In the Valley of Vaitia
It is not easy to analyze the magic which cozens every traveler into
believing that he is the first to see Tahiti with clear eyes--one
feels that it is made up of nature in a mood of unearthly loveliness;
of a sense of ancient and unalterable life; of a realization that
strange beliefs persist under a semblance of Christianity; of the
lure of a race whose confidence the white man can never fully gain.
The mail steamers, the wireless, the traders, the scattering of
French officials--these things are a mere play of shadows on the
surface. Even the churches, I was tempted to say; but the church
plays more than a shadowy part in the life of the native, whose
religion, at the present day, is a singular blending of Christian
doctrine and old heathen belief. The Tahitian reads his Bible (he has
no other book) and sings loudly every Sunday in church; but the dead
are still things of horror in his mind; sorcerers--masquerading as
doctors--still carry on a brisk trade; and Tautau, the Great-headed,
is still a living presence in the valley of Punaruu.
When the people of the Society Islands accepted Christianity a
century ago they did so with reservations of which the missionaries,
perhaps, were not aware. Here and there, as at Faatoai on Moorea,
there was a burning of idols, but a great mass of material--old
gods and heathen weapons--was stored in secure hiding places among
the hills. To-day, after three generations of increasing European
influence, hundreds of natives know of these caves and repair to
them for purposes of their own, yet a white man might spend his life
on Tahiti without a glimpse of a cinnet-bound _orooro_ or a slender
ironwood spear.
My friend Airima is typical. The widow of a Yankee skipper, the owner
of a neat wooden villa in Papeete, where she appears regularly, on
her way to church, in shoes, stockings, and a black-silk gown, she
finds it necessary, from time to time, to cast off the unnatural
manners of Europe and live as she was meant to live; to be herself,
an elderly and delightful savage. When the mood comes she closes
the villa in Papeete, gathers the willing members of her family, and
repairs to her native house, far off on the peninsula of Taiarapu.
The house of Airima stands on the river bank, shaded by a pair of
mango trees, dark green and immemorially old. The roof is thatched
with braided fronds of coconut; breezes play through the lofty single
room, bare of furniture and floored with mats spread on white coral
gravel, leveled and packed. Past the veranda, on which the family
sleeps through the warm hours of the day, the river flows out gently
to the sea; a broad, still water, deep and glassy clear, peopled with
darting shoals of fish--mullet, young pampano, and _nato_, the trout
of the South Seas. Opposite the river mouth the reef is broken by a
pass, through which the steady lines of combers sweep in to crash and
tumble on the bar. Morning and afternoon the breakers are alive with
naked children, shouting and glistening brown in the sunlight as they
ride the waves.
Inland, the valley marking the river's course is lost in a maze of
broken and fantastic peaks; seaward, bordering the green and blue
of the lagoon, the snowy line of the reef stretches off endlessly;
and beyond a three-league expanse of bright sea the headlands of
Tahiti Nui rise in vast, swelling curves, up and up to the perpetual
clouds which veil the heights. Under a bright sun at midday, when
the palm tops toss to the trade which paints the lagoon--in the deep
passes and over the patches of sandy bottom--with ruffled sapphire
and emerald, and sets the whitecaps to dancing beyond the reef, or
in the calm of night, with the moon hanging low over pinnacles of
basalt--when the polished surface of the lagoon is broken by the
plunge and swirl of heavy fish, and native songs, rising and falling
in savage cadences, float out across the water--it is a place not
easily forgotten.
* * * * *
It was still dark when we rose--Maruae and I; the brothers of Maruae
had returned from the reef, and the ovens behind the cook house were
smoking, for in these places the hour of the day's first meal is set
by the return of the fishermen. I took one shuddering plunge into
the river, dressed myself in a shirt, a waistcloth, and a pair of
hobnailed boots, and squatted with the rest to consume a fresh-caught
mackerel and a section of breadfruit, dipped in the common bowl of
sauce.
Maruae sucked his fingers and stood up, calling to the dogs. Airima
glanced at me over the back of a large fish she was gnawing, holding
it with both hands. "Go, you two," she said. "You stay," replied
Maruae, as he turned to take the path to the mountains. The oceanic
tongue possesses no other words of parting.
