In the valley of Vaitahu—With Vanquished Often and Seventh Man He Is So
Angry He wallows in the Mire—Worship of beauty in the South
Seas—Like the ancient Greeks—Care of the body—Preparations for a
belle’s début—Massage as a cure for ills.
ACROSS the Bordelaise Channel from Atuona, many hours of sailing in an
outrigger canoe, lay the island of Tahuata. Its principal settlement was
Vaitahu, and there I went with Exploding Eggs, my adopted brother of
fourteen, to stay awhile in the house of the chief, Seventh Man Who Is
So Angry He Wallows in the Mire, as Neo Efitu, his short name, meant.
Atuona personified the brooding spirit of melancholy that possessed the
race, the shadow of the white upon the Marquesan spirit, but Vaihatu had
as _genus loci_ a blithe and domestic sprite, which had kept the tiny
village—formerly of thousands—in the habits and moods of the old ways.
Waited on as an honored guest by the chief, his wife, and his niece,
Vanquished Often, the friend and playmate of the few score inhabitants,
I had happy weeks of simple pleasures, and of intense interest in
searching into the past of the Marquesans, and especially into their
customs and manners in relation to esthetics.
The only foreigner in the valley, by my earnest wish and laughable
example, life resumed for a time much of the old Marquesan method and
appearance. The mission church, the first Christian edifice within a
thousand miles, was rejoining the wilderness. Without clergy or
adherent, its walls were fast falling into decay, and its
precisely-planned garden was jungle. The artist-schoolmaster, Le Moine,
who had taught Vaitahu’s children to say, “_La France est le plus bon
pays du monde_,” was gone to seek other models for painting as ravishing
as Vanquished Often, or men as majestic as Kahuiti, the cannibal of
Taaoa. Existence, almost as devoid of invention and artificiality as
before the white came, I was able to rebuild in my mind the structure of
Marquesan taste, and to view in imagination the attractive aspect of
Vaitahu in its idyllic days of old. We brought out of the chests the
native garments of _tapa_, and we lived as much as possible—like
children playing Indians—a perspective of the past.
I looked from my mat upon the _paepae_ of Seventh Man Who Wallows to see
Vanquished Often by the _Vai Puna_, the spring of Vaitahu. She had taken
off her _ahu_ or tunic of pink muslin and bent over to receive the full
stream of cool water from the hills which flowed through the bamboo
pipes. Her beautiful body, the blood mantling under her silken skin,
perfect in development at thirteen years, glowed in the dazzling light
and under the silvery cascade, and her long, unconfined hair shone
red-gold in the sunbeams. My mind reverted to the descriptions of the
women, the men, and the scenes described by these who voyaged here
decades ago.
[Illustration:
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Some friends in my valley
]
[Illustration:
Wash-day in the stream by my cabin
]
Not any people in all the world, ancient or modern, ranked human beauty
higher in the list of life’s gifts than did the people of these islands.
In the star-scattered archipelagos of the Pacific tropics a dozen tawny
races or breeds of superb physical endowment made their bodies wondrous
temples for their free souls. The loveliness and grace of women, the
symmetry and strength of men, were, before the white came to destroy
them, the fascinating labor of their days, their vivid religion, and the
expression of their joy of living.
They brought the culture of beauty and the rhythm of motion to an
unequaled perfection, and in the adornment of their bodies and
development of their natural attractions reached a pitch of splendor and
artistry which, though seeming savage to us of this period, struck
beholders, even of our kind, as entrancing and marvelous.
While all over Polynesia these conditions obtained when the first
Anglo-Saxons threw down the anchors of their ships in the enchanting
harbors of these tropics, they remained longest in the Marquesas
Archipelago.
In their simple dress, their practice of manipulation in the development
of their bodies, their use of scents, unguents, and lotions, their
wearing of flowers and ornaments, their singular and astounding art of
the story-teller, the dance and the pantomime, and the exquisite
tattooing of their persons, they showed a delicacy of feeling and an
understanding of elegance unsurpassed in the records of the nations of
the earth.
