At the House of Tari
You will not find Ahu Ahu--under that name--on any chart, and it
would be equally useless to search for Nukutere; yet both islands
exist, and I like their ancient names better than the modern ones.
Glance at your maps and you will see the eastern Pacific dotted
with islands bearing names like Jarvis, Malden, and Starbuck--names
which suggest no more than the thought of some wandering skipper,
immortalizing himself by adding new dangers to the chart. Then think
of Nukutere--the immemorial name of an island known wherever the old
Polynesians gathered to tell their tales; Nukutere: The Object of
the War Fleet's Voyage ... it needs a dull imagination not to feel a
stir.
It was on Nukutere that I found that curious fellow, Tari, at home.
Friends often smile at my passion for wild fowl, yet I owe this
peaceful adventure entirely to a duck. For several days I had been
awaiting a chance to photograph the sky line of the island, and when,
one afternoon, the clouds about the peaks dispersed, I put my camera
into a small outrigger canoe and paddled down the lagoon, on the
lookout for the viewpoint of greatest beauty. I had gone a number of
miles and the sun was low when I found the view I wanted; though the
silhouette of Nukutere was clear-cut, there were clouds in the west
and the light was not strong enough for an instantaneous picture.
The lagoon is narrow at this point; there was nothing to do but
paddle out to the reef and set up my tripod in the shallow wash of
the sea. In this manner I made ten exposures--pretty things they must
have been, with the long evening shadows, the foreshore of dark bush
beyond the water, the high profile of peaks and jagged ridges against
the sky.
I folded the steel tripod and stowed the camera in its case;
just as I pushed off to paddle back to the village I heard the
whimper of a duck's wings in leisurely flight. I have a very fair
acquaintance with the ducks of the northern hemisphere, which winter
in considerable numbers in Hawaii and occasionally drift down as far
as Penrhyn Island, nine degrees south of the equator; but though it
must be well known in scientific quarters, the odd nonmigratory duck
of the South Seas is a puzzle to me. It is an unsocial bird, this
Polynesian cousin of the mallard; a lover of solitude, a haunter
of thick woods and lonely valleys; though I have seen them many
times in the distance, I have been unable to obtain a specimen so
far. I used to wonder how they survived the swarms of bloodthirsty
island rats until a friend wrote me from the Cook group: "On top of
the razor-back ridge behind the plantation, the dogs put up a duck
almost under our feet. I found the nest well hidden in the fern--a
beautifully constructed affair, edged with a coaming of down, curled
inward. There were eight eggs, standing on end and arranged to occupy
the least possible space. When the ducklings appear the old bird must
carry them down one at a time--a thousand feet or more--to the swampy
feeding grounds."
I could tell by the sound of its wings that the duck approaching
me over the lagoon was closer than any I had seen; in my eagerness
for a glimpse I forgot all about cameras and canoes. I flung myself
around to look, intent and open-mouthed. Next moment the outrigger
heaved up with the speed of a rolling porpoise, described a flashing
arc through the air, and smacked heavily into the water closing
over my head. It was a fast bit of comedy. The coral anchor and my
tripod went to the bottom; I caught the camera instinctively and
rose, sputtering, to the surface, where I managed to balance it on
the flat bottom of the canoe. Then, as the water was not deep, and
I had on nothing but a singlet and a _pareu_, I swam down to get the
tripod, and started for shore, pushing the canoe before me. Ahead on
the beach two girls and a boy were dancing and rolling in the sand;
as the water left my ears I could hear their screams of joy. For
the moment I found myself unable to join in the mirth. My thoughts
dwelt on cameras and on a story I had heard the night before--how a
fisherman, not far from where I was, had felt a tug at his waist as
he swam with face submerged, watching the bottom, and turned to see a
shark of imposing size nip off the largest fish on his string.
The closer sight of me seemed to redouble the appreciation of my
audience, but it was not until I was splashing in the shallows
that I was able to smile. Then I saw that the elder of the girls
was Apakura, the wife of Tari. She had been washing clothes at the
mouth of a little stream and came forward, bare-armed and smiling
maliciously, to greet me.
"Ah, you have come to bathe in the sea," she said, as I took her
hand, and at this enormous joke all three fell into such a convulsion
of laughter that they were obliged to sink down on the sand once
more. When she had caught her breath she turned to call her husband:
"_E Tari! E Tari e! Aere mai ikonei!_" A moment later he stepped out
of the bush, rubbing from his eyes the sleep of an afternoon nap, and
I was shaking his hand.