We followed the river across the flatlands of the coast. Dawn was
flushing in the east; the profile of lofty ridges, fern clad and
incredibly serrated, grew sharp against the sky. The mynahs were
awakening; from the thick foliage of orange and mango trees came
their extraordinary morning chorus--a thousand voices, whistling,
screaming, and chattering that it was time the assembly broke up for
the foraging of another day. In one place, where a turn of the path
brought us suddenly to the edge of a still reach of water, a pair
of native ducks (_Anas superciliosa_) rose vertically on beating
wings and sped off over the palm tops. A little farther on, where
volcanic bowlders began to appear through the alluvial soil and the
river leaped and foamed over the first rapids, a family of Tahitian
jungle fowl, led by a splendid burnished cock, sprang out of the
grass and streamed away, in easy, rapid flight, toward the hills. The
dogs bounded forward and stopped, whining as they watched the wild
chickens dwindle to speeding dots.
The groves of coconut palms and open pasture land were behind us
now; the valley was narrowing, hemmed in by thousand-foot cliffs
to which a tangle of vegetation clung. The river had become a
torrent, boiling and waist deep--plunging over cataracts, roaring
down dark rapids under a roof of matted trees: giant hibiscus a yard
through, too remote to tempt the ax of the canoe builder; candle
nut, Barringtonia, and mapé, the island chestnut, with boles like
fluted columns of a temple. The trail wound back and forth, across
the river, over the trunks of fallen trees, around masses of rock
tumbled from the cliffs above, mounting higher and higher into the
heart of the island. Once, as we stopped to rest, I looked back
and caught a glimpse of the sea--a wedge of blue, far behind us
and below. The dogs had begun to range ahead, for they knew that
any moment we might start a sounder of wild pig. I was growing
tired--it was not easy to follow Maruae at his own gait. He walked
with the rapid, springy tread of a mountain man; when he stooped to
clear a low-branching limb or lopped off a section of creeper with
an easy swing of his machete I admired the play of muscles on his
back, rippling powerfully under the smooth, brown skin. Silken and
unblemished--unless it be by scars--the skin of these people is not
like ours, but softer and closer in texture; seeming, like marble, to
glimmer with reflected light.
The gorge grew narrower; we rounded a buttress of jointed basalt and
came suddenly into the light and open of a lonely valley. A quarter
of a mile wide and twice as long, set high above the sea, and hemmed
in by untrodden ridges, it lay here uninhabited and forgotten, in a
silence broken only by the roar of savage cataracts and the far-off
bellowing of wild bulls. Yet man had been here. Along the base of the
cliffs we found the terraced stone of his dwellings, the blocks of
volcanic rock pried apart by the roots of huge old trees.
Maruae was squatting on his heels beside me, contemplating in silence
these relics of an older time. Finally he turned his head. "Those
stones are very old," he remarked; "they have been here always, since
the beginning. Men placed them there and men slept on them, but not
the men of my people." My thoughts dwelt on the old idle tales I
had heard--of the Lizard men, of the dark-skinned aborigines, the
Manahune, said to have been in possession of the land when the eyes
of Polynesian voyagers first rested on cloudy Orofena. There were
other tales, too, of a later day; of a tribe of men dwelling in the
valleys, neither tasting fish nor setting foot on the beach except
when, at certain intervals, they were permitted to come down to
worship by the sea. Even to-day it needs no effort of the imagination
to see two distinct types among the island people: men and women
of the kind one considers typically Polynesian--tall, clean limbed,
and light brown, with clear, dark eyes, straight or waving hair, and
heads not differing greatly from the heads of Europeans; and another
kind, of a negroid or Melanesian cast--short, squat, and many shades
darker in complexion, thick-lipped and apish, with muddy eyes, kinky
hair, and flattened, undeveloped heads. And, strangely enough, after
more than a century of missions and leveling foreign influence,
the dark and awkward people seem still to fill the humbler walks of
life--they are the servants and dependents, the feeders of pigs, the
carriers of wood and water. Great stature, physical beauty, and light
complexion are still the hall marks of aristocratic birth. Writing
of the islands a hundred years ago, old Ellis, the often-quoted,
closest observer of them all, remarked: "It is a singular fact in
the physiology of the inhabitants of this part of the world that the
chiefs, and persons of hereditary rank and influence of the islands,
are, almost without exception, as much superior to the peasantry or
common people in stateliness, dignified deportment, and physical
strength as they are in rank and circumstances, although they are
not elected to their station on account of their personal endowments,
but derive their rank and elevation from their ancestry. This is the
case with most of the groups of the Pacific, but peculiarly so in
Tahiti and the adjacent isles. The father of the late king was six
feet four inches high; Pomare was six feet two. The present king of
Raiatea is equally tall. ... Their limbs are generally well formed,
and the whole figure is proportioned to their height, which renders
the difference between the rulers and their subjects so striking
that Bougainville and some others have supposed they were a distinct
race, the descendants of a superior people, who at a remote period
had conquered the aborigines and perpetuated their supremacy." There
is a curious inconsistency in the matter of complexion, for in the
old days a dark skin was considered the sign of a strong, warlike,
and masterly man. Ellis records an extract from an old song: "If
dark be the complexion of the mother, the son will sound the conch
shell"; and yet, on the same page, he observes that "the majority of
the reigning family in Raiatea are not darker than the inhabitants of
some parts of southern Europe."
