream from head to toes. Singular to relate, I was aware of
a profound regret for my murders of many sharks—who, after all, I
reasoned with an atavistic impulse of propitiation, were but working out
the wise plan of the Creator. But the animal that grasped my arm did not
bite. It held me firmly, and dragged me out from that murky hell, until
in a few seconds the light, God’s eldest and loveliest daughter,
appeared faintly, and then, bright as lightning, and all of a sudden, I
was in the center of the sun, my mouth open at last, my chest heaving,
my heart pumping madly, and my head bursting with pain. I was in the
arms of Piri a Tuahine, who, as all the other Tahitians, had swum under
the reef in search of me.
In the two or three minutes—or that half-hour—during which I had been
breathless, the sailors had recaptured the boat and were righting it,
the oars still fastened to the gunwales. I was glad to be hauled into
the empty boat, along with McHenry, who was sputtering and cursing.
“Gorbli-me!” he said, as he spat out salt water, “you made a bloody fool
o’ yerself doin’ that! Why didn’t ye look how I handled meself? But I
lost a half-pound of tobacco by that christenin’.”
I was laid down on the cargoless seats, and the men rowed through the
moat, smiling at me with a worthy sense of superiority, while McHenry
dug the soaked tobacco out of his trousers pocket.
“Ye can always trust the Kanaka to get ye out o’ the water if ye
capsize,” said he, artfully. “We’ve taught him to think o’ the white man
first. He damn well knows where he’d get off, otherwise.”
A hundred feet farther, we came to a spit of rocks, which stopped
progress. A swarm of naked children were playing about it. Assisted by
the Tahitians I was lifted to my feet, and, with McHenry, continued to
the sand.
There I took stock of my physical self. I was battered and bruised, but
no bones were broken. My shins were scraped and my entire body bleeding
as if a sharp steel comb had raked me. My head was bloody, but my skull
without a hole in it, or even marked depression, except my usual one
where phrenologists locate the bump of reverence. I was sick at my
stomach, and my legs bent under me. I knew that I would be as well as
ever soon, unless poisoned, but would bear the marks of the coral. All
these white men who journeyed about the Paumotus bore indelible scars of
coral wound.
[Illustration:
The road from the beach
]
[Illustration:
An American Josephite missionary and his wife, and their church
]
My friend, the poet, Rupert Brooke, had been made very ill by coral
poisoning. He wrote from the Tiare Hotel in Papeete: “I’ve got some
beastly coral-poisoning into my legs, and a local microbe on top of
that, and made the places worse by neglecting them, and sea-bathing all
day, which turns out to be the worst possible thing. I was in the
country, at Mataiea, when it came on bad, and tried native remedies,
which took all the skin off, and produced such a ghastly appearance that
I hurried into town. I’ve got over it now and feel spry.” His nickname,
_Pupure_, meant leprous, as well as fair, and was a joking _double
entendre_ by the natives.
I was later, in the Marquesas, to see a man die of such poison received
in the Paumotus. But, in Kaukura, I had to make the best of it, and
after a short rest began to see the sights. There was a crowd of people
about, men and women, and still more children, all lighter than the
Paumotuans in complexion and stouter in body. They were dressed up. The
men were in denim trousers and shirts, and some with the stiff white
atrocities suffered by urbanites in America and Europe. The women wore
the conventional night-gowns that Christian propriety of the early
nineteenth century had pulled over their heads. They were not the
spacious _holokus_ of Hawaii. These single garments fitted the portly
women on the beach as the skin of a banana its pulpy body—and between me
and the sun hid nothing of their roly-poly forms. I recognized the _ahu
vahine_ of Tahiti.
“_Ia ora na i te Atua!_” the people greeted me, with winning smiles.
“God be with you!” was its meaning, and their accent confirmed their
clothing. They were Tahitians. I spoke to them, and they commiserated my
sad appearance, and pointed out a tall young white man who came striding
down the beach, his mouth pursed in an anxious question as he saw me.
“Got any medicine on that hay wagon?” he asked. “We’ve got a bunch of
dysentery here.”
I knew at once by his voice issuing through his nostrils instead of his
mouth, and by the sharp cut of his jib, that he was my countryman, and
from the Middle West. He had the self-satisfied air of a Kansan.
“The trade-room of the _Marara_ is full of medical discoveries, perunas,
Jamaica ginger, celery compounds, and other hot stuff,” I replied, “but
what they’ll cure I don’t know. We have divers patent poisons known to
prohibition.”
“That’s all rotten booze. My people don’t use the devilish stuff,” he
commented, caustically. He continued on, wading to the boat, and, after
a parley, proceeding with it to the schooner.