I know Tari rather well, and have spent a good deal of time within
a few miles of where he lives, yet I had been in his house only once
before. This is characteristic of the islands. There is an agreeable
indifference about the relations of white men down here, a careless
friendliness I find pleasanter than the more strained and effusive
sociality of civilized places. In every part of the world, of course,
this tranquil simplicity--the essence of the finest manner--is to
be found among the few who have studied the art of living, but the
average one of us is neither sure enough of himself nor sufficiently
indifferent to the opinion of others; handicapped by an abnormal
sense of obligation, we permit ourselves both to bore and to be
bored. In certain respects the native is a very well-bred man;
perhaps the white intruder has caught something of his manner--or
it may be that distance from home brings life into a truer focus;
in any case, one deals with the white man of the islands without
consciousness of an effort either to entertain or to impress. When
you stop at the house of a strange planter he will offer you a
whisky-and-soda--if you refuse, nothing more will be said of the
matter. At home, with a parching throat, it is quite conceivable
that you might tell your chance host not to bother, looking forward
with hopeful hypocrisy to his persuasion and your own inevitable
acceptance. I think I liked Tari the better for not having asked me
to his house; now that hazard had brought me to the door, he made me
feel that I was really welcome.
The house was set on a little rise of land, with a view of the lagoon
at the end of an avenue of tall coconut palms. The broad veranda,
set with steamer chairs and scarlet-bordered Aitutaki mats, gave on
a garden of small flowering trees--"Frangipani," "_Tiare Tahiti_,"
"Maid of Moorea," "Queen of the Night." Tari showed me to a corner
room, and mixed a rum punch while his wife put buttons on a fresh
suit of drill.
Dressed in his clothes, I strolled into the living room to wait
while he was changing for dinner. The place was large, and one might
have spent hours examining the things it contained--the fruit of
twenty years in the South Seas. There were wreaths of bright-colored
shell--the favorite parting gift of the islands--from the Paumotus,
from Raiatea, from Aitutaki, and Mangaias. There were fans from
Manihiki, woven in patterns of dyed pandanus, and Savage Island fans,
decorated with human hair. Ranged on a series of shelves, I found a
notable collection of _penus_--the taro-mashers of eastern Polynesia,
implements in which the culture of each group expresses itself.
I was able to recognize the pestle of Mangaia, eight-sided and
carved with almost geometrical perfection from a stalactite of pink
lime; the Marquesan _penu_ of dark volcanic stone with its curious
phallic handle; the implement of old Tahiti, gracefully designed
and smoothly finished by a people far removed from savagery; the
rare and beautiful _penu_ of Maupiti--unobtainable to-day--perfect
as though turned on a lathe, and adorned with a fantastic handle of
ancient and forgotten significance. Mother-of-pearl bonito hooks
from a dozen groups were there, and on a table I saw a rare _Toki
Tiki_ from Mangaia, an odd thing which, for want of a better name,
might be called a Peace Adze. It is a slender little tower of carved
wood, set with tiers of windows and surmounted by a stone adze head,
lashed on with wrappings of sennit, above which extend a pair of
pointed ears. The carving--in the close-grained yellow wood of the
Pua--is exquisitely done; I recognized the standard patterns of the
islands--the Shark's Teeth, the Dropping Water, and the intricate
_Tiki Tangata_. The significance of the Peace Adze was religious
and ceremonial; the story goes that when, at the end of a period of
fighting, two Mangaian clans decided to make peace, the adze played
a leading part in the attendant ceremony. A handful of earth was dug
up with its head to show that the ground might now be cultivated,
and the people were told that they might come and go unmolested,
freely as the air through the windowlike openings on its sides. Tari
had real adzes as well--the tools with which trees were chopped down
and canoes hollowed out--stone implements of a perfection I have
never seen elsewhere, carved out of basaltic rock, hard and close as
steel, smoothed by processes at which one can only guess, sharp and
symmetrical as the product of modern machines.
The Marquesan curiosities interested me most of all--relics of
those dark valleys which harbored the most strangely fascinating of
all the island peoples. There were ornaments of old men's beards,
arranged in little sennit-bound tufts, crinkled and yellowish white;
beaked clubs of ironwood, elegantly carved and smooth with countless
oilings; ear pendants cut in delicate filigree from the teeth of
sperm whales; grotesque little wooden gods, monstrous and bizarre;
ceremonial food bowls of _Tamanu_, adorned with the rich and graceful
designs of a culture now forever gone. One felt that the spirits of
forgotten artists hovered about the place, beckoning one back to days
a century before Melville set foot in the valley of Taipi, to scenes
of a strange beauty on which mankind will never look again. Some
day--perhaps in a future less remote than we like to fancy--nature's
careless hand may once more set the stage for a similar experiment,
but the people sequestered in those gloomy islands will be
of another blood, and the result can never be the same. The
Marquesans themselves--if one is to believe the students of antique
mankind--were the result of a racial retrogression; their continental
forebears knew iron and pottery and the culture of rice--things lost
in the eastward push which brought them to the Nine Islands of Iva.