While Maruae and I rested among the ruins of the ancient settlement
the dogs had been more usefully engaged. My musings were disturbed
by a sudden burst of squeals, punctuated by excited yelpings. Maruae
sprang to his feet, long knife in hand. It was only a small pig, a
sixty-pounder, but he was bursting fat, stuffed with Vi apples fallen
from the great tree under which he had been feeding. The dogs had
him by the ears when we arrived; a thrust of the machete put an end
to his short and idyllic life. I hung him from a branch and skinned
him while Maruae went off in search of _fei_. Presently he returned,
carrying on his shoulder a stout pole of hibiscus, from either
end of which swung a bunch of the mountain plantains, like huge,
thick bananas, the size of quart bottles and bright yellowish red.
There was a clump of palms near by, another sign, perhaps, of man's
former occupation--the relics of unnumbered vegetable generations;
we had coconuts to drink, pork and _fei_ were at hand, and plenty
of fresh-water crayfish to be had in the river. In the islands, the
obtaining of food is always the signal for a meal. Maruae beckoned to
me and led the way to the river, where he readjusted his waistcloth
to leave a kind of apron hanging in front and plunged up to his
armpits in the still water. With the apron spread as a trap for the
darting crayfish, he moved slowly along the grassy and overhanging
bank of the stream, stopping every moment or so to hand a struggling
victim up to me. This little fresh-water lobster is one of the most
delicious shellfish in the world--of the same dimensions as the
French ecrivisse, and not unlike it in flavor. In fifteen minutes we
had enough, and the work of preparing our meal began.
I gathered wood and started a fire against a face of rock. Maruae
cut a section of giant bamboo, half filled it with water, threw
in the crayfish, and stood it beside the fire to boil. Our meal
was genuinely primitive; I had cigarettes, matches, and a paper of
salt stowed in the tuck of my _pareu_--excepting our knives, we had
nothing else that the rudest of savages might not have possessed.
Turning up the earth with his machete, my companion scraped out
a shallow trench--a Maori oven. He set a ring of stones about the
edge, lined the inside with pebbles, and filled the whole with coals
from our camp-fire. While the coals glowed, heating the earth and
stones, he cut off a loin and hind-quarter of pork, wrapped the meat
carefully in plantain leaves, and selected half a dozen of the riper
plantains for our meal. Finally, when the oven was thoroughly hot,
he scraped away the coals from the middle, laid in the leaf-wrapped
pork, surrounded by a ring of plantains, pushed the hot stones close
to the food, and covered the whole with a thick layer of plantain
leaves. We ate the crayfish--boiled to a bright scarlet--while the
balance of our meal was cooking. I added salt to the boiled-down
liquor in the bottom of the bamboo, and dipped in this natural sauce.
The first course whetted our appetites for the tender meat and juicy
plantains which soon came from the oven.
As we lay smoking after our meal I could see that Maruae had
something in his mind and was debating whether or not to speak.
Finally he began, cautiously and with an air of skeptical restraint
at first, but with more and more assurance as he saw that I listened
seriously to his story.
"The old people say," he remarked, pointing to the head of the
valley, where the cliffs narrowed to a deep crack through which the
river rushed, "that far up in this same valley, beyond the upper
gorge you see, a spirit dwells, one of the heathen spirits which are
as old as the land. You and I may not believe in these things, but
it is good, when the evenings are long, to listen to the stories of
the old men. The name of this spirit is Tefatu; some call him _varua
ino_, saying that he dogs the footsteps of the living and preys upon
the souls of the newly dead, but that is not true, for many times in
the memory of my fathers he has been known to aid those in perplexity
or distress. The old men believe that if a traveler, lost in these
mountains at nightfall, calls on Tefatu for succor, the spirit will
appear before him in the likeness of a pale, moving fire, and lead
him in safety down to the sea. Once in sight of the sea, the man
must cry out in a loud voice, 'You have aided me, Tefatu, and I
am content; stop here and I will go on my way.' It is not good to
neglect these words of parting. Sometimes he is seen at night, flying
from ridge to ridge of the mountain--a great glowing head, trailing a
thin body of fire. Long ago, during the childhood of my grandmother,
Tefatu left this land for a space of years; men said that he had
flown to Hawaii, but now he is returned beyond a doubt. High up among
the cliffs I found the cave in which he sleeps by day.... These eyes
of mine have seen the Old Lord lying there among the whitened heads
of men--I looked and turned away quickly, for my stomach was cold
with fear.