As I sat under the _pandanus_ thatch of Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He
Wallows in the Mire, I recalled what that eminent moralizer, Lecky, had
said:
The intense esthetic enthusiasm that prevailed was eminently
fitted to raise the most beautiful to honor. In a land and
beneath a sky where natural beauty developed to the highest
point, supreme physical perfection was crowned by an assembled
people. In no other period of the world’s history was the
admiration of beauty in all its forms so passionate or so
universal. It colored the whole moral teaching of the time, and
led the chief moralists to regard virtue simply as the highest
kind of supersensual beauty. It led the wife to pray, before all
other prayers, for the beauty of her children. The courtesan was
often the queen of beauty.
Lecky wrote that of ancient Greece to contrast it with the morals of the
Europe of his day, but I considered the striking likeness between the
condition he described and the attitude of the ancient Marquesans. Here
in these tiny islands, separated by ten thousand miles of billow from
the land of Pericles and Aspasia, a people whose origin was only guessed
at by science, erected the same goal of attainment, and like standards
of harmony of form and movement. Doubtless at that very day these Greeks
of the tropics, considering their environment, most distant from the
birthplace of humanity and from the example of other peoples, were
comparable in brilliancy of person and ease of motion to the Homeric
figures.
The American sea-fighter, Captain David Porter, who ran up the Stars and
Stripes in the breadfruit groves of these islands, said:
The men of the Marquesas are remarkably handsome, of large
stature and well-proportioned; they possess every variety of
countenance and feature, and a great difference is observable in
the color of the skin, which for the most part is of a copper
color. But some are as fair as the generality of working people
much exposed to the sun of a warm climate.
The young girls were handsome and well-formed; their skins were
remarkably soft and smooth and their complexions no darker than
many brunettes in America, celebrated for their beauty. Their
modesty was more evident than that of the women of any place we
had visited since leaving our own country; and if they suffered
themselves (though with apparent timidity and reluctance) to be
presented naked to strangers, may it not be in compliance with a
custom which taught them to sacrifice to hospitality all that is
most estimable?
Why, and how had this strange race, so far from others’ strivings,
attained so singular a state of natural beauty that discoverer after
discoverer and diarist after diarist, from the bloody Spaniard, Mendaña,
to the gentle Louis Stevenson, set it down as the “handsomest on earth?”
One must guess at the beginnings of the Marquesans. Scientists make
explorations to find the route of the Caucasian people who thousands of
years ago—maybe, before the Hebrews deserted Jehovah for
Baal-Peor—migrated through the unknown and fearsome wastes of ocean
toward these misty islands of the far south. What equipment of body and
soul they brought with them we do not know, but they were or became the
masters of their seas, and in their frail canoes dared even the long
voyage to New Zealand and to Hawaii, when Europeans and Asiatics in
keeled ships crept carefully about their own coasts, or crossed the
Mediterranean Sea only within the threatening Pillars of Hercules.
During the thousands of years the Marquesans were separated from Europe
they developed a policy of government, a paternalistic democracy, or
communism, which was perfectly adapted to their nature and surroundings.
A very large part of it was concerned with beauty, manners, and
entertainment, with personal decoration, carving of stone and wood,
building of temples and houses, oratory, dances, and chants. All of
these were carefully regulated by cults, gilds, and _tapus_. They must
have been an extremely prolonged growth, for they had come to a fixed
standard of detail and exactness, and an acme of art, bizarre and exotic
as it was, that could have been but the minute accretion of many
centuries. When the first explorers came into the uncharted spaces of
these warm seas, they found a culture totally beyond the understanding
of most of them, and abhorrent to state and church, but which a few fine
souls glimpsed as an astonishing revelation of the natural development
of the human, and, by foil, of the decadence of civilization. They found
health and high spirits abounding to a degree utterly strange to them,
the hardiest and most adventurous of Europeans and Americans, and they
were provoked by the innocence, radiance, and naturalness of the women.