One curious trinket--labeled "Fatu Hiva"--caught my eye; a squat
little figure carved in a sawn-off length of yellow ivory. I examined
it closely; it had the air of being at least a hundred years old,
and the concentric rings of the section showed it to be the tooth
or tusk of some large animal. Where could the Marquesan carver have
obtained such a lump of ivory on which to exercise his skill? Could
it be possible that this was the tusk of an elephant, carved not one
hundred but many centuries ago, and preserved by the people of these
distant islands--an immemorial relic of the days when their ancestors
left Persia or the Indian hills? I looked again; it was large enough
to be part of a small tusk, but the section was flatter than any
elephant ivory I had seen. What could it be? Not the tooth of a
hippopotamus--it was too large for that; not the sword of a narwhal,
which shows a betraying spiral twist. Then I thought of a walrus
tusk, and the story seemed clear. Seventy-five or a hundred years
ago some whaling vessel, after a venture in the northern ice, must
have sailed south and put in at Fatu Hiva for water or wood or fruit.
They had killed walrus off Cape Lisburne or in the Kotzebue Sound
and, as was the habit of whalers, some of the tusks had been kept for
scrimshaw work. Knowing the Polynesian passion for ivory (in Tonga
it was death for any but those of the highest rank to take the teeth
of a stranded sperm whale) it is not difficult to imagine the rest--a
lantern-jawed Yankee harpooner, perhaps, trading his walrus tusk for
a canoeload of fruit or the favors of an exceptionally pretty girl.
I was examining a paddle from Manihiki--a graceful, narrow-bladed
thing, carved out of porcupine wood and set with diamonds of
mother-of-pearl--when Tari came in.
"A pretty paddle, isn't it?" he remarked. "You won't find a more
curious one in the Pacific. Notice the way that reinforcing ridge
runs down the blade from the haft? Everything has a meaning in
primitive stuff of this sort; the original pattern from which this
has descended probably came from a land of little trees, where the
paddles had to be made in two pieces--blade lashed to handle. Look
at the shape of it--more like a Zulu _assegai_ than anything else;
it is a weapon, primarily; a thrust of it would kill a naked man.
The Manihiki people spend a lot of their time in canoes on the open
sea--after bonito by day and flying-fish by night--and those waters
swarm with sharks. They have developed their paddle into a weapon
of defence. The Samoans carried a special shark club for the same
purpose."
I asked his opinion on the disputed question of sharks--whether, in
general, the shark is a real menace to the swimmer or the paddler of
a small canoe.
"I've heard a lot of loose talk," he said; "how learned societies
have offered rewards for a genuine instance of a shark attacking
a man, but I have seen enough to know that there is no room for
argument. Some idiot goes swimming off a vessel in shark-infested
waters, and talks all the rest of his life, perhaps, of the silly
fears of others--never realizing that he owes his life to the fact
that none of the sharks about him chanced to be more than usually
hungry. The really hungry shark is a ravening murderer--dangerous
as a wounded buffalo, reckless as a mad dog.... I have seen one tear
the paddle from the hand of a man beside me and sink its teeth, over
and over again in a frenzy, in the bottom of a heavy canoe. How long
do you suppose a swimmer would have lived? And it's not only the big
sharks that are dangerous. I remember one day when a lot of us were
bathing in Penrhyn lagoon. Suddenly one of the boys gave a shout and
began to struggle with something in the waist-deep water--clouded
with blood by the time I got there. A small tiger shark, scarcely a
yard long, had gouged a piece of flesh out of his leg, and continued
to attack until a big Kanaka seized it by the tail and waded to
the beach, holding the devilish little brute, snapping its jaws and
writhing frantically, at arm's length. As he reached the dry sand the
native allowed his arm to relax for an instant; the shark set its
teeth in his side and tore out a mouthful that nearly cost the man
his life."