"I cannot tell you clearly," Maruae went on, in answer to my obvious
question, "for I was greatly afraid. It seemed to me that he was
a figure of wood, longer and thinner than a man, black with age,
covered with carved patterns, and bound, in places, with close
wrappings of _napé_--the fine sennit my people have forgotten how
to make. The place was full of bones; scores of men had been slain
and their bodies offered there, as was the custom of our old kings.
Once, not many years ago, a wise man came here from the islands of
Hawaii--an old man, bearded and wearing spectacles. It was his work
to write down the names of our ancestors, and he spoke our tongue,
though haltingly and with a strange twist. He lived with us for a
time and we grew fond of him, for he was a simple man, who made us
laugh with his jokes and was kind to the children. One evening I told
him how I had found the place of Tefatu. As I spoke his eyes grew
bright behind their windows of glass, and when I had done he begged
me, in great excitement, to lead him to the cave--offering a hundred
of your dollars if I could prove that I had spoken true words. I
was younger then, and in need of money, for I was courting a girl.
We went together into the mountains, but as we drew near the place
something within me made me hesitate and I grew afraid. In the end
I deceived that man who was my friend, telling him that I could not
find the way. He was indeed a wise man; another would have mocked me
for a liar and a teller of idle tales, but he only smiled, looking
at me kindly--he knew that my words were true and that I feared to
betray the sleeping place of the Old Lord."
Maruae rose to his feet with the sigh of a man who has eaten well
and is deprived of his rightful siesta. He shouldered his ponderous
load of _fei_--which I could scarcely raise from the ground--and led
the way toward the sea, while I followed, bearing the remnants of the
pig. It was noon when we reached the flatlands of the coast.
A quarter of a mile above the house of Airima we stopped to watch
a large canoe, loaded with a mound of seine, gliding up the river,
followed by a fleet of smaller craft. An old woman stood in the
bow, directing the proceedings with shrill volubility; she was
the proprietor of the net, a village character at once kindly and
tyrannical--widow of one chief and mother of another. As her canoe
drew abreast of us she gave the command to halt and spread the net.
The river at this point is almost without current, very still and
clear; Maruae and I sat on the high bank, too tired to do more than
play the part of spectators.
They grounded the big canoe just below where we sat, putting one
end of the seine ashore and paddling slowly across the river while
the net was laid out in a deep, sagging curve downstream. One after
another the smaller canoes were beached, and the people, half naked
and carrying spears, ran along the bank to take to the water a few
hundred yards above. The river was alive with them, splashing and
shouting as they drove the fish toward the trap. Next moment the
bright shoals began to appear beneath us, the sunlight glinting
on burnished sides as they darted this way and that by hundreds,
seeking a way of escape. A run of mullet flashed downstream, saw the
net, turned, and were headed back toward the sea. A series of cries
went up--"_Aué! Aué!_"--as fifty or sixty of the beautiful silvery
fish leaped the line of floats and dashed away to safety. The old
headwoman, dressed in a Mother Hubbard of respectable black and a
rather handsome hat, was swimming easily in three fathoms of water;
nothing escaped her watchful eye.
"_E ara!_" she shouted, angrily; "the best fish are getting away!
Hurry, you lazy ones--splash the water below the net, or we shall not
have a mullet left! Remember that when the haul is over he who has
not worked shall have no fish."
As the line of beaters drew near, the men in the big canoe paddled
upstream and across behind them, throwing out net as they went,
until the frightened fish and a score of swimmers were encircled.
The two ends of the seine were now close together on the bank, and
half a dozen men began to haul in with a will, their efforts causing
the circle to narrow slowly and steadily. Looking down from the
high bank, one could see children of ten or twelve, stark naked,
and carrying tiny spears in their hands, swimming like frogs a
fathom deep in the clear water, pursuing the darting fish. Now and
then a youngster came to the surface with a shrill cry of triumph,
holding aloft the toy spear on which was transfixed a six-inch fish.
The people of the islands, as a rule, are neither fast nor showy
swimmers; one can see prettier swimming any summer afternoon on the
Long Island shore, but the Polynesian is at home in the water in a
way the white man can never match. I watched an old woman, all of
seventy and wearing a black blouse girded tightly to her waist with
a _pareu_, treading water at the lower end of the net, where the fish
were beginning to concentrate. She was as much at her ease as though
she had been lying on her veranda exchanging gossip with a neighbor.
