IMPROVEMENT IN HEALTH AND SPIRITS--FELICITY OF THE
TYPEES--THEIR ENJOYMENTS COMPARED WITH THOSE OF MORE ENLIGHTENED
COMMUNITIES--COMPARATIVE WICKEDNESS OF CIVILIZED AND UNENLIGHTENED
PEOPLE--A SKIRMISH IN THE MOUNTAIN WITH THE WARRIORS OF HAPPAR
Day after day wore on, and still there was no perceptible change in the
conduct of the islanders towards me. Gradually I lost all knowledge of
the regular recurrence of the days of the week, and sunk insensibly into
that kind of apathy which ensues after some violent outburst of despair.
My limb suddenly healed, the swelling went down, the pain subsided, and
I had every reason to suppose I should soon completely recover from the
affliction that had so long tormented me.
As soon as I was enabled to ramble about the valley in company with the
natives, troops of whom followed me whenever I sallied out of the house,
I began to experience an elasticity of mind which placed me beyond the
reach of those dismal forebodings to which I had so lately been a prey.
Received wherever I went with the most deferential kindness; regaled
perpetually with the most delightful fruits; ministered to by dark-eyed
nymphs, and enjoying besides all the services of the devoted Kory-Kory,
I thought that, for a sojourn among cannibals, no man could have well
made a more agreeable one.
To be sure there were limits set to my wanderings. Toward the sea my
progress was barred by an express prohibition of the savages; and after
having made two or three ineffectual attempts to reach it, as much to
gratify my curiosity as anything else, I gave up the idea. It was in
vain to think of reaching it by stealth, since the natives escorted me
in numbers wherever I went, and not for one single moment that I can
recall to mind was I ever permitted to be alone.
The green and precipitous elevations that stood ranged around the
head of the vale where Marheyo’s habitation was situated effectually
precluded all hope of escape in that quarter, even if I could have
stolen away from the thousand eyes of the savages.
But these reflections now seldom obtruded upon me; I gave myself up to
the passing hour, and if ever disagreeable thoughts arose in my mind, I
drove them away. When I looked around the verdant recess in which I was
buried, and gazed up to the summits of the lofty eminence that hemmed me
in, I was well disposed to think that I was in the ‘Happy Valley’,
and that beyond those heights there was naught but a world of care
and anxiety. As I extended my wanderings in the valley and grew more
familiar with the habits of its inmates, I was fain to confess that,
despite the disadvantages of his condition, the Polynesian savage,
surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an
infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual existence than
the self-complacent European.
The naked wretch who shivers beneath the bleak skies, and starves among
the inhospitable wilds of Tierra-del-Fuego, might indeed be made happier
by civilization, for it would alleviate his physical wants. But the
voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has
bountifully provided with all the sources of pure and natural enjoyment,
and from whom are removed so many of the ills and pains of life--what
has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? She may ‘cultivate his
mind--may elevate his thoughts,’--these I believe are the established
phrases--but will he be the happier? Let the once smiling and populous
Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives,
answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter
as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible; and the devoutest
Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away
mournfully asking--‘Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five years of
enlightening?’
In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few
and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but
Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in
reserve;--the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries,
the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of
refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human
misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people.
But it will be urged that these shocking unprincipled wretches are
cannibals. Very true; and a rather bad trait in their character it must
be allowed. But they are such only when they seek to gratify the passion
of revenge upon their enemies; and I ask whether the mere eating of
human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only
a few years since was practised in enlightened England:--a convicted
traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike
heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels
dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four
quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and
fester among the public haunts of men!
The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of
death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our
wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are
enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most
ferocious animal on the face of the earth.
His remorseless cruelty is seen in many of the institutions of our own
favoured land. There is one in particular lately adopted in one of the
States of the Union, which purports to have been dictated by the most
merciful considerations. To destroy our malefactors piece-meal, drying
up in their veins, drop by drop, the blood we are too chicken-hearted
to shed by a single blow which would at once put a period to their
sufferings, is deemed to be infinitely preferable to the old-fashioned
punishment of gibbeting--much less annoying to the victim, and more in
accordance with the refined spirit of the age; and yet how feeble is all
language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we
mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude
in the very heart of our population.
But it is needless to multiply the examples of civilized barbarity; they
far exceed in the amount of misery they cause the crimes which we regard
with such abhorrence in our less enlightened fellow-creatures.
The term ‘Savage’ is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I
consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring
up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined
to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is
concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States
as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans
despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.
I once heard it given as an instance of the frightful depravity of a
certain tribe in the Pacific that they had no word in their language
to express the idea of virtue. The assertion was unfounded; but were
it otherwise, it might be met by stating that their language is almost
entirely destitute of terms to express the delightful ideas conveyed by
our endless catalogue of civilized crimes.