The voice of Apakura was summoning us to eat. "_Kaikai!_" she called:
"_Aere mai korua!_" Tari's dining room was a section of the side
veranda, screened off with lattices of bamboo, where we found a table
set for two, fresh with flowers and damask. Apakura sat cross-legged
on a mat near by; she was weaving a hat of native grass and looked
up from her work now and then to speak to the girl who served
us--admonishing, scolding, and joking in turn. Tari followed my
glance, and smiled as he caught the eye of his wife.
"It probably strikes you as odd that she doesn't sit with us," he
said to me. "I tried to get her into the way of it at first, but
it's no good. For generations the women of her family have been
forbidden to eat in the presence of men, and the old _tapu_ dies
hard. Then she hates chairs; when she sits with me she is wretchedly
uncomfortable, and bolts her food in a scared kind of way that puts
me off my feed. It is best to let them follow their own customs;
she likes to sit on the floor there and order her cousin about;
when we've finished they'll adjourn to the cook house for dinner
and discuss you till your ears tingle. Housekeeping down here is
a funny, haphazard business--hopeless if one demands what one had
at home; easy and pleasant if one is willing to compromise a bit.
To a man who understands the natives at all the servant question
does not exist; they will jump at a chance to attach themselves to
your household--the trouble is to keep them away. It isn't wages
they are after; I pay these people nothing at all for cooking and
washing and looking after the place. They like to be where tea and
sugar and ship's biscuit are in plenty, and they like to be amused.
An occasional stranger, coming and going like yourself, gives them
no end of food for talk; I have a phonograph I let them play, and
a seine I let them take out for a day's fishing now and then. Once
a month, perhaps, I kill a pig and give a bit of a party, and once
or twice in a year I get a bullock and let them invite all their
relatives to a real _umukai_. In return for all this they look after
my fifty acres of coconuts, make my copra, do my housework, cooking,
and laundry, and provide me with all the native food I can use. It
strikes me as a fair bargain, from my point of view, at least. It is
understood that they are not to bother me; unless there is work to do
or they want to see me they never set foot in the house.
"My greatest trouble has been to get some idea of regularity into
their heads. These people cannot understand why we prefer to eat our
dinner at the same hour every day. Where contact with the white man
has not changed their habits, they eat whenever they are hungry--at
midnight or at four in the morning, if they chance to be awake. Even
here they can't understand my feelings when dinner is an hour or two
late."
The cousin of Apakura took away the remnants of a dish of raw fish
and brought us a platter heaped with roast breadfruit, taro, yams,
and sweet potatoes, served with a pitcher of _tai akari_--the sea
water and coconut sauce, worthy of a place on any table. It is only
the uncivilized white who turns up his nose at native food; the
island's vegetables are both wholesome and delicious, and cannot
be cooked better than in a Maori oven. A certain amount of European
food is necessary to health, but the sallow, provincial white man,
who takes a sort of racial pride in living on the contents of tins,
need not be surprised that the climate of the islands does not agree
with him. It is the same type, usually with no other cause for pride
than the fact that he chanced to be born white, whose voice is most
frequently heard declaiming on the subject of color. Everywhere
in the islands, of course, the color line exists--a subtle barrier
between the races, not to be crossed with impunity; but the better
sort of white man is ready to admit that God, who presumably made
him, also made the native, and made of the Polynesian a rather fine
piece of work. Tari had stepped across with eyes open, counting the
cost, realizing all that he must relinquish. He is not a man to make
such a decision lightly; in his case the step meant severing the last
material tie with home, giving up forever the Englishman's dreams of
white children and an old age in the pleasant English countryside.
His children--if children came to him--would have skins tinted by a
hundred generations of hot sunlight, and look at him with strange,
dark eyes, liquid and shy--the eyes of an elder race, begotten when
the world was young. His old age would be spent on this remote
and forgotten bit of land, immensely isolated from the ancestral
background to which most men return at last. As the shadows gathered
in the evening of his life there would be long days of reading and
reflection--stretched in a steamer chair on this same veranda, while
the trade hummed through the palm tops and the sea rumbled softly
on the reef. At night, lying wakeful as old men do, in a hush broken
only by the murmur of a lonely sea, his thoughts would wander back--a
little sadly, as the thoughts of an old man must--along a hundred
winding paths of memory, through scenes wild and lovely, savage,
stern, and gay. Dimly out of the past would appear the faces of men
and women--long since dead and already only vaguely remembered--the
companions of his youth, once individually vibrant with the current
of life, now moldering alike in forgotten graves. They would be a
strangely assorted company, Tari's ghosts: men of all the races,
scholars, soldiers, sportsmen, skippers of trading vessels, pearl
divers of the atolls, nurses of the Red Cross, Englishwomen of
his own station in life, dark-eyed daughters of the islands, with
shining hair and the beauty of sleek, wild creatures--bewitching and
soulless, half bold and half afraid. Whether for good or ill, wisely
or unwisely, as the case might be, no man could say that Tari had
not lived; I wondered what the verdict would be when, in the days to
come, he cast up the balance of his life....