Each time she thought the headwoman's eyes were turned away she
reached over the net, seized a fish, and stuffed it into her blouse,
until a flapping bulge hung down over her _pareu_. But old Tinomana's
eyes were sharp. "Enough," she cried, half laughing and half in
anger, "_aué, tera vahine e!_ Perhaps she thought to get a string of
fish, too, for that worthless son-in-law of hers!"
At length the seine lay in two great piles on the beach, and only
a bulging pocket, filled with a pulsating mass of silver, remained
in the river. Under the direction of Tinomana the fish were divided
into little piles, strung on bits of hibiscus bark, and apportioned
among the people, according to the size of their families and the
amount of help they had given in the haul. For herself she reserved
a considerable share, for her household was large, and as the owner
of the net she was entitled to a full half--more than she loaded into
the big canoe.
It was early afternoon when we laid down our burdens in the cook
house and stripped for a swim. The others were awakening from their
siesta; a flock of brown children, all vaguely related to the family
of Airima, followed us to the river, carrying miniature surf boards.
Next moment they were in the water, splashing and shouting as they
paddled downstream toward where the surf broke on the bar. Tehinatu,
the pretty sister of Maruae, passed us with a rush and leaped feet
first from the high bank. She rose to the surface thirty yards away,
shouting a challenge to catch her before she could reach the opposite
shore. Her brother and I dove together, raced across the river, and
had nearly overtaken the girl when she went under like a grebe. I was
no match for her at this game; under water she could swim as fast as
I, and was a hundred times more at home. I gave up the pursuit and
landed for a sunning among the warm rocks of the point.
Out where the seas reared for the landward rush the black heads of
children appeared and disappeared; I could hear the joyous screams
of others, flattened on their boards and racing toward me, buried in
flying spray. The old woman I had seen helping herself to fish was
coming down the river, paddling an incredibly small canoe, laden with
an enormous bunch of bananas and four kerosene tins of water. She
lived a mile down the coast and, like many of her neighbors, braved
the surf daily to supply her house with fresh water from the river.
The gunwale of her canoe seemed to clear the water by no more than
a couple of inches; I watched with some anxiety, thinking of the
feelings of an American grandmother in the same situation.
She ceased to paddle at the river mouth and watched her chance,
while the frail dugout rose and fell in the wash of half a dozen big
seas. Then in a momentary lull she dug her paddle into the water.
I sat up to watch; a boy standing in the shallows near by shouted
encouragement. At first I thought that she had chosen her moment
well. The canoe passed the white water, topped a little wave without
swamping, and was seemingly out of danger; but suddenly a treacherous
sea sprang up from nowhere, rearing a tossing crest. It was too
late to retreat--certain disaster lay ahead. Stoically, without a
sign of dismay, the paddler held her craft bow on; the canoe rose
wildly against the foaming wall, seemed to hang for an instant almost
vertically, and then canoe, cargo, and old woman disappeared in
the froth. The boy screamed in ecstasy as he galloped through the
shallows to lend a hand. The other children ceased their play and
soon the canoe and its recovered cargo were brought ashore. They
emptied the dugout and filled the tins with fresh water; I heard
the old woman laugh shrilly as she wrung her clothes on the beach.
Presently, coached by a dozen amused spectators, she made a second
attempt, and passed the surf without a wetting; when I saw her last
she was paddling off steadily to the west.
I was dozing among the rocks when a ringing whistle startled me
and I looked up to see a bird like a large sandpiper alight on the
beach and begin to feed, running briskly after the receding waves or
springing into the air for a short flight when threatened by a rush
of water. It was a wandering tattler, and no bird was ever better
named. Solitary in its habits, except in the breeding season, when it
resorts to northern lands so remote that its nest and eggs are still
(I believe) unknown, it travels south at the approach of winter,
making lonely passages across some of the widest stretches of ocean
in the world ... to Hawaii, to the Galapagos, to the Marquesas, and
probably to the remote southern islands of Polynesia. What obscure
sense enables the migrating bird to follow its course far out of
sight of land? In France, I have flown side by side with wild geese,
heading steadily southward above a sea of clouds. It seemed to me
that--like the pilot of an airplane--they might guide themselves,
in a general way, by the sun, the stars, or the look of the land
below--an idea borne out by the fact that geese become lost and
confused in a fog. But in considering a bird like the carrier pigeon
or the tattler, all such theorizing comes to an end. No general sense
of north and south could guide the tattler to the lonely landfalls
of the South Pacific; his wanderings--like the migration of the
golden plover, or the instinct of the shearwater, which sends him
unerringly, on the darkest night of storm, to his individual burrow
in the cliffs--must be classed among the inexplicable mysteries of
nature.