In the altered frame of mind to which I have referred, every object that
presented itself to my notice in the valley struck me in a new light,
and the opportunities I now enjoyed of observing the manners of its
inmates, tended to strengthen my favourable impressions. One peculiarity
that fixed my admiration was the perpetual hilarity reigning through the
whole extent of the vale.
There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations, in all
Typee. The hours tripped along as gaily as the laughing couples down a
country dance.
There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the
ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There
were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable,
no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers
perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description and battery
attorneys, to foment discord, backing their clients up to a quarrel,
and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations, everlastingly
occupying the spare bed-chamber, and diminishing the elbow room at the
family table; no destitute widows with their children starving on the
cold charities of the world; no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud
and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word--no
Money! ‘That root of all evil’ was not to be found in the valley.
In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old women, no
cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens, no sour
old bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no
blubbering youngsters, and no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun and
high good humour. Blue devils, hypochondria, and doleful dumps, went and
hid themselves among the nooks and crannies of the rocks.
Here you would see a parcel of children frolicking together the
live-long day, and no quarrelling, no contention, among them. The same
number in our own land could not have played together for the space of
an hour without biting or scratching one another. There you might have
seen a throng of young females, not filled with envyings of each other’s
charms, nor displaying the ridiculous affectations of gentility, nor
yet moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons, but free,
inartificially happy, and unconstrained.
There were some spots in that sunny vale where they would frequently
resort to decorate themselves with garlands of flowers. To have seen
them reclining beneath the shadows of one of the beautiful groves;
the ground about them strewn with freshly gathered buds and blossoms,
employed in weaving chaplets and necklaces, one would have thought
that all the train of Flora had gathered together to keep a festival in
honour of their mistress.
With the young men there seemed almost always some matter of diversion
or business on hand that afforded a constant variety of enjoyment. But
whether fishing, or carving canoes, or polishing their ornaments, never
was there exhibited the least sign of strife or contention among them.
As for the warriors, they maintained a tranquil dignity of demeanour,
journeying occasionally from house to house, where they were always sure
to be received with the attention bestowed upon distinguished guests.
The old men, of whom there were many in the vale, seldom stirred from
their mats, where they would recline for hours and hours, smoking and
talking to one another with all the garrulity of age.
But the continual happiness, which so far as I was able to judge
appeared to prevail in the valley, sprang principally from that
all-pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us be at one time
experienced, the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence.
And indeed in this particular the Typees had ample reason to felicitate
themselves, for sickness was almost unknown. During the whole period of
my stay I saw but one invalid among them; and on their smooth skins you
observed no blemish or mark of disease.
The general repose, however, upon which I have just been descanting,
was broken in upon about this time by an event which proved that the
islanders were not entirely exempt from those occurrences which disturb
the quiet of more civilized communities.
Having now been a considerable time in the valley, I began to feel
surprised that the violent hostility subsisting between its inhabitants,
and those of the adjoining bay of Happar, should never have manifested
itself in any warlike encounter. Although the valiant Typees would often
by gesticulations declare their undying hatred against their enemies,
and the disgust they felt at their cannibal propensities; although they
dilated upon the manifold injuries they had received at their hands, yet
with a forbearance truly commendable, they appeared to sit down under
their grievances, and to refrain from making any reprisals. The Happars,
entrenched behind their mountains, and never even showing themselves on
their summits, did not appear to me to furnish adequate cause for that
excess of animosity evinced towards them by the heroic tenants of our
vale, and I was inclined to believe that the deeds of blood attributed
to them had been greatly exaggerated.
On the other hand, as the clamours of war had not up to this period
disturbed the serenity of the tribe, I began to distrust the truth of
those reports which ascribed so fierce and belligerent a character to
the Typee nation. Surely, thought I, all these terrible stories I have
heard about the inveteracy with which they carried on the feud, their
deadly intensity, of hatred and the diabolical malice with which they
glutted their revenge upon the inanimate forms of the slain, are nothing
more than fables, and I must confess that I experienced something like a
sense of regret at having my hideous anticipations thus disappointed.
I felt in some sort like a ‘prentice boy who, going to the play in the
expectation of being delighted with a cut-and-thrust tragedy, is almost
moved to tears of disappointment at the exhibition of a genteel comedy.
I could not avoid thinking that I had fallen in with a greatly traduced
people, and I moralized not a little upon the disadvantage of having a
bad name, which in this instance had given a tribe of savages, who
were as pacific as so many lambkins, the reputation of a confederacy of
giant-killers.