Apakura ceased her plaiting and began to measure off the narrow
braid, delicately woven in a pattern of black and white, which
would eventually be sewn in spirals to make a hat--my hat, by the
way, for it had been promised to me weeks before. One fathom, two
fathoms, three fathoms--another two fathoms were needed, work for
the odd moments of a month. Some day--in an uncertain future and on
a distant island, perhaps--the cabin boy of a schooner would step
ashore and present me with a box containing this same hat, superbly
new, decorated with a gay puggree and lined with satin bearing my
initials in silk. Meanwhile, though I would have given much for a new
hat, there was nothing to do but wait. Like other things of native
make, a hat cannot be bought with money; the process of manufacture
is too laborious to be other than a matter of good will. Think of
the work that goes into one of these hats. First of all--far off in
the mountains--the stalks of _aeho_ (_Erianthus floridulus_) must be
gathered. These are split when thoroughly dry, and the two halves
scraped thin as paper before being split again into tiny strips
of fiber less than a sixteenth of an inch wide. A certain amount
of the _aeho_, depending on the pattern to be woven, must now be
dyed--usually black or in a shade of brown. From a dozen to twenty of
these strands--dyed and undyed--are plaited into the flexible braid
of which the hat is built up--a task requiring extraordinary patience
and skill. Such hats are made only for relatives and close friends;
if an unmarried girl gives one to a man the gift has the same
significance as the pair of earrings he would give in return. When a
native boy appears with a new and gorgeous hat, the origin of which
is veiled in doubt, village gossip hums until the truth is known;
even the classic sewing circle of New England can show no faster or
more efficient work than these artless brown women, standing knee
deep in the waters of some dashing stream, prattling, laughing,
shattering the reputations of absent sisters, as they pound and wring
the soapy clothes.
When dinner was over and Tari was filling his pipe in the living
room I took up the lamp for a glance at the titles on his shelves of
books. Side by side with the transactions of the Polynesian Society
and the modern works of S. Percy Smith and McMillan Brown, I found
Mariner's _Tonga_, Abraham Fornander's _Account of the Polynesian
Race: Its Origin and Migration_, Lieut. William Bligh's _Voyage to
the South Seas for the Purpose of Conveying the Bread-fruit Tree
to the West Indies, in His Majesty's Ship the_ "Bounty," and the
_Polynesian Researches_ of William Ellis. I took down a volume of
Ellis; Tari crossed the room to glance over my shoulder at the quaint
title page--it was evident that he loved his books.
"Tahiti was the most interesting of all the islands," he said, as we
sat down, "and the best accounts of old Tahiti are those of Bligh
and Ellis. Bligh wrote from the standpoint of a worldly man and,
though he was unable to speak the language fluently and stopped only
a few months on the island, he has left an extraordinarily vivid
and detailed picture of the native life before European religion
and trade began their work of change. Ellis was a missionary of
the finest sort--broad-minded as religious men go, inspired by the
purest of motives, a close and sympathetic observer, and able to
appreciate much of the beauty and interest of the old life. If you
believe that one branch of mankind is justified in almost forcibly
spreading its religion among the other races, and that trade should
follow the Bible, you will enjoy every page of Ellis. His point of
view concerning temporal matters is summed up in this volume, at
the end of a chapter on Hawaii. Here it is: 'Their intercourse with
foreigners has taught many of the chiefs to prefer a bedstead to the
ground, and a mattress to a mat; to sit on a chair, eat at a table,
use a knife and fork, etc. This we think advantageous, not only to
those who visit them for purposes of commerce, but to the natives
themselves, as it increases their wants, and consequently stimulates
to industry.' There you hear the voice of the mechanical age, which
began a hundred years ago and ended--I rather fancy--when we fired
the last shots of the war. Increase their wants, advertise, speed
up production--whatever the impalpable cost, make the way smooth for
the swift wheels of progress--those are the germs of a disease from
which the world may need another century to recover. But the change
in these islands was only the insignificant corollary of a greater
change throughout the world; Ellis and his kind were no more than the
inevitable instruments of a harsh Providence.