This Edenic condition astounded the Yankee Porter, who went to sea at
sixteen, and who slew scores of Marquesans, for he put in his log:
The Hawaiians, Tahitians, and New Zealanders had by residence
among whites become corrupt; they had fallen into their vices
and ate the same food. They were no longer in a state of nature;
they had, like us, become corrupt, and while the honest,
guileless faces of the Marquesans shone with benevolence, good
nature and intelligence, the downcast eye and sullen look of the
others marked their inferiority and degeneracy. Guilt, of which
by intercourse with us they had become sensible, had already
marked their countenances. Every emanation of their souls could
not be perceived upon their countenances as with those of the
naked Marquesans.
War, murder, mutiny, desertion, and horrible orgies marked the reaction
of these forecastle denizens, scourings of slums and dull villages, to
the spontaneity, ease, and liberty they found here, in contrast with
their ugly and restricted lives aboard ship or in the hard climes and
rough grooves of their homes. The sight of such intense individual
happiness, glowing vitality, and exquisite bodies, of a coöperative
existence without kings or commoners, business or money, palaces or
hovels, disease or dirt, prudery or prostitutes, shocked them by the
abrupt differences from their own countries. They wrote the Marquesans
down as barbarians, as the Greeks did the Romans; and church,
government, and trade made haste to hack down their achievement, and to
make over the pieces as the wretched patchwork of their own hands. They
hated it, subconsciously, for its giving the lie to their own boasted
institutions. They ended it that it might not mock the degradation and
futility of their own conduct and the opposition between their decalogue
and their deeds. The merchant condemned and altered it to make a market
for what it did not then need or desire.
The first approach to change after subjugation and conversion was
through clothing, because the most obvious difference between the whites
and the browns was that the latter largely exposed their bodies. The
missionary paved the way for the dealer who had cottons to sell by
saying that God abhorred nakedness. Livingston himself acted likewise.
The Marquesans, in truth, had a small variety of clothing. Much of the
time both sexes wore only the single garment, the _pareu_ or loin-cloth.
Their clothes of _Tapa_ or bark were, except mattings, the only stuffs
made by the Marquesans. They were of a remarkable texture and coloring,
considering the materials available. The inner barks of the banian,
breadfruit, and particularly the mulberry trees were used. The outer
rind was scraped off with a shell, and the inner slightly beaten and
allowed to ferment. It was then beaten over wooden forms with clubs of
ironwood about eighteen inches long, grooved coarsely on one side and
finely on the reverse, a process that united so closely the fibers that
in the finished cloth one could not guess the processes of its making.
Bleached in the sun on the beaches to a dazzling white, this fabric was
either dyed black or brown, yellow or red, or fashioned as it was into
the few varieties of garments they affected. All wore the _pareu_ about
the loins; a strip two yards or more in length, and a yard wide, which
is passed twice about the waist and tucked in for holding, as the sarong
of the Malay. It hangs above the knees, and like the _fundoshi_ of
Japan, worn by royalty and beggar, is capable, for strenuous movements,
such as swimming, of being gathered up to form a diaper or breech-cloth.
The _cahu_ or _ahu_, a long and flowing piece of _tapa_, was worn by the
females, hanging from the shoulders, knotted about or covering one or
both breasts at the whim of the wearer. For the coloring of this and the
_pareu_, rich and alluring dyes were found in the plants and trees and
even the sea-animals of the beaches. The outlines of the hibiscus
flowers and carven objects were imprinted upon these tapas, and
astronomical, mystic, or tribal signs or records drawn upon them in
fantastic but artistic design.
The method of wearing the _cahu_ for hiding or disclosing the charms of
the female was as varied as the _toilettes_ of Parisian fashion. The
conceit of the girl or woman, the occasion, and the weather decided its
being draped in any one of a score of manners. A belle might think it
ungenerous to cover too much, and an old or homely woman find the entire
surface too scant. When human nature has freest fling, prudery is the
fig-leaf of ugliness, here, as in the salon of Mayfair, or behind the
footlights of Broadway.