* * * * *
On the road which passes close to the house of Airima I found
Tehinatu in conversation with the driver of a Chinese cart. She
was bargaining for a watermelon; the Chinaman stood out for three
francs--she offered two.
"Enough of talking," she said, firmly; "the melon is the best you
have, but it is green. I will give two francs."
"A _toru toata_," muttered the proprietor of the melon,
indifferently. ("_Toata_" means a franc, but is obviously a
corruption of quarter, for the dollar passed current here long before
the money of France.)
"Look at my clothes," pleaded the deceitful girl, changing her
tactics suddenly. "I am a poor woman who cannot afford to pay the
prices you expect from the chief. Come, dear _Tinito_, give me the
melon for two francs."
The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders and glanced at me. The glint in
his narrow eye might have meant, "Ah, these women--what's the use!"
He sighed; for a moment, while Tehinatu looked at him pleadingly, he
was silent.
"Take the melon," he said, "and give me two francs; I must be on my
way. But do not think you have deceived me, cunning woman; I know
that you are not poor, for only yesterday your brother sold the copra
from your land."
Without a sign of embarrassment the girl opened her hand and held
up a hundred-franc note. "Ah, you are rich," remarked the Chinaman,
as he undid an oilcloth wallet and stripped the change from a
substantial roll of bills. "I knew it. Are you not ashamed to
practice such deceit?" But Tehinatu only tucked the melon under her
arm with a triumphant smile.
It is a curious study to watch the contact of Chinese and Polynesian,
races separated by the most profound of gulfs, yet possessing the
meeting ground of a common love of bargaining. All through the
French islands you will find Chinamen, scattered singly or in little
groups--through the windward and leeward Societies; the Marquesas;
among the distant atolls of the Paumotu; in the remote Gambiers;
in Tupuai, Rurutu, and lonely Rimatara. They are keepers of small
stores, for the most part, where you may see them interrupted at
their eternal task of copra making to exchange a box of matches for
a single coconut or to haggle for a quarter of an hour over a matter
of five sous. Patient, painstaking, and unobtrusive--existing in
inconceivable squalor, without the common pleasures which enable most
of us to tolerate our lives--they seem to be impelled by motives far
more profound than the longing for material gain, by a species of
idealism equally incomprehensible to the native and to the visitor
of European race. It is not beyond possibility that in the course of
a few more generations it will be the native islander who lingers
here and there, isolated in communities principally Chinese; for
the islanders, superb physically, are the least prolific of men,
while the weedy little _Tinito_, who brings his own women with him,
or succeeds, with his own peculiar knack, in obtaining women from a
population which regards him with amused contempt, surrounds himself
with children in as short a time as nature allows. I have sometimes
thought that the secret of the Chinaman's dogged and self-denying
labors might lie here--traceable to his cult of ancestor worship:
to become a revered ancestor one must have children, and in order
to bring up properly a large family of children one must spend one's
life in unceasing toil.
I doubt that Europeans in large numbers will ever be tempted to
make the islands their home; the life is too alien, the change
too great. As things are, the relation of Polynesian and Chinese
amounts to a subtle contest for the land--a struggle of which both
parties are aware. The native, incapable of abstract thought, feels
and resents it vaguely; to the Chinaman, whose days are spent in
meditation undisturbed by the automatic labors of his body, the issue
is no doubt clear cut. The native is by far the more attractive of
the two--clean, kindly, selfish, jolly, childish, well bred, and
pleasing to the eye; but the Chinaman possesses the less attractive
qualities which make for the survival of a race--the industry, the
unselfishness, the capacity to live for an idea--and in the end, if
only by force of numbers, he will win. Looking into the future, one
can see the Eastern islands populated by Chinese, as our own islands
of Hawaii have been peopled with immigrants from Japan. "They are
dying, anyway, and they won't work," the commercial gentleman will
tell you; "here is rich cane land, needing only labor to produce
bountifully--and the world needs sugar." Perhaps this view is
correct--for myself, I feel that the question is debatable. There
are certain parts of the world--like our American mountains, deserts,
and lonely stretches of coast--which seem planned for the spiritual
refreshment of mankind; places from which one carries away a new
serenity and the sense of a yearning for beauty satisfied. Ever since
the days of Cook the islands of the South Sea have charmed the white
man--explorers, naturalists, traders, and the rough crews of whaling
vessels; the strange beauty of these little lands, insignificant
so far as commercial exploitation is concerned, seems worthy of
preservation. And the native, paddling his outlandish canoe or
lounging in picturesque attitudes before his house, is indispensable
to the scene. If the day comes when his canoe lies rotting on the
beach and his house is tenanted by industrious Chinese--though the
same jagged peaks rise against the sky and the same sea thunders
lazily along the reef--when the anchor drops and the call comes to go
ashore, I, for one, shall hesitate.