"Ellis's book was published in eighteen thirty-one. During the
eighty-nine years that have passed since that date we have seized
the islands and profited largely by them--as coaling stations, as
naval bases, as sources of valuable raw material, as markets for our
surplus manufactured goods. What have we done for the natives in
return? Instead of the industrious, piously happy, and increasing
communities foreseen by the missionaries as the result of their
efforts, one finds a depressed and dying people, robbed of their old
beliefs and secretly skeptical of the new. We who conduct our wars in
so humane and chivalrous a spirit have taught them to abolish human
sacrifice and to stop the savage fighting which horrified the first
messengers of Christianity, but, in the case of the islands of which
Ellis wrote, the benefits of civilization end here. Infanticide is
now a punishable crime and rarely practiced, but perhaps it is as
well to have children and to kill a certain number of them, as to
be rendered sterile by imported disease. After all, infanticide,
repulsive though it may be, is only a primitive form of the birth
control which is making its appearance in Europe and America, as
the continents--the white man's islands--approach the limit of
population.
"As for true religious faith of the kind which the missionaries
sincerely hoped to instill, that plays in the life of the Kanaka a
part of about the same importance as in the life of the average white
man. Don't think I am cynical in saying this--I respect and envy men
who possess real faith; they are the ones by whom every great task is
accomplished. But the religion of the native is less than skin deep;
his observance of the Sabbath day a survival of the old _tapu_; his
churchgoing and singing of hymns--satisfying the social instinct,
the love of gossip, the desire to be seen in fine clothes--replace
the old-time dance, wrestling matches, and exhibitions of the
_areoi_. You have seen something of the outer islands, where the
people are half savage even to-day, still swayed by what we call
heathen superstition. Now consider Tahiti, where the people for
more than a hundred years have been subjected to exhortations of
an intensity almost unparalleled. If it is possible to inject our
religion into their blood, it must have been accomplished in Tahiti,
but in my opinion the efforts of three generations of missionaries
have produced a result surprisingly small on this island--the most
civilized of the South Pacific--where heathen superstition is far
from dead to-day.
"Before the schooners took to Penrhyn Lagoon we used to spend
the hurricane season in Papeete; I never cared much for towns; I
usually put in the time wandering about the more remote districts.
Civilization has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti. Men
who wear trousers and go to church by day would fear to sleep at
night unless a lamp burned in the house to repel the _varua ino_
and ghastly _tupapau_ of their ancestors. If a girl falls ill the
native doctor--a lineal descendant of the heathen priest--is called
in. 'What have you done during the past week?' he asks.... 'You
spoke harshly to that old woman? Ah, I knew there was a cause!' He
administers a remedy in the form of a certain bath or a sprinkling
with the water of a young coconut, and takes his leave. If the girl
recovers it is a remarkable instance of the doctor's skill; if she
dies it is proof that her offense was too grave to be remedied.
Perhaps a ghost walks and the native doctor is again consulted. 'It
is your wife who comes to trouble you at night? How was she buried?'
Eventually the grave is opened and the body found to be lying face
down; when turned on her back and again covered with earth the lady
is content, and ceases her disreputable prowlings.
"I am not convinced that all of these things are absurdity.... I
told you, when we were on the schooner, about some of my curious
experiences in this group. There are happenings fully as strange
on Tahiti and Moorea. You must have heard of what the natives call
_varua ino_--a vague variety of devil, a sort of earth spirit,
quite unhuman and intensely malignant. The people are not fond of
discussing this subject, and their beliefs have become so tangled
that it is impossible to get a straightforward story, but as nearly
as I can make out, numbers of these _varua ino_ are thought to lie
in wait wherever a man or woman is dying, struggling fiercely with
one another in their effort to catch and devour the departing human
soul. If the spirit makes its escape the first time the ravening
watchers do not give up hope, but linger about the body, to which
the soul is apt to return from time to time during the day or
two following death. The human soul, at this stage, is considered
nearly as malignant and dangerous as the _varua ino_--you can see
what a garbled business it is. Sometimes an earth spirit enters the
corrupted body and walks abroad at night. On one subject the natives
all agree: the struggles of the preying spirits and the human soul
are apt to be marked by splashes and pools of blood--whose blood I
have never learned to my satisfaction.
