I
It was the island of Fitu-Iva--the last independent Polynesian
stronghold in the South Seas. Three factors conduced to Fitu-Iva's
independence. The first and second were its isolation and the
warlikeness of its population. But these would not have saved it in
the end had it not been for the fact that Japan, France, Great
Britain, Germany, and the United States discovered its desirableness
simultaneously. It was like gamins scrambling for a penny. They got
in one another's way. The war vessels of the five Powers cluttered
Fitu-Iva's one small harbour. There were rumours of war and threats of
war. Over its morning toast all the world read columns about Fitu-Iva.
As a Yankee blue jacket epitomized it at the time, they all got their
feet in the trough at once.
So it was that Fitu-Iva escaped even a joint protectorate, and King
Tulifau, otherwise Tui Tulifau, continued to dispense the high justice
and the low in the frame-house palace built for him by a Sydney trader
out of California redwood. Not only was Tui Tulifau every inch a king,
but he was every second a king. When he had ruled fifty-eight years and
five months, he was only fifty-eight years and three months old. That
is to say, he had ruled over five million seconds more than he had
breathed, having been crowned two months before he was born.
He was a kingly king, a royal figure of a man, standing six feet and
a half, and, without being excessively fat, weighing three hundred and
twenty pounds. But this was not unusual for Polynesian “chief stock.”
Sepeli, his queen, was six feet three inches and weighed two hundred
and sixty, while her brother, Uiliami, who commanded the army in the
intervals of resignation from the premiership, topped her by an inch and
notched her an even half-hundredweight. Tui Tulifau was a merry soul, a
great feaster and drinker. So were all his people merry souls, save in
anger, when, on occasion, they could be guilty even of throwing dead
pigs at those who made them wroth. Nevertheless, on occasion, they could
fight like Maoris, as piratical sandalwood traders and Blackbirders in
the old days learned to their cost.