For the men, while the _pareu_, always as now, was the common apparel,
they had a hundred ornaments, in a diversity more numerable than those
of the females. Whenever man has not sacrificed his masculine craving
for adornment to religious or economic pressure, he is the gaudier of
the sexes. From the fiddler-crab with his rampant claw to the mandrill
with his crimson and lilac callosities, nature has so ordained it, and
man rejoiced in his privilege. Not until European man felt the iron hand
of the machine age, when the rifle displaced the bow and the pistol the
sword, the factory the home loom, and the foundry the smithy; not until
money became the chief pursuit of all ranks, and puritanism a general
blight upon brilliancy of costume, did the white man relinquish his
gewgaws to the parasitic woman. Then he made it a vicarious pride by
decorating her with his riches and making her the vehicle of his pomp in
ornature, and the advertisement of his prosperity.
The Marquesans, struck by the glitter of brass buttons and gold braid,
of broadcloth and fur, unfamiliar with metal, and admiring everything
foreign, fell facile victims to vestures, and when the new-fangled
religions that followed hot upon the discoverers, enforced covering by
dogma and even by punishment, they clothed themselves and sweated in
fashion and sanctity. But clothes irk the Marquesans as they do all
people living close to a kindly nature. Our own babes resent even the
swaddles which bind them in the cradle. The first years of childhood are
a continuing struggle against garments, until, having lost plasticity
and the instant response of muscle to mind that distinguishes the
Marquesans, the result is rationalized by adolescents into modesty and
convention. After youth, clothing is welcomed by us to enhance imperfect
charms and to hide defects, to screen our unhandsome and puny bodies.
The lean shanks, protuberant abdomens, and anatomical grotesqueries in a
public bath bear witness to our sacrifice. Marriage is often a
disclosure of unguessed flaws.
“The gods are naked and in the open,” said Seneca.
Pigalle sculptured the frail old Voltaire in the nude, yet attained
dignity. Even Broadway smiles at frocked heroes in bronze, and must have
its ideals in marble or bronze undraped.
How often, when I lived at the spacious home of my friend, Ariioehau
Ameroearao, the chief at Mataiea in Tahiti, I have seen him, chevalier
of the Legion of Honor, come in from the highway in stiff white linen or
in religious black, and in a twinkling reduce his garb to a loin-cloth!
His walls were hung with portraits of princes and distinguished
travelers, guests of his in the past score of years, and none was more
distinguished, though in brilliant uniform and gorgeously decorated,
than the old chief in his strip of cotton print.
“Three kings naked have I seen, and never a sign of royalty,” said the
cynical Bismarck.
Plato understood very well the spirit in which the Polynesians were
clothed by the whites, the crass prurience that pointed out to them the
wickedness of nudity, that hid their beautiful bodies under tunics and
pantaloons, that laughed at their simplicity.
In the “Republic” he says:
Not long since it was thought discreditable and ridiculous among
the Greeks, as it is now among most barbarian nations, for men
to be seen naked. And when the Cretans first, and after them the
Lacedæmonians, began the practice of gymnastic exercises, the
wits of the time had it in their power to make sport of those
novelties. But when experience has shown that it was better to
strip than to cover up the body and when the ridiculous effect
that this plan had to the eye had given way before the arguments
establishing its superiority, it was at the same time, as I
imagine, demonstrated that he is a fool who thinks anything
ridiculous but that which is evil, and who attempts to raise a
laugh by assuming any object to be ridiculous but that which is
unwise and evil.