In the Cook group, six hundred miles west of Tahiti, the prospect
is less depressing, for the British have adopted a policy of
exclusion and made it impossible for the native to sell his land.
The Cook-Islander, reinforced here and there with a dash of white
blood, and undiscouraged by a competition he is not fitted to meet,
seems to be holding his own. The reason is clear--the native has been
little tampered with, left in possession of his land, and protected
rigidly against epidemics like the influenza of 1918, which ravaged
the island populations wherever infected vessels were permitted
to touch. Imported disease, exploitation of the land, and coolie
immigration--these are the destroying forces from which the native
must be preserved if a shadow of the old charm is to linger for the
enjoyment of future generations of travelers.
Following Tehinatu toward the house, I thought to myself how
wonderfully the island charm had been preserved here on the peninsula
of Taiarapu. We were within fifty miles of Papeete, where business is
carried on, and steamers call, and perspiring tourists walk briskly
about the streets; yet here, in this lonely settlement by the lagoon,
civilization seemed half a world away. When I walked abroad the
sight of a white man brought the people to their doors, and bands of
children followed me, staring and bright eyed, with interest.
On the veranda children surrounded us while the girl cut and
distributed thin slices of her melon. There is a fascination in
watching these youngsters, brought up without clothes and without
restraint, in an environment nearly as friendly as that of the
original human pair. Once they are weaned from their mothers'
breasts--which often does not occur until they have reached an age
of two and a half or three--the children of the islands are left
practically to shift for themselves; there is food in the house, a
place to sleep, and a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool--that
is the extent of parental responsibility. The child eats when it
pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself with no other
resources than its own. As it grows older certain light duties
are expected of it--gathering fruit, lending a hand with fishing,
cleaning the ground about the house--but the command to work is
casually given and as casually obeyed. Punishment is scarcely
known; yet under a system which would ruin forever an American or
English child the brown youngster flourishes with astonishingly
little friction--sweet tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom
quarrelsome. The small boy tugs at the net or gathers bait for the
fishermen, seemingly without a thought of drudgery; the small girl
tends her smaller sister in the spirit of playing with a doll.
Perhaps the restless and aggressive spirit which makes discipline
necessary in bringing up our own children is the very quality that
has made the white race master of the world; perhaps the more hostile
surroundings of civilization have made necessary the enforcement of
prohibitory laws.
I filled my pipe and lay smoking on a mat, with an eye on the
youngsters at their play. For the time being, a little girl, at the
most attractive period of childhood, was the center of interest. One
of her front teeth was loose; she had tied a bit of bark to it and
was summoning up courage for a determined pull. A boy stole up behind
her, reached over her shoulder, and gave the merciful jerk; next
moment he was dancing around her, waving the strip of bark to which
the tooth was still attached. The owner of the tooth began to sob,
holding a hand over her mouth, but her lamentations ceased when a
larger boy shouted, seriously, "Give her the tooth and let her speak
to the rat!" The small girl trotted to the edge of the bush, where I
heard her repeat a brief invocation before she flung the tooth into
a thicket of hibiscus. I knew what she was saying, for I had made
inquiries concerning this children's custom--probably as old as it
is quaint. It is a sort of exchange; the baby tooth is thrown among
the bushes and the rat is invoked to replace it with one as white and
durable as his own. The child says:
"Thy tooth, thy tooth, O rat, give to the man;
The tooth, the tooth of the man, I give to the rat."
No doubt the games of children everywhere are very much the same; in
the islands, at any rate, an American child would soon find itself at
home. The boys walk on stilts, play tag, blindman's buff, prisoner's
base, and a game called _Pere Pana_, like what we called Pewee when
I was a youngster in California--almost exactly as these things are
done at home. The girls play cat's cradle, hopscotch, jackstones, and
jackstraws--often joining in the rougher games of their brothers.
One curious game, evidently modern, and perhaps originated by the
children of missionaries, is called _Pere Puaa Taehae_ (the Game of
the Wild Beast). The boys and girls, who pretend to be sheep, stand
in line one behind the other, clinging together under the protection
of the mother ewe at the head of the line. Presently the wild beast
appears, demanding a victim to eat. "You are the wild beast?" the
sheep ask. "Yes," he replies, "and I want a male sheep." He then
waits while the sheep--in whispers inaudible to him--decide on which
boy (for the beast has his choice of sexes) shall be sacrificed. When
the decision is made the mother at the head of the line says, "You
want a male sheep?" At that, all the others chant in unison, "Then
take off your hat, and take off your clothes, and strike the hot
iron." The last word is the signal for the victim to make a dash for
safety; if he can get behind the mother before the wild beast catches
him the performance is repeated until the beast succeeds in catching
another boy or girl, who then becomes the _Puaa Taehae_.