"A friend of mine--an educated and skeptical Englishman, in whose
word I have the utmost confidence--was the witness of one of these
blood-splashing affairs. He lived on Moorea, just across from Tahiti;
Haapiti was the village, I think. One afternoon he whistled to his
fox terrier and strolled to a near-by house, where the body of a
native (an old fellow he had liked) lay in state, surrounded by
mourning relatives. As he stood on the veranda the dog began to growl
furiously, and at the same moment the oldest man present--a sort of
doctor and authority on spiritual matters--shouted out suddenly that
everyone must leave the house. The native explained afterward that
he had caught a glimpse of something like a small comet--a shapeless
and luminous body, trailing a fiery tail--rushing horizontally
toward the rear of the building. The people gathered outside in
a bit of a panic; the fox terrier seemed to have gone mad on the
porch--alternately cowing and leaping forward with frenzied growls
toward some invisible thing. All at once there was a great racket of
overturned furniture inside the house, and next moment the Englishman
saw gouts of what looked like blood splashing over the outer wall and
the floor of the veranda. The dog was covered--it was a week before
his coat was clean. The net result of the affair was that the veranda
needed a cleaning, a couple of tables were overturned, and the body
of the old man considerably disturbed; but its most curious feature
is the fact that my friend--suspecting native trickery and the
desire to impress a white man--took a specimen of the blood across to
Papeete, where he got the hospital people to examine it. It was human
blood beyond a doubt. What do you make of that?
"The other evening, when I was having a yarn with Apakura, she told
me about another kind of _varua ino_, who figures as the villain
in the tale of a Polynesian Cinderella. It may interest you. A
great many years ago, on Ahu Ahu, there was a man named Tautu--one
of Apakura's family--a renowned fighting man, who dabbled in
sorcery when there were no wars to be fought. Tall, handsome, and
famous, it was no wonder that Tautu was pursued by all the island
girls--scheming sisters, in particular, who went so far as to build
a hut near where he lived. Hoping to catch the eye of the hero, they
took their finest ornaments and robes of tapa and went to live in
the hut, accompanied by their little sister, Titiara, who was to act
as a drudge about the house. Young Titiara had no designs on Tautu,
and she possessed no finery to make herself beautiful in his eyes,
but one day, when she was gathering wood in the bush, he chanced to
pass. Stopping to speak with her, he was struck with her goodness and
beauty, and from that time the two met every day in the forest. The
older sisters, meanwhile, were the victims of a mischievous earth
spirit which haunted the vicinity and visited them in the guise of
Tautu. They were triumphant--when it was known that they had won the
warrior's favors all their friends would be wild with jealousy; they
could not resist preening themselves before their little sister.
'Tautu loves us,' they told her; 'he comes every day when you are
off gathering wood.' 'But that is impossible,' said Titiara, 'for
Tautu is my lover; he meets me each day in the forest.' The older
girls laughed scornfully at this, but Titiara said no more until she
met her lover in the evening. When she told him what her sisters
had said, he laughed. 'It is a _varua ino_,' he informed her, 'a
mischievous spirit whose true appearance is that of a hideous old
man. To-morrow I will prove to your sisters that it is not I who
visit them.' That night Tautu sat up late, weaving a magic net of
hibiscus bark--a net which had the property of causing a spirit to
assume its true shape. Next afternoon Tautu and Titiara stole up
to the house where the spirit, in the form of a splendid warrior,
was talking and laughing with the two sisters. Tautu cast the net;
next moment the spirit was howling and struggling in the magic
meshes, unable to escape, moaning as it shriveled and changed to the
appearance of an old man, graybearded, trembling, and hideous. The
two sisters shrank back in loathing and mortification, while Tautu
told them that he had chosen Titiara to be his wife."
As he finished his story Tari rose, crossed the room to a bookshelf,
and returned to hand me a volume bound in worn yellow leather.
"I'm going to turn in now," he remarked; "we'll go fishing in the
morning if you will plan to stop over. Take this to your room if
you are not sleepy; it is worth running over--Bligh's account of the
voyage of the _Bounty_, published at Dublin in seventeen ninety-two."
Propped up in bed, with a lamp burning on the table beside me, I
opened Bligh's quaint and earnest account of his voyage. The mutiny,
the commander's passage in an open boat from Tonga to Timor, and
the settlement of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island have been made
familiar by a voluminous and sentimental literature, but I had never
before come across the story of Bligh's residence among the natives
of Tahiti, one hundred and thirty-two years ago.
More than any other Eastern island, perhaps, Tahiti was the cradle
of the oceanic race; called the Lap of God by Kamapiikai, the fabled
Hawaiian voyager, who discovered, in the southern group, the fountain
of eternal youth. Knowing something of the island as it is to-day,
I had listened with interest when Tari remarked, "Civilization
has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti." Bligh was a close
observer, blessed with insight and a pleasant sense of humor; at the
time of his visit the people were untouched by European influence. It
is interesting to check his observations against what any traveler
may see nowadays--to judge for oneself how deeply the civilization
of Europe has been able to modify the peculiarities of Polynesian
character.