McHenry had half determined to plant himself, at least temporarily, in
Kaukura, and left me to spy on the store of a Chinese, who had brought a
stock of goods from Papeete. I walked toward an enormous thatched roof,
under which, on the coral strand, were nearly a thousand persons. The
pungent smoke from a hundred small fires of cocoanut husks gave an
agreeable tang to the air; the lumps of coral between which they were
kindled were red with the heat, the odors rose from bubbling pots. All
the small equipment of Tahitian travelers was strewn about. Upon
mattresses and mats in the shed, the sides of which were built up
several feet to prevent the intrusion of pigs and dogs, lay old people
and children, who had not finished their slumbers. Stands for the sale
of fruits, ice, confections, soda-water, sauces, and other ministrants
to hunger and habit bespoke the acquired tastes of the Tahitians; but
most of the people were of Kaukura and other atolls.
Kaukura alone had nearly a thousand inhabitants. Its lagoons were the
richest in pearl of all the group. Being one of the nearest of the
Paumotus to Tahiti, it had been much affected by the proselytizing and
commercializing spirits of that island—spirits often at variance but now
and again joined, as on a greater scale trust magnates capitalize and
direct missions and religious institutions with the left hand, while
their right takes toll of life-killing mill and mine.
The village was as attractive as a settlement could be in these
benighted islands, the houses stretching along one or two roads, some in
gala color. A small, sprightly white man was donning shirt and trousers
on the veranda of the best residence at the end of the street. He was
about forty years old, with a curiously keen face, a quick movement, and
an eye like an electric light through a keyhole.
“Hello,” he said, briskly, “by golly, you’re not an American, are you?
I’m getting my pants on a little late. We were up all hours last night,
but I flatter myself God was glad of it. Kidd’s my name; Johnny Kidd,
they call me in Lamoni. I’m glad to meet you, Mr. ——?”
“O’Brien, Frederick O’Brien, of almost anywhere, except Lamoni,” I
replied, laughingly, his good-natured enthusiasm being infectious.
He looked at me, inquiringly.
“Not in my line, are you?” he asked, with an appraising survey of me.
My head bleeding and aching, my body quivering with the biting pain of
its abraded surface, I still surrendered to the irony of the question. I
guessed that he was a clergyman from his possessive attitude toward God,
but he was so simple and natural in manner, with so little of a clerical
tone or gesture, that I would have thought him a street-faker or
professional gambler had I had no clue to his identity. I remembered,
too, the oft-quoted: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
“I’m merely a beachcomber,” I assured him. “I take a few notes now and
then.”
“Oh, you’re not a sky-pilot,” he went on, in comic relief. “You never
can tell. Those four-flushing Mormons have been bringing a whole gang of
young elders from Utah to Tahiti to beat us out. I’m an elder myself of
the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They
usually call us the Josephites. In these islands we are Konito or
Tonito. We’ve been having a grand annual meeting here. Over sixty from
Tahiti, and altogether a thousand and seventy members. They’ve been
gathering from most of the Paumotus for weeks, coming with the wind, but
we’re about over now.”
“But I thought the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was the
Mormons,” said I, puzzled.
“Mormon!” There was such vigor in his explosive catching up of my query
that I may well be pardoned if I thought he placed the common name for
Sheol after that of the sect. But it stands to reason that he did not.
His whole training would stop such a word ere it escaped him.
“Mormon! I should say not! Those grafters and polygamists are not our
kind. They stole our name. We were the same until Brigham Young split
off and led his crowd to Utah. Our headquarters is at Lamoni, Iowa, but
I. N. Imbel, who’s gone to the schooner, my partner, and I are the
missionaries in these islands. We’re properly authorized ministers who
make this our regular and whole business. My pal and I live in Papeete,
but run through the Paumotus when there’s anything doing.”
The reverend fellow had no airs about him.
“Sit down and take off your clothes and dry them, and I’ll rub your cuts
with some liniment,” he invited. “They’ll dry in the sun, and here’s a
_pareu_ to slip over you. I’d like to tell you more about our work, so’s
you won’t mix us up with those Mormons. They’re a tough bunch. My
father’s the head of our mission in England, and I’m in charge of these
islands. Every year we have a business meeting. That’s what this is; not
a revival. We don’t believe in that emotion game. We call it a
‘reasonable service.’ We take up a collection, of course. We invite the
natives to investigate our claims. We have the custom to get converts by
debating with the Mormons, but after we had accepted a challenge to meet
them in Papeete the French governor stopped the show, because a French
law forbade such meetings. They used to have riots in France, it seems.
The Mormons teach polygamy and other abominations. They’ll tell you they
don’t, but they do. You ask any Mormon native if he believes in plural
wives, and he’ll say yes, that the elders from America teach that it’s
right. Those Mormons ran away from here once, when the French government
scared them, and we got in and had most of the natives in the Paumotus
that the Catholics hadn’t kept. Then when the Mormons saw there was no
danger, they came back here from Salt Lake. Oh, they’re a bad outfit.
We’re regularly ordained ministers, not farmers off on a lark. This
temple here cost a thousand dollars, without the labor. That was all
voluntary. Wait a minute!”
He dashed into a room, and returned with a pamphlet which purported to
be the findings of the Court of Lake County, Ohio, and he read from it a
decree that the Utah Mormons were a fragment and split off from the real
simon-pure religion established by Joseph Smith in New York. I wished
that Stevenson had been there to hear him, for I remembered his page of
bewilderment at the enigma of the “_Kanitu_” and _Mormoni_ in the
Paumotus, and how he made comparisons of the Holy Willies of Scotland,
and a New Guinea god named Kanitu. His uninquiring mind had not solved
the problem.
“We beat those wolves in sheep’s clothing in this court,” said Elder
Kidd, animatedly. “We’re the real church, and the Brighamites are a
hollow sham.”
Mr. Kidd engaged my interest, true or pseudo-disciple of Joseph Smith.
He was so human, so guileful, and had such an engaging smile and wink.
He seemed to feel that he was in a soul-saving business thoroughly
respectable, yet needing to be explained and defended to the Gentile.
His competitors’ incompetency he deemed worthy of emphasis.
“Not long ago,” he said, “in certain of these Paumotus there had been a
good deal of backsliding from our church. Nobody had stirred them up,
and with these people you have got to keep their souls awake all the
time or they’ll go to sleep, or, worse, get into the control of those
Mormons. They’ll steal a convert like you’d peel a banana, and that’s
what I call the limit of a dirty trick. The Mormons thought they had a
puddin’ in these backsliders to pull them over to their side. I heard
about it, and without a word to any one I took a run through the group.
I went through that crowd of backsliders with a spiritual club, and I
not only redeemed the old Josephites, but I baptized seventy-five others
before you could run a launch from here to Anaa. It was like stealin’
persimmons from a blind farmer whose dog is chained. I was talkin’ to
the head Mormon in Papeete shortly afterward, and he asked me what we
were doin’. I counted off the seventy-five new ones, and he had to
acknowledge his church hadn’t made a count in a long time. I offered to
bet him anything he was beat to a finish, but he quit cold.”
The Reverend Mr. Kidd excused himself to go to the meeting-house and get
his breakfast with some of his deacons. McHenry had returned from his
tour of espionage. He was cast down at the poor chance for business.
“There’s nothing doin’,” he said. “Twenty years ago I was here with a
schooner o’ booze to a Konito meetin’ like this. There was kegs o’ rum
with bloody tops knocked in right in the road. An’ wimmin’! You’d a-gone
nuts tryin’ to choose. This is what religi’n does to business. A couple
o’ bleedin’ chinks sellin’ a few bottles o’ smell water, an’ a lot o’
Tahitians with fruit an’ picnic stuff. A thousand Kanakas in one bunch
an’ not one drunk. By cripes, the mishes have ruined the trade. The
American Government ought to interfere. You and me had better skin out
to west’ard where there ain’t so many bloody preachers, an’ you can
handle the Kanaka the way you want. To-night this mob’ll be in that
meetin’-house singin’ their heads off, instead o’ buyin’ rum and dancin’
like they used to. Them two sky-pilots has got all the francs. Even the
Chinks hasn’t made a turn. Kopcke of Papeete is here an’ ain’t made a
sou. He’s goin’-a go to leeward.”
“McHenry,” I interrogated, “do you never consider the other fellow?
Aren’t these poor people better off chanting hymns and praying than
getting drunk and dancing the hula, just to make you money.”
He regarded me with contemptuous malice.
“I knew after all you were a bloody missionary,” he said, acridly. “I
been on to you. You’ll be in that straw shed to-night singin’ ‘Come to
Jesus.’ You’d better look out after your cuts! You’ll be sore’n a boil
to-morrow when they get stiff. Let’s go back to the schooner and get
drunk!”
I was tempted to return to the _Marara_ to ease my misery, and only the
promise of Elder Kidd to assuage it with liniment, and an ardent desire
to attend the Josephite services that night, detained me in the heat of
the atoll. McHenry persisting in his decision to cool his coppers in
rum, and I to see everything of Kaukura, I joined with a friendly native
for a stroll. The Josephite temple was a small coral edifice, washed
white with coral lime. An old and uncared-for Catholic church was
near-by. Most of the residences were thatched huts, or shacks made of
pieces of boxes and tin and corrugated iron, with a few formal wooden
cottages, painted red, white, and blue. They were very poor, these
Kaukurans, from our point of view, earning barely enough to sustain them
in strength, and with few comforts in their huts, except the universal
sewing-machine. Everywhere that was the first ambition of the
uncivilized woman roused to modern vanities, as of the poor woman in all
countries.
Walking along the beach I narrowly escaped a more serious accident than
the disaster of the reef, for only the warning of my companion stayed me
from treading upon a _nohu_, the deadliest underfoot danger of the
Paumotus. It was a fish peculiarly hateful to humans, yet gifted by
nature with both defensive disguise and offensive weapons, a remnant of
the fierce struggle for survival in which so many forms of life had
disappeared or altered in changing environment. The _nohu_ lay on the
coral strand where the tide lapped it, looking the twin of a battered,
mossy rock, so deceiving that one must have the sight of the aborigine
to avoid stepping upon it, if in one’s way. Put a foot on it, and before
one could move, the _nohu_ raised the bony spines of its dorsal fin and
pierced one’s flesh as would a row of hatpins; not only pierced, but
simultaneously injected through its spines a virulent poison that lay at
the base of a malevolent gland. The _nohu_ possessed a protective
coloring and shape more deluding than any other noxious creature I know,
and kept its mouth shut except when it swallowed the prey for which it
lay in wait. Its mouth is very large, and a brilliant lemon-color
inside, so that if it parts its lips it betrays itself. Brother to the
_nohu_ in evil purpose is the _tataraihau_. But what a trickster is
nature! The _nohu_ is as ugly as a squid, and the _tataraihau_ beautiful
as a piece of the sunset, a brilliant red, with transverse bands of
chocolate, bordered with ebony.
“If you can spit on the _nohu_ before he sticks his _taetae_ into you,
it will not poison you,” sagely said my savior, as he stabbed the wretch
with his knife.
Pliny, as translated by Holland, said:
All men carry about them that which is poyson to serpents: for
if it be true that is reported, they will no better abide the
touching with man’s spittle than scalding water cast upon them:
but if it happen to light within their chawes or mouth,
especially if it comes from a man that is fasting, it is present
death.
Pliny in his day may have known of quick-witted people who, when
assailed by a snake, had presence of mind to expectorate in his chawes,
but the most hungry, salivary man could hardly avail himself of this
prophylactic unless he recognized the _nohu_ before treading upon him.
The Paumotuans employ the _mape_, the native chestnut, the _atae_,
_ape_, and _rea moeruru_. These are all “yarb” remedies, and the first,
the juice of the chestnut, squeezed on the head and neck, they swear by.
The French doctors advise morphine injection or laudanum externally, or
to suck the wound and cup it. Coagulating the poison _in situ_ by
alcohol, acids, or caustic alkali, or the use of turpentine, is also
recommended. If the venom is not speedily drawn out or nullified, the
feet of the victim turn black and coma ensues. The French called the
_nohu_, _La Mort_, The Death.
My Paumotuan friend and Elder Kidd together gave me this information,
and when we brought the _nohu_ to the house in which he lived the
clergyman said we would eat it. The native heated an old iron pipe and,
after flaying the skin off the fish, boiled it. The flesh was remarkably
sweet and tender.
I lay on a mat, and, after the American had laved me with the liniment,
the Paumotuan, a Konito elder, massaged me for an hour, during which
grievous process I fell asleep, and woke after dark when the “reasonable
service” was beginning.
The people were ranged under the immense roof in orderly ranks, the
Tahitians being in one knot. Both the American elders were upon a
platform, surrounded by the native elders, who aided in the conduct of
the program, which was in Paumotuan. The Paumotuan language is a dialect
closely allied to the Maori, which includes the Tahitian, Hawaiian,
Marquesan, New Zealand, Samoan, and other island tongues. The Paumotuan
was crossed with a strange tongue, the origin of which was not fixed,
but which might be the remains of an Aino or negroid race found in the
Paumotus by the first Polynesian immigrants. Tahitians easily understood
the Paumotuans, though many words were different, and there were many
variations in pronunciation and usage. The Tahitians had been living
closely with Europeans for a hundred years, and their language had
become a mere shadow of its past form. The Paumotuan had remained more
primitive, for the Paumotuan was a savage when the Tahitians were the
most cultivated race of the South Seas; not with a culture of our kind,
but yet with elaborated ceremonials, religious and civil, ranks of
nobility, drama, oratory, and wit.
