Diffidence of Takaroans—Hiram Mervin’s description of the
cyclone—Teamo’s wonderful swim—Mormon missionaries from America—I
take a bath.
THERE was no stir on the quay of Takaroa. In these latitudes the
civilized stranger is shocked by the indifference to his arrival of the
half-naked native. It enrages a prideful white. He perhaps remembers the
pages of Cook and the other discoverers, who wrote of the overflowing
enthusiasm of the new-found aborigines for them; but he forgets the
pages of history since national, religious, and business rivalries
invaded the South Seas. These Paumotuans, and, indeed, most Polynesian
peoples, are kin to pet cats who madden mistresses by pretending not to
hear calls, and by finding views from windows interesting when asked to
show their accomplishments or fine coats. Though they may have seen no
outsider for months, these Paumotuans will appear as unconcerned at a
white visitor’s coming as if circuses dropped in their midst daily. Yet
every movement, every word of a newcomer is as alluring to their
imaginations, bored by the sameness of their days, as a clown’s antics
to a child.
“It is a politeness and pride, not indifference,” had explained my
friend, that first gentleman of Tahiti, the Chevalier Tetuanui, of
Mataiea. “We simple islanders have been so often rebuffed by
uncultivated whites that we wait for advances. It is our etiquette.”
The main thoroughfare of the village stretched up from the quay half a
mile, with one or two ramifying byways, along which straggled the humble
homes of the Takaroans. There were not the usual breakfast fires before
them, as in Tahiti, where breadfruit and _feis_ are to be cooked, nor
did the appetizing odor of coffee rise, as in Tahiti, for Mormonism
forbade coffee to its adherents as it did alcohol and tobacco. Beside
the quay were dozens of cutters, and a small launch. Canoes were being
relegated to lesser civilizations by the fast sailing cutters. Motor
power was new here; almost new in Tahiti. But a few years and it would
be common, for while the islander cared nothing for time, he was
attracted to labor-saving machines.
Captain Moet set the sailors to unload the _Marara’s_ boat, and the
chief of Takaroa appeared. The French, whose island possessions in
Polynesia occupy sea room in spots from eight to twenty-seven degrees
below the equator, and from 136 to 155 west of Greenwich, have left
survive, in title at least, the chieftaincies, the form of government
they found upon seizure. “_Monsieur le Chef_,” they said of the native
officials here, as they did of a head cook in a restaurant. These
chiefs, though nominally the representatives of French sovereignty,
were, in pitiable reality, wretchedly-paid tax collectors, policemen,
and bailiffs. But they often were gentlemen—gentlemen of rich color. The
strapping fellow who had _viséd_ the documents of the _Marara_, though
wearing only denim overalls, lacked nothing in courtesy. A rent
disclosed that the “alls” were over his birth-suit.
[Illustration:
Atoll of Hikuera after the cyclone
]
[Illustration:
The wrecked _County of Roxburgh_
]
I was not arrayed very smartly, having left collar, cravat, and socks,
as well as shirt and undershirt, aboard. Pongee coat and trousers, with
flexible shoes, were in this tropic an ideal compromise with culture.
Open the coat, and the breeze had access to one’s _puris naturalibus_,
and, if one had to swim or wade, little clothing was wetted. The chief
surveyed me, saw that I took no interest in the cargo, and drew his own
conclusion.
“_Ia ora na!_” he said gently, and led me toward the village.
It was seven years earlier that the last great cyclone had devastated
these islands. Takaroa was mute witness of its ruin. The houses were
almost all mere shacks of corrugated iron—walls and roofs of hideous
gray metal. A few wooden buildings, including two stores, were the
exceptions. The people had neither courage nor money to rebuild
comfortable abodes. Lumber must be brought from Tahiti and carpenters
employed. No more unsuitable material than iron for a house in this
climate could be chosen, except glass, but it was comparatively cheap,
easily put together, and a novelty. It was as unharmonious a note among
the palms as rag-time music in a Greek theater, and in the next cyclone
each separate sheet would be a guillotine. Nothing more than a few feet
above the ground withstands these hurricanes, which fell cocoanuts as
fire eats prairie-grass.
