sailor, whom I had got to know in the town, I saw an opportunity of
sailing as a deck hand, and so on the _Polly Smith_ I sailed away bound
for Tahiti. We had on board several native passengers, two young girls,
and several Samoan men with their wives and children who were going off
to the other Islands to secure work on plantations. We had a fine time
on those moonlight nights, as we crept along the equatorial Pacific Seas
with all sails set, and on the decks the sailors danced with the native
women while I fiddled away, delighted to be at sea again. The little
Samoan children were the life of that boat; one tiny girl would stand on
the deck by the galley and go through all the fantastic Samoan dances,
throw her little legs about, stand on her head, wave her legs and hands
about while upside down with as much ease as though she were on her
feet. There was an English passenger with us, I think his name was
Wallace. We became very friendly with each other; he was going to Tahiti
on some Government business and came from Sydney. For many days we lay
becalmed, and then a fine breeze sprang up and we raced away with full
sail set for some days. As a rule the wind slackened by day and
strengthened by night, and they _were_ nights too, the fine tropic stars
shining away overhead, the clear crystal skies imaged in the waters all
around us as the small cutter drifted along, far away out on the lonely
Pacific track. There were no islands in that part of the ocean, but we
were all happy enough. The native passengers would loaf all day long
looking over the vessel’s side singing to themselves, and at night we
all congregated and had a sing-song. I would play the violin and do my
best to keep time to the natives as they danced and rolled about as the
boat heeled over. Mr Wallace sang songs and the half-caste cook got
drunk on sly grog, did jigs and afforded us great amusement.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XV
Tahitian Morals and Duplicity—I play the Violin at Government
Concert—Death of M’Neil—The Black Slave Traffic
ARRIVING at Tahiti our passengers went off to the plantations and I went
off also as I wanted to see what kind of a place it was. The capital,
Papeite, was a much larger and livelier place than Apia. The population
consisted of all kinds of half-castes, Chinese, French, and Tahitian
brigands. I went inland and tramped around the sugar plantations whereon
worked the natives and Chinese. A good deal of the country was under
cultivation. I shall never forget the awful-looking people that I came
in contact with or forget the debauchery that I witnessed. The sole
occupation of a good many of the natives was to drink as much as they
could get down them and the women sold their bodies to the first-comer
for the price of a drink. The missionaries were there by hundreds, it
seemed; they were a mixture of French and English and had exciting times
reforming those native women and men. I went into several of the native
homes and found them very hospitable people. Some of the women had
Chinese husbands and their half-caste children had tiny almond eyes,
jet-black and sparkling. The Chinese of Society Islands impressed me as
being much more wholesome in their way of living than the Australian
Chinamen, and they did not smell half so disagreeable. A Chinaman got
jealous of his native wife whilst I was there and struck her with a
knife. The Tahitians went for him and when I saw him you could hardly
tell which was his head and which his feet; anyway his brother Chinamen
came into the village, rolled him up and gave him a decent burial, and
his wife screamed and wailed away till I was glad to clear out, for it
was a most painful sight to see her grief. She was a pretty woman, in
fact all the young women were handsome, and the men too, but as soon as
the women get over twenty they start to fade. A South Sea Island girl of
ten years of age is as matured as a European girl of sixteen.
I found human nature was just the same there as everywhere else—everyone
wanted as much as they could get out of you, and those who were better
clothed than their sisters and brothers were vain-glorious and looked
down on the others. Girls and boys made love to each other and eloped
into the forest with the missionaries after them at full speed, and the
brave old chiefs strolled about and spoke of the old times and smacked
their lips and spoke on the sly of the missionaries, saying “they were
the children of the devil” but addressing them to their faces with some
such jargon as, “Me Christian man now. One God. Good God, who no eat
other God,” whereupon they would gravely walk away to sell their soul
for a drink. They loved their old customs deep down in their heart and
rubbed noses with each other and cherished hopes that some day the gods
would help them to drive the white men into the sea. But the older ones
were even then fast disappearing, and drink and prostitution were
raising the death rate of the native children, and so there, as
elsewhere all over the South Seas, the race was fast dying out.
There were many traders there, and they all seemed to make plenty of
money. You could always recognise a trader by his big hat smashed on his
head and his slouching walk and his very often warty nose, that had
started to blossom after drinking some oceans of beer. They were
generally married men and often got into awful trouble when they were
quite unsober by mistaking their Tahitian wife for their Marquesan wife,
and mentioning the wrong name to their bride during the night brought
down her wrath on to their wicked heads. I have often seen them with a
black eye or a terribly scratched, clawed face, for women in Tahiti are
as jealous as the European ladies, and will brook no rival; but of
course when their husband is away with his other bride on some far-off
Isle they do not let the grass grow under their feet, and often a white
trader leaves his home in disgust when his native wife presents him with
a half-caste baby with slit-almond eyes and a face showing strong
Mongolian origin, or a little fair-skinned mite with pretty violet dark
eyes that looks suspiciously like the village missionary.
[Illustration: RAROTONGAN SCENERY]
In