The Marquesans, perfect animals, had their senses extraordinarily
attuned to the faintest vibrations of value to their survival or
delight. They heard sounds plainly that I, with rather better than
ordinary civilized hearing, did not catch. I was with Vanquished Often
when she spoke to Exploding Eggs two hundred feet away in a
conversational tone. I tested them, and found they could talk with each
other intelligibly when I heard but an indistinct whisper from the
farthest. So with smell. Ghost Girl and Mouth of God, my neighbor at
Atuona, could detect any intimates by their odor in pitch darkness at
twenty feet, though Marquesans, because they have little bodily hair and
are the cleanest people I know, have less personal odor than we. They
enjoyed life through scent infinitely more than do we. They had no
kisses but rubbed noses and smelled each other with indrawings of their
breath. Odoriferous herbs, flowers, and seeds were continually about
their necks, both men and women, tucked behind their ears, or in their
hair, and their bodies after bathings were anointed with the
_hinano_-scented cocoanut-oil. Their noses were sources of sensuous
enjoyment to them beyond my capability. They inhaled emanations from
flowers too subtle to touch my olfactory nerves.
The Marquesan woman has ever been an arch-coquette, paying infinite
attention to her appearance, and enduring pain and _ennui_ to improve
her beauty. Her complexion was as much a pride as with a fashionable
American woman to-day. The beauty parlors of our cities were matched by
the steam baths, the use of saffron, of oils, and of massage, and by
weeks or even months of preparation before some great festival. To burst
upon the assembled clan, white as the sea-foam, with skin as smooth as a
polished calabash, hair oiled and wreathed, and body rounded from
dancing practice and much sleep, and to set beating wildly the pulses of
the young men, so that, strive as they might to remain mute, they would
be forced to yield mad plaudits, was a result worth months of effort. To
be the belle of the ball was a distinction a woman remembered a
lifetime. It was an honor comparable to the warrior’s wounds, or
possession of the heads of the enemies. Parents felt keenly the success
of their daughters. Titihuti and others have told me of their triumphs,
as Bernhardt or Patti might recite of packed houses and a score of
encores.
A curious secrecy or modesty was attached to the making of the toilet
and the enhancement of the natural charms. No Marquesan or Tahitian or
Hawaiian would ever have looked at herself in a portable mirror—if she
had one—as do many of our females, and the whitening and reddening of
cheeks and lips in public places would have caused a blush of shame for
her sex to suffuse the face of a Marquesan, to whom such intimate
gestures were for the privacy of her home or the bank of the limpid
stream in a grove dedicated to the Marquesan Venus.
Near Tahiti was the atoll of Tetuaroa where for hundreds of years the
belles of Tahiti resorted to lose their sunburn in the bowered groves
and to spend a season in beautification by banting, special foods,
dancing, swimming, massage, baths, oils, and lotions.
Here in the Marquesas, as in all Polynesia, a period of voluntary
seclusion preceded the début of the maiden, or the preparation for a
special _pas seul_ by a noted beauty.
Seclusion of the girl was practiced at the time of puberty. It has a
curious analogy in such far separated places as Torres Straits and
British Columbia, one Australasia and the other North America. The girls
of a tribe in Torres Straits are hidden for three months behind a circle
of bushes in their parent’s house at the first signs of womanhood. No
sun must reach them, and no man, even though he be the father, enter the
house, nor must they feed themselves. The Nootkas of British Columbia
also conceal their nubile virgins, and insist that they touch their own
bodies for a period only with a comb or a bone, never laying their hands
upon it.
It would seem that all this mystery had the same purpose, that of adding
to the attractiveness of the girls and heightening the romance of their
new condition. Our coming-out parties parallel the goal of these strange
peoples, announcements, formal introductions, as brilliant as possible,
being considered desirable both among savages and ourselves to give
notice of a marriageable state. Our débuts have not departed far from
aboriginal ideas.
The Junoesque wife of Seventh Man Who Wallows had just come from the
_via puna_ in her accustomed bathing attire, and, still dripping, seated
herself in the sun near me to dry. She had added a jasmine blossom to
the heavy gold hoops in her ears and had lit her pipe, and her handsome,
large face was twisted between smiles and frowns as she tried to put in
understandable words and gestures her recital of these customs:
“Our girls, daughters of chiefs, such as I am, were kept hidden for
months before we appeared for the first time in public in the tribal
dance. The _tapu_ was strict. We were secret in our mother’s house and
inclosure, without supposedly even being seen by any one but our
relatives and their retainers. It was death to gaze upon us. We were
_tapu tapu_. If we had cause to go out, our official guardian blew a
conch-shell to warn all from the neighborhood. Not until the day of the
dance or marriage ceremony, not until the feast was spread and the
accepted suitor present to claim us, or the drums booming for the dance,
were we shown to the multitude; we had had months of _omi omi_, and
would be in perfect condition and most beautiful.”
It was this _omi omi_, or massage, that many of the earlier chroniclers
of the South Seas believed to be the cause of the chiefs and headmen of
all these islands being much bigger and handsomer than the common
people. The _hakaiki_, or chiefs, men and women, throughout Polynesia
astonished the voyagers and missionaries by their huge size. Often they
were from four to six inches above six feet tall, and framed in
proportion. Hardly a writing sailor or visitor to Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa,
or the Marquesas but remarks this striking fact. Many thought these
headmen a different race than the others, but scientists know that
family, food, and the curious effect of the strenuous massage from
infancy account for the differences. The _omi omi_ of these islands, the
_tarumi_ of Tahiti, and the _lomi lomi_ of the Hawaiians all have a
relation to the _momi-ryoji_, practiced by the tens of thousands of
whistling blind itinerants throughout Japan.
I had a remarkable illustration of the curative merits of _omi omi_
when, having bruised my back by awkwardness in sliding down a rocky
waterfall into a once tabooed pool with Vanquished Often and Exploding
Eggs, I submitted myself to the ministrations of Juno and Vanquished
Often. They would have me in the glare of the early morning sun on
Seventh Man’s _paepae_, and there were gales of laughter as they shouted
out my physical differences from the Marquesans, my excellences, and my
blemishes. On one side and on the other, both squatted, they handled me
as if they understood the locations of each muscle and nerve. They
pinched and pulled, pressed and hammered, and otherwise took hold of and
struck me, but all with a most remarkable skill and seeming exact
knowledge of their method and its results. I was in agony over their
treatment of me, but after a day as well as ever.
Before I was given the _omi omi_, I was bathed by the two ladies with a
care and nicety not to be bought at our best hammams. A tiny penthouse
was made quickly of cocoanut-leaves, and in this was placed a great
wooden trencher of water in which white hot stones were dropped. On a
tiny stool I sat in the resulting steam, the delicious odor of _kakaa_
leaves thrown into the boiling water aiding the vapor in effect on skin
and nerves. Quite ten minutes I was compelled to remain in the
penthouse, my fair jailers remaining obdurate outside despite my
imploring cries to be released, my protestations that I was being
dissolved and would emerge a thing of shreds and patches. When I could
not have stood it another second, my lungs bursting with restraint, and
my body hot enough to hurt my nervously caressing hands, I was suddenly
let out and hurried to the beach, where Vanquished Often rushed with me
into the beating surf.
The sea seemed cold as an Adirondack lake, and I was for swimming beyond
the breakers in fullest enjoyment of the relief, but my doctors would
not allow me another minute and hand in hand rushed me to the chief’s
_paepae_, now my own, for my lenitive kneading. The bruises I had got in
my awkward essay to emulate the agility of Exploding Eggs and Vanquished
Often were deep and painful, but after half an hour of their pounding I
fell asleep and remained unconscious six hours. I was to myself a
celestial musical instrument, a human xylophone, from which houris
struck notes that made the stars whirl, and to the music of which
Vanquished Often danced in the purple moonlight upon a milky cloud.
Their cessation of the _omi omi_ woke me. It was past noon when I joined
them and the whole merry populace of Vaitahu in the warm ocean waves. I
was without pain or stiffness, and reborn to a childhood I had
forgotten.
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