But subsequent events proved that I had been a little too premature in
coming to this conclusion. One, day about noon, happening to be at the
Ti, I had lain down on the mats with several of the chiefs, and had
gradually sunk into a most luxurious siesta, when I was awakened by
a tremendous outcry, and starting up beheld the natives seizing their
spears and hurrying out, while the most puissant of the chiefs, grasping
the six muskets which were ranged against the bamboos, followed after,
and soon disappeared in the groves. These movements were accompanied
by wild shouts, in which ‘Happar, Happar,’ greatly predominated. The
islanders were now seen running past the Ti, and striking across the
valley to the Happar side. Presently I heard the sharp report of a
musket from the adjoining hills, and then a burst of voices in the same
direction. At this the women who had congregated in the groves, set up
the most violent clamours, as they invariably do here as elsewhere on
every occasion of excitement and alarm, with a view of tranquillizing
their own minds and disturbing other people. On this particular
occasion they made such an outrageous noise, and continued it with such
perseverance, that for awhile, had entire volleys of musketry been fired
off in the neighbouring mountains, I should not have been able to have
heard them.
When this female commotion had a little subsided I listened eagerly for
further information. At last bang went another shot, and then a second
volley of yells from the hills. Again all was quiet, and continued so
for such a length of time that I began to think the contending armies
had agreed upon a suspension of hostilities; when pop went a third gun,
followed as before with a yell. After this, for nearly two hours
nothing occurred worthy of comment, save some straggling shouts from the
hillside, sounding like the halloos of a parcel of truant boys who had
lost themselves in the woods.
During this interval I had remained standing on the piazza of the ‘Ti,’
which directly fronted the Happar mountain, and with no one near me
but Kory-Kory and the old superannuated savages I have described. These
latter never stirred from their mats, and seemed altogether unconscious
that anything unusual was going on.
As for Kory-Kory, he appeared to think that we were in the midst of
great events, and sought most zealously to impress me with a due sense
of their importance. Every sound that reached us conveyed some momentous
item of intelligence to him. At such times, as if he were gifted with
second sight, he would go through a variety of pantomimic illustrations,
showing me the precise manner in which the redoubtable Typees were at
that very moment chastising the insolence of the enemy. ‘Mehevi hanna
pippee nuee Happar,’ he exclaimed every five minutes, giving me to
understand that under that distinguished captain the warriors of his
nation were performing prodigies of valour.
Having heard only four reports from the muskets, I was led to believe
that they were worked by the islanders in the same manner as the Sultan
Solyman’s ponderous artillery at the siege of Byzantium, one of them
taking an hour or two to load and train. At last, no sound whatever
proceeding from the mountains, I concluded that the contest had been
determined one way or the other. Such appeared, indeed, to be the case,
for in a little while a courier arrived at the ‘Ti’, almost breathless
with his exertions, and communicated the news of a great victory having
been achieved by his countrymen: ‘Happar poo arva!--Happar poo arva!’
(the cowards had fled). Kory-Kory was in ecstasies, and commenced a
vehement harangue, which, so far as I understood it, implied that the
result exactly agreed with his expectations, and which, moreover,
was intended to convince me that it would be a perfectly useless
undertaking, even for an army of fire-eaters, to offer battle to the
irresistible heroes of our valley. In all this I of course acquiesced,
and looked forward with no little interest to the return of the
conquerors, whose victory I feared might not have been purchased without
cost to themselves.
But here I was again mistaken; for Mehevi, in conducting his warlike
operations, rather inclined to the Fabian than to the Bonapartean
tactics, husbanding his resources and exposing his troops to no
unnecessary hazards. The total loss of the victors in this obstinately
contested affair was, in killed, wounded, and missing--one forefinger
and part of a thumb-nail (which the late proprietor brought along with
him in his hand), a severely contused arm, and a considerable effusion
of blood flowing from the thigh of a chief, who had received an ugly
thrust from a Happar spear. What the enemy had suffered I could not
discover, but I presume they had succeeded in taking off with them the
bodies of their slain.
Such was the issue of the battle, as far as its results came under my
observation: and as it appeared to be considered an event of prodigious
importance, I reasonably concluded that the wars of the natives were
marked by no very sanguinary traits. I afterwards learned how the
skirmish had originated. A number of the Happars had been discovered
prowling for no good purpose on the Typee side of the mountain; the
alarm sounded, and the invaders, after a protracted resistance, had been
chased over the frontier. But why had not the intrepid Mehevi carried
the war into Happar? Why had he not made a descent into the hostile
vale, and brought away some trophy of his victory--some materials for
the cannibal entertainment which I had heard usually terminated every
engagement? After all, I was much inclined to believe that these
shocking festivals must occur very rarely among the islanders, if,
indeed, they ever take place.
For two or three days the late event was the theme of general comment;
after which the excitement gradually wore away, and the valley resumed
its accustomed tranquility.