The family of Pomare, of which the chief Tu (called Otoo by Cook,
Tinah by Bligh) was the founder, owed its rise to power largely to
the friendship of the English. Bligh often entertained Tinah and
his wife, Iddeah, on board the _Bounty_--they must have been amusing
parties. "Tinah was fed by one of his attendants, who sat by him for
that purpose ... and I must do him the justice to say he kept his
attendant constantly employed: there was, indeed, little reason to
complain of want of appetite in any of my guests. As the women are
not allowed to eat in presence of the men, Iddeah dined with some
of her companions about an hour afterward, in private, except that
her husband, Tinah, favored them with his company and seemed to have
entirely forgotten that he had already dined." In his rambles about
the island Bligh noticed precisely what strikes one to-day: "In any
house that we wished to enter we always experienced a kind reception
and without officiousness. The Otaheiteans have the most perfect
easiness of manners, equally free from forwardness and formality.
When they offer refreshments, if they are not accepted, they do not
think of offering them the second time; for they have not the least
idea of that ceremonious kind of refusal which expects a second
invitation." Bligh was not deceived, like the French philosophers
who read Bougainville's account of Tahiti, and rhapsodized about the
beauty of a life free from all restraint; he remarked the deep-rooted
system of class inherent in the island race, a system of which the
outward marks are gone, but which is far from dead to-day. "Among
people so free from ostentation as the Otaheiteans, and whose manners
are so simple and natural, the strictness with which the punctilios
of rank are observed is surprising. I know not if any action, however
meritorious, can elevate a man above the class in which he was born,
unless he were to acquire sufficient power to confer dignity on
himself. If any woman of the inferior classes has a child by an Earee
it is not suffered to live."
Bligh's observations on the gay and humorous character of the people
and their extraordinary levity might have been written yesterday.
"Some of my constant visitors had observed that we always drank His
Majesty's health as soon as the cloth was removed; but they were by
this time become so fond of wine that they would frequently remind
me of the health in the middle of dinner by calling out, 'King
George Earee no Brittanee'; and would banter me if the glass was not
filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and jollity of
these people when they met on board." One day Tinah told Bligh of an
island "to the eastward of Otaheite four or five days' sail, and that
there were large animals upon it with eight legs. The truth of this
account he very strenuously insisted upon and wished me to go thither
with him. I was at a loss to know whether or not Tinah himself gave
credit to this whimsical and fabulous account; for though they have
credulity sufficient to believe anything, however improbable, they
are at the same time so much addicted to that species of wit which we
call humbug that it is frequently difficult to distinguish whether
they are in jest or in earnest." On another occasion, while walking
near a place of burial, Bligh was "surprised by a sudden outcry of
grief. As I expressed a desire to see the distressed person, Tinah
took me to the place, where I found a number of women, one of whom
was the mother of a young female child that lay dead. On seeing us
their mourning not only immediately ceased, but, to my astonishment,
they all burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, and, while we
remained, appeared much diverted at our visit. I told Tinah the woman
had no sorrow for her child, otherwise her grief would not have so
easily subsided, on which he jocosely told her to cry again: they did
not, however, resume their mourning in our presence. This strange
behavior would incline us to think them hard-hearted and unfeeling
did we not know that they are fond parents and, in general, very
affectionate: it is therefore to be ascribed to their extreme levity
of disposition; and it is probable that death does not appear to them
with so many terrors as it does to people of a more serious cast."
When the surgeon of the _Bounty_ died and was buried ashore "some of
the chiefs were very inquisitive about what was to be done with the
surgeon's cabin, on account of apparitions. They said when a man died
in Otaheite and was carried to the Tupapow that as soon as night came
he was surrounded by spirits, and if any person went there by himself
they would devour him: therefore they said that not less than two
people together should go into the surgeon's cabin for some time." I
thought of Tari and his tales of the _varua ino_ ... four generations
of schools and churches have failed to work a metamorphosis.
* * * * *
I read on till drowsiness overcame me and the pages blurred before
my eyes. It was late and the night was very calm; a vagrant night
breeze, wandering down from the mountains, rustled gently among
the fronds of the old palms around the house. When the rustling
ceased--so faint as to be almost inaudible--I could hear the far-off
whisper of the sea. The world about me was asleep; I roused myself
with an effort, adjusted the mosquito net, and blew out the lamp.
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