We had not walked a hundred yards before a powerful half-caste stopped
me with a soft “_Bon jour!_” A good-looking, clean-cut man of thirty
years, the white blood in him showed most in his efficient manner and
his excellent French.
“You are American,” he said in that tongue in the wildest voice.
“_Mais oui._” I replied.
“I am Hiram Mervin, son of Captain Mervin, owner of the schooner
_France-Austral_. My father is American, and I am half American, though
I speak no English. You may have read of me. I repaired his boat, the
_Shark_, for that American author, Jack. His engine was broken down. He
wanted me to go to Australia as his mechanician, but my father said no,
and when an American says no, he means that, _n’est-ce pas, Monsieur?_”
“Where were you,” I inquired, “when the last cyclone blew?”
His fine brown face wrinkled. Hiram had a firm chin, a handsome black
mustache, and teeth as hard and white as the keys of a new piano.
“Ah, you have heard of how we escaped? _Non? Alors, Monsieur_, I will
tell you. I am a diver, and here I keep a store. We were at Hikueru, my
father and I, when it began to storm. Father watched the barometer, and
the sea. The mercury lowered fast, and the waves rolled bigger every
hour.
“‘The barometer is sinking fast. The ocean will drown the island,’ said
my father. ‘Noah built an ark, but we cannot float on one; we must get
above the water.’
“There were four cocoanut-trees, solid and thick-trunked, that grew a
few feet from one another. Bad planting, _oui_, but most useful. He set
me and some others, his close friends, to climbing these trees and
cutting off their heads, so that they stood like pillars of the temple.
It was a pity, I thought, for we ruined them. Then we took heavy planks
and lifted them to the tops of these trees and spiked and roped them in
a platform.
“_Attendez, Monsieur!_ All this time the cyclone increased. My father
was not with us. It was the diving season on Hikueru, and people were
gathered from all over the atolls, and from Tahiti, hundreds of Maoris,
and many whites. My father was directing the efforts of the people to
save their property. We had not yet thought of our lives being in great
danger. We islanders could not live if we expected the worst.
“A gale from the east, strong but not dangerous, had lashed the water of
the lagoon and made it like the ocean, and then, turning to the west,
had driven the ocean mad. Now the ocean was coming over the reef, the
waves very high and threatening. We knew that if ever the sea and the
lagoon met to fight, we would be the victims. Thus, Monsieur, the lagoon
surrounded by the island, and the usually calm waters inside the outer
reef, were both in a frightful state, and we began to fear what had been
in other atolls. My father was wise, but, being a Mormon and also an
American, he must not think of himself first. My father came to us and
tested the platform, and showed us where to strengthen it.
“‘The island will be covered by the sea and the lagoon,’ he said. ‘Make
haste, in the name of God!’
“Some one, a woman, called to him for help, and he ran to her. A sheet
of iron from a roof came through the air, and wounded him. I thought his
head was almost cut off, from the quantity of blood. _Mais, Monsieur,
c’etait terrible!_ We caught hold of my father, and made a sling with
our ropes, and lifted him, unconscious, to the platform at the top of
the trees. He raised his head and looked around.
“‘Go down again!’ he commanded. ‘Cut down those three trees. If they
fall they will strike us.’
“Monsieur, that was my father, the American, who spoke, though nearly
dead. He was wise. We did as he said, as quickly as we could, and
climbed back to the platform. The great breakers of the ocean were now
far up on our beach at each end of the tide. The whole width of the land
from the edge of the beach to the lagoon is but the length of four or
five cocoanut-trees. The water below the atoll was forced up through the
coral sand, Monsieur, until it was like the dough of the baker when he
first pours in the cocoanut juice. People still on the ground went up to
their arms in it. We feared the atoll would be taken back to the depths.