It being the conclusion of the grand annual meeting of the Josephites, a
summing up of the business condition of the sect in these waters was the
principal item. Elders Kidd and Imbel stressed dependence of the
Almighty upon his apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors, and of
these called-of-God men upon the francs collected at such gatherings as
this.
Both the divines spoke earnestly, and mentioned Jehovah and Joseph Smith
many times, with Aarona, Timoteo, Pauro, and other figures from the
Scriptures. They struck the pulpit when they spoke of the _Mormoni_, and
the faces of the congregation took on expressions of holy disdain.
Somewhat like the modern preacher of the larger cities, the elders
strove to entertain as well as instruct, edify, and command their flock.
They proposed a charade or riddle, which they said was of very ancient
origin, and perhaps had been told in the time of the Master’s sojourn
among men. They spoke it very slowly and carefully and repeated it
several times, so that it was thoroughly understood by all:
He walked on earth,
He talked on earth,
He reproved man for his sin;
He is not in earth,
He is not in heaven,
Nor can he enter therein.
This mysterious person was written about in the Bible, said Elder Kidd.
_Aue!_ That was a puzzler! Who could it be? Many scratched their heads.
Others shook theirs despairingly. A few older men, of the diaconate,
probably, smiled knowingly. Some began to eliminate likely biblical
characters on their fingers. Iesu-Kirito, Aberahama, Ioba, Petero, and
so on through a list of the more prominent notables of Scripture. But
after five minutes of guesses, which were pointed out by Mr. Kidd not to
comply with the specifications of the charade, the answer was announced
with impressive unction:
“Asini Balaama.”
Balaam’s ass. _Aue!_ Why, of course. I had named to myself every
_persona dramatis_ of the Book I could recall, but the talkative steed
had escaped me. We all laughed. Most of the congregation had never seen
an ass or even a horse, and the word itself was pulled into their
language by the ears. But they could conjure up a life-like picture of
the scene from their pastor’s description, and there were many
interchanges between neighbors about the wisdom of the beast, and his
kindness in saving Balaam from the angry angel who would have killed
him.
But in time the prose part of the service came to an end, and the
singing began. I moved myself to the shadows outside the pale, and
stretching at full length on a mat on the sand, gave myself to the
rapture of their poetry, and the waking dreams it brought.
_Himene_, all mass singing was called in these islands—the missionary
hymn Polynesianized. They had only chants when the whites came; proud
recitatives of valor in war, of the beginnings of creation, of the
wanderings of their heroes, challenges to the foe, and prayers to the
mysterious gods and demons of their supernal regions. They learned
awedly the hymns of Christianity, and struggled decades with the airs.
Confused with these were songs of the white sailors, the spirited
bowline and windlass chanteys of the British and American tars, the
trivial or obscene lays of beach-combers and soldiers, and later the
popular tunes of nations and governments. Out of all these the
Polynesians had evolved their _himenes_, singing as different from any
ever heard in Europe or America as the bagpipe from the violin, but
never to be forgotten when once heard to advantage, for its barbaric
call, its poignancy of utterance, and its marvelous harmony.
In the great shed outside which I lay under the purple sky, the men and
women were divided, and the women led the _himene_. One began a wail, a
high note, almost a shriek, like the keening of a wake, and carrying but
a phrase. Others met her voice at an exact interval, and formed a
chorus, into which men and women entered, apparently at will, but each
with a perfect observance of time, so that the result was an
overwhelming symphony of vocal sounds which had in them the power of a
pipe-organ to evoke thought. I heard the cry of sea-birds, the crash of
the waves on the reef, the thrashing of the giant fronds of the
cocoa-palms, the groans of afflicted humans, and the pæans of victory of
embattled warriors. The effect was incredibly individual. Each white
heard the _himene_ differently, according to his own cosmos.
There under the stars on Kaukura, cast down and conscious as I had been
of my trivial hurts, and of a certain loneliness of situation, I forgot
all in the thrill of emotion caused by the exquisite though unstudied
art of these simple Josephites, worshipers, whose voices pierced my
heart with the sorrows and aspirations of an occult world. The Reverends
Kidd and Imbel were forgotten, and all but the mysterious conflict of
man with his soul. I fell asleep as the _himene_ went on for hours, and
was awakened by Kopcke, the trader, who said that the _Marara_ was to
sail at midnight, and that he had been asked to bring me aboard.
Chocolat barked a welcome from the taffrail as we boarded the schooner,
and with the offshore wind we welcomed I could hear a faint human noise
which I interpreted as the benediction of the Reverend Johnny Kidd.
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