The twelve-year-old daughter of Maruae--for Airima was a
great-grandmother, not an uncommon thing in this land of rapid
generations--had been talking for several days of piercing her
ears in order to install a pair of earrings to which she had fallen
heir. This evening she had finally mustered courage for the ordeal;
I watched her hesitating approach and saw her hand Tehinatu the
necessary instruments--a cork, a pair of scissors, and a brace of
sharp orange thorns from which the green bark had been carefully
stripped. Whatever her color, woman's endurance in the name of vanity
is proverbial; the child made no outcry as the thorn passed through
the lobe of her ear, sank into the cork, and was snipped off, inside
and out, close to the skin--the remaining section to be removed a
fortnight later, when the small wound had healed. As Tehinatu smiled
at me and flourished the scissors, to which clung a drop of blood, I
heard a shrill call from the cook house, "_Haere mai tamaa!_" It was
supper time.
Some of the children, in answer to the call, straggled toward where
Airima squatted beside her oven; others, already stuffed with odds
and ends of fruit, went on with their play. Maruae beckoned to me as
he passed. The meal was a casual affair; one helped oneself without
ceremony, squatting to exchange conversation between bites, or walked
away, food in hand. There were pork, cold fish, baked taro, and
sections of cream-colored breadfruit, ripe and delicately cooked.
The sun had set when we finished, and as the sky gave promise of a
clear night I spread a mat on the river bank. Bedtime in these places
comes when drowsiness sets in; as I fell asleep the clouds veiling
the highlands of Tahiti Nui were still luminous in the afterglow.
It was midnight when I awoke. In the house, faintly illuminated by
the light of a turned-down lamp, the family of Airima slept. The air
was warm and scented with the perfume of exotic flowers. The river
was like a dark mirror reflecting the stars; even the Pacific seemed
to sleep, breathing gently in the sigh of little waves, dallying
with the bar. Presently I became aware of subdued voices--Airima
and Tinomana, the chief's mother, were seated on the rocks below me,
fishing with long rods of bamboo for the _faia_ which runs in with
the night tide. They were recalling the past, as old ladies will.
"The women of Tahiti," remarked Tinomana, "are not what they were
when I was young; nowadays you may travel from morning till night
without seeing a really beautiful girl."
"Those are true words," said Airima; "_Aué_, if you had seen my
eldest daughter, who died when she was fifteen! She was lovely as
the _itatae_, the white tern which hovers above the tree tops. Her
eyes were brown and laughing, her hair fell in ringlets to her knees,
her teeth were small white pearls, and her laughter like the sound
of cool water running in a shady place. Alas, my Vahinetua! She was
our first-born; my husband loved her as he loved none of the others.
A strange, dreamy child.... I used to watch her when she thought
herself alone. Sometimes, I know not why, the tears came to my eyes
as I saw her gazing into the sky while she chanted under her breath
the little old song the children sing to the tern:
"O Itatae, sailing above the still forest, where shall you fly
to-night?
Downwind across the sea to Tetiaroa, the low island....
"As she grew older a wasting illness fell on her; the doctors could
do nothing to stop her coughing; my husband even took her to the
white doctor in Papeete--it was on his recommendation that we took
her to sea. We were in Mangareva, far off in the Gambier Islands,
when I saw that the end was near. My husband was not blind--he
headed back for Tahiti at once, giving up the rest of his trip.
Vahinetua was never more beautiful than on the last morning of her
life--cheeks flushed and eyes shining soft and clear as the first
star of evening. We were nearly home--off Maitea, the little island
which lies between Tahiti and Anaa; she died in my arms and I covered
her with the bright patchwork _tifaefae_ her own hands had sewn. 'Our
child is dead,' I told the captain, her father, as I came on deck.
He said nothing, but put a hand on my shoulder and pointed toward
the masthead, where I saw a small white tern hovering above us. I
cannot tell you how, but I knew at once the soul of my daughter was
in that pretty bird. It flew with us all day, and at evening, as we
entered the harbor of Papeete, it turned back and disappeared in the
night. For many years thereafter, each time my husband passed Maitea
homeward bound, the white bird was waiting for him at the place where
my daughter had died...."
The voices of the old women murmured on, recalling the joys and
sorrows of other days. Suddenly, in a mango tree behind the house, a
rooster crowed, answered far and near by others of his kind. As the
last drawn-out cry died in the silence of the night I yielded to an
overpowering drowsiness and fell asleep.