Our platform was nearer the lagoon than the moat—to be exact, two
hundred feet from the moat, and a hundred from the lagoon. My father had
us tie him to the platform and to the trees. We had brought plenty of
ropes for that.
“_Mon Dieu!_ Below the poor people were tying themselves to the trunks
of the cocoanut-trees, and climbing them, if they could, and roosting in
the branches like the wild birds of the air. They were shrieking and
praying. There were many whites, too, because all the pearl-shell and
pearl buyers, and the keepers of stores like us, were there from
Papeete. The little children who could not climb were crying, and many
parents stayed with them to die. The sea was now like the reef, white as
the noon clouds with foam. We had bound my father’s wounds with my
shirt, but the blood dripped on the boards where he lay with his eyes
open and watching the cyclone.”
The chief, who had accompanied me, became restless. He understood no
French.
“_Monsieur l’Americain_, do I detain you?” Hiram Mervin asked me.
I signed for him to continue.
“Then came the darkness. There were only the sounds of the wind and
water, the crash of the cocoanut-trees as they fell with their human
fruit. We heard the houses being swept away; we thought we caught
glimpses of vessels riding on the breakers, and we imagined we caught
the shrieks of those being destroyed. But the wind itself sounded like
the voices of people. I heard many calling my name.
“‘Hiram Mervin, pray for us! Save us!’ said the cyclone.
“Ah, I cannot tell it! It was too dreadful. It was hours after darkness
that the sea reached its height. Those below were torn from hummocks of
coral, from the roofs of houses, and from trees. We knew that the sharks
and other devils of the sea were seizing them. The sea rushed over the
land into the lagoon and the lagoon returned to the sea. When they met
under us, they fought like the bulls of Bashan. Hikueru was being
swallowed as the whale swallowed _Iona_, the _perofeta_. We held on
though our trees bent like the mast of a schooner in a typhoon. We
called often to one another to be sure none was lost. When morning came,
after night on night of darkness, the waters receded, and we saw the
work of the demon. Almost every house had been cut down, and most of the
trees. The cemeteries were washed up, and the bodies, bones, and skulls
of our dead for decades were strewn about or in the ocean. The lagoon
was so full of corpses old and new that our people would not fish nor
dive for shells there for a long time. The spirits are still seen as
they fly through the air when there is a gale. But, Monsieur, our four
cocoanut-trees had stood as the pillars of the temple of Birigi’ama
Iunga. Not for nothing was my father born in America. _Mais, Monsieur_,
the chief is waiting. The _mitinare_ will be glad to see you. _Au
revoir._”
Hiram took a step to return to the quay when he called back to me. “Ah,
there is Teamo, who is the Living Ghost,” and he pointed to a Paumotuan
woman who was coming up from the quay towards where we three stood.
Teamo had the balanced gait of one who sits or stands much in canoes,
and she strode like a man, her powerful figure showing under her red
Mother-Hubbard which clung close to her stoutish form. Short, she was
like most of the Paumotuans, of middle height, but with her head set
upon a pillar of a neck, and her bare chocolate arms, rounded, but
hinting of the powerful muscles beneath the skin. Her hair was piled
high on her head like a crown, and upon it was a basket in which were
two chickens. A live pig was under her arm. She was carrying this stock
from our boat.
“There,” said Hiram, “there is Teamo, who is the greatest swimmer of all
these seas, and who went through the great cyclone as does a fish.
_Haere mai!_” he called, “This _monsieur_, who is an American, like my
father, wants to hear about your swimming of the seas in the _matai
rorofai_.”
Teamo put down her pig and the chickens from her head, sat upon her
haunches, and drawing a diagram in the coral sand, she told her strange
tale in her own language.
“The water is coming over the atoll, and the lagoon and the sea are
one,” said Teamo, “when my brother and sisters and I climbed the great
cocoanut-tree by our house, because it is death below. You know the
cocoanut-trees. You see they have no limbs. You know that it is hard to
hold on because the great trees shake in the wind, and there is no place
to sit. Only we could put our arms around the leaves and hold as best we
might. When it comes on dark we feel the wind roaring louder about us,
and we hear the cries of those who are in other trees. Then far out on
the reef we hear the pounding of the sea and the waves begin more and
more to come over the atoll until they cover it deeper and deeper, and
each succeeding wave climbs higher and higher toward where we cling. We
know that soon there will come a wave whose teeth will tear us from the
tree.
“That wave came all of a sudden. It was like a cloud in the sky. It
lifted me out of the cocoanut-leaves as the diver tears the shell from
the bank at the bottom of the lagoon. It lifted me and took me over the
lagoon, over the tops of all trees, and when it went back to the ocean,
it carried me miles with it. I was on the top of its back, almost in the
sky, and it was as black as the spittle of the devilfish.”
The chief was listening attentively, for she spoke in Paumotuan. Hiram
Mervin interposed:
“Teamo went away from Hikueru on that wave and stayed three days,” said
he. “She was numbered with the dead when the count of the living was
made by my father.”
Teamo squatted on the sand of the road. I was afraid she would weary in
her relation, as do her race. “_Parau vinivini!_” I said, and smoothed
her shoulders.
“I kept upon its back,” she resumed. “All through that night I swam or
floated, fighting the waves, and fearing the sharks. I called on
Birigi’ama Iunga and on Ietu Kirito, and on God. Hours and hours I kept
up until the dawn. Then I saw a coral-reef, and swam for it. I was
nearly crushed time and time on the rocks, but at last I crawled up on
the sand above the water, and fell asleep.
“When I awoke I was all naked. The waves had torn my dress from me, and
the sun was burning my body. I was bruised and wounded, but I prayed my
thanks to the God of the Mormons. I stood upon my feet, and I saw all
about me the _pohe roa_, the blackening and broken bodies of people of
Hikueru. They, too, had floated on the same wave, but they had perished.
They were all about me. I searched for cocoanuts, for I was drying up
with thirst and shaking with hunger. At last I found one under the body
of my cousin, and, breaking it with a rock, I drank the water in it, and
again fell asleep.
“Now when I awoke I was stronger, and a distance away in the water I saw
a box floating. I broke it open, and found it had in it tins of salmon.
They were from some store in Hikueru, for I soon knew there was no
living human on that atoll but me. I could not open the tins of salmon
but pierced holes in them with a piece of coral and sucked out the fish.
God was even better to me, for I found a camphor-wood chest with a shirt
and _pareu_ in it, and I put them on. I then found a canoe thrown up on
the beach, and it was half full of rain-water. I made up my mind to
return to my home in the canoe. It was broken and there was no paddle. I
patched it, I found the outrigger, and tied it on with cocoanut-fiber
which I plaited. I made a paddle from the top of the salmon case, and
lashed it to the handle of a broom I found. I kept enough fresh water in
the canoe, and after two days of eating and resting I pushed out in the
canoe, with the remainder of the salmon. I could not see any other
atoll, but I trusted to God and prayed as I paddled. I pushed over the
reef at daybreak of the third day, and paddled until the next morning,
when I saw Hikueru, and reached the remnants of my village.”
Teamo gathered up her burdens and, with a reminiscent smile, walked on.
“_Monsieur l’Americain_,” said Hiram, “you may be sure that when she
returned to Hikueru from Tekokota—that atoll was fifteen miles away—they
were afraid of her, as the friends of Lataro when Ietu Kirito raised him
from the dead.”
The chief’s restlessness increased, as if he must deliver me somewhere
quickly; but I thought of the man they called the king of the Paumotus.
“The house of Mapuhi, is it—”
“The chief is taking you there now,” said Hiram. “The elders are there.
My father was long-time the partner of Mapuhi. They sailed their
schooners together and had their divers.”
“You and your father are Mormons?”
“_Nous sommes bons Mormons_,” replied the half-caste, seriously. “Am I
not named for the king who built the temple of Solomon. It is a shame,
Monsieur, that those _Konito_ are permitted in these islands. They
corrupt the true religion.”
The chief touched my arm, and we proceeded, after an exchange of bows
with the son of the American. We walked to the very end of the small
_motu_ or islet. The _motus_ are often long but always very narrow,
between three hundred and fifteen hundred feet.
The people of Takaroa had chosen to pitch their huts on this spot of the
whole atoll because of the pass into the lagoon being there. That was
the determining factor just as the banks of rivers and bays were
selected by American pioneers. Where the salt water was on three
sides—the moat, the lagoon, and the channel between the next _motu_—was
the residence of our seeking.
It was a neat domicile of dressed lumber, raised ten feet from the
ground on stilts. It was fenced about, and here and there a banana-plant
or fig-tree grew in a hole dug in the coral, surrounded by a little wall
of coral and with rotting tin cans heaped about. Driven in the trunks
were nails. I asked the chief the reason, and he replied vaguely that
the trees needed the iron of the cans and the nails.
We were entering the grounds now, and I guessed it was Mapuhi’s house.
“Mapuhi is here?” I inquired.
“_’E_, he is at prayer, maybe.”
The chief shrank back, as we were on the porch.
“_Faaea oe; tehaeri nei au._ You stay; I go,” he said.
On the side veranda, a girl of seventeen or so, in a black gown, lay on
a mattress and yawned as she scratched her knee with her toes—not of the
same leg. She was almost naked, slender and very brown. These Paumotuans
are darkened by the sun, their hair is not long and beautiful like the
Tahitians’. Beauty is a matter of food and fresh water. She lay on this
bare mattress, without sheets or pillows, evidently just awakening for
the day. She made quite a picture when she smiled. The daughter of the
king, doubtless.
There was a noise in response to my knock, and the door opened. A
tousled pompadour of yellowish-red hair above hazel eyes peeped out, the
eyes snapped in amazement, and their owner, a strapping chap of
twenty-five, put out his hand.
“Hello! Where are you from?” he said.
“Off the _Marara_ just now, and from the United States not long ago.”
“Well, gee cricketty, I’m glad to see you! My name’s Overton, T. E.
Overton of Logan, Utah. Come here, Martin! He’s Martin De Kalb of
Koosharem, Utah. We’re Mormon elders. Say, it’s good to talk United
States!”
A body leaped out of bed in an inner room, and a pair of blue eyes under
brown hair, an earnest face, supported by an athletic figure in pajamas,
rushed out. The owner seized my hand.
“I’ll be doggoned! I didn’t know anything was in sight. The _Marara_!
Any mail for me? Come in, and we’ll dress.”
The king’s daughter had fled when the missionaries appeared. I entered
the living-room and found a chair, while the elders flooded me with
questions from their sleeping quarters, as they put on their clothes.
While I answered, I looked at the home of this foremost of the
Paumotuans, whose father and mother had eaten their kind.
A dining-room table and half a dozen cheap chairs were all the
furniture. South Sea Islanders found sitting in chairs uncomfortable,
and these were plainly guest seats, for governors and pearl-buyers and
missionaries.
The walls held prints curiously antagonistic. Brigham Young, founder of
the Utah Mormon colony, with a curly white beard, smooth upper lip, and
glorified countenance, sat in an arm-chair, holding a walking-stick of
size, with a gilded head. A splendiferous colored lithograph of the
temple at Salt Lake flanked the portrait.
On the other wall was a double pink page from a New York gazette,
usually found in barber-shops and on boot-black stands, with pictures of
two prize-fighters, Jeffries and Johnson, one white and the other black,
glaring viciously at each other, and with threatening gloved fists.
Beneath this picture was in handwriting:
_Teferite e Tihonitone
na
Taata Moto_
Emerging from their bedroom, the elders caught my eyes fastened on the
pink page, and they looked grieved, as housewives whose kitchen is found
in disorder.
“They’re crazy about boxing,” said Overton. “That’s young Mapuhi who put
that up and wrote that. We reprove them for such ungodly interests, but
they are good Mormons, anyhow.”
I led the conversation to their own work in this group. They became
enthusiastic. Sincere faces they had, simple and strong, of the pioneer
type. They were sons of healthy peasantry, and products of plain living
in the open. De Kalb had left a wife and child in Koosharem, and Overton
a sweetheart in Logan, to take their part in spreading their gospel
among these natives. They were voluntary missionaries, paying their own
expenses for the two or three years they were to give to proselytizing,
according to the rule of their church, they said. They were eager to
return to their women and their farms, and their service was soon to be
at an end. Each had spent a year or so in Papeete in the Mormon Mission
House, learning the Paumotuan language and the routine of their duties,
and now for a year and more they had journeyed from atoll to atoll where
they had churches, preaching and making converts, they said. They talked
with fervor of their success.
“The Lord has been mighty good to us,” said De Kalb, who was in his
twenties. “We’ve got this island hog-tied. If it weren’t for the
Josephites and some of those Catholic priests, we’d have every last one.
Those Josephites are sorest, because they are deserters from Mormonism.
Why are they? Why, their so-called prophet was Joseph. I forget his
other name. Oh, no, he was not our martyr, Joseph Smith. They split off
from the real church. They don’t amount to a hill of beans, but when the
Mormons left these islands, because the French were hostyle, these
Josephites sneaked in and got quite a hold by lying about us, before we
got on to their game and came back here. They’re out for the stuff. The
real name of our church here is, _Te Etaretia a Jesu Metia e te feia
mo’a i te Mau Mahana Hopea Nei_.”
“Gosh, I’d like to get my hair cut and roached,” said Elder Overton. “It
was fine, when I left Papeete. I just have to let it go,” and he stirred
his golden shock with the air of a man who has abandoned comfort for an
ideal.
“Do the Paumotuans cling to their heathen customs?” I asked.
Overton looked at the floor, but De Kalb, the older, spoke up.
“They will circumcise,” he said hesitatingly. “We try to stop it, but
they say it is right; that it makes them a separate people. They often
wait until thirteen years of age before prompted to perform the rite.
The kids don’t appreciate it.”
“And tithes? Your church members give a tenth of their incomes?”
Again De Kalb replied:
“They should,” he said. “These Takaroans are just beginning to see the
beauty of that divine law. It is hard to make them exact. Perhaps they
give a twentieth. It’s cocoanuts, you know, and it’s hard to keep
account.”
“Of course, polygamy is—” I was about to say “forbidden,” when I felt
that I had broached a delicate topic. I was stupid. Here in a lagoon
surrounded by a narrow fringe of coral, to bang the eternal polyangle of
one man and many women! The elders looked pained. I was about to
withdraw the remark with an apology, but Westover made the most of his
twenty-four years and waived aside my amends.
“It must be met,” he said. “We obey the laws of the land. The American
law forbids plural marriages, and our church expressly forbids them. We
are loyal Americans. We say to these people that polygamy is not to be
practised. That’s true, no matter what the Josephites say.”
Elder De Kalb, who was watching me, interposed:
“I suppose you’re not a Mormon, but, as a matter of fact, isn’t
polygamy, with wives and children to the extent of a man’s purse, all
avowed and cherished, better than adultery?”
Overton got upon his feet. “You bet it is,” he declared, with intense
feeling. “It’s nature’s law. There are more women than men by millions.
Men are polygamous by instinct. And, by heavens! look at all those old
maids at home and in England!”
[Illustration:
Photo from Underwood and Underwood
Mormon elders baptizing in the lagoon
]
Considering the sorrows of old maids, I felt my standards being
endangered, but was saved from downright perversion by accepting the
royal favor of a tub of fresh water from a cistern that caught the
rain-water from the roof. I was seeking to immerse myself in the
inadequate bath when I saw the daughter of the king gazing at me
interestedly, and I hope that I blushed. But the princess distinctly
winked in the direction of my hosts as I attempted to sink into oblivion
in the ten-gallon pail.
[Illustration:
Over the reef in a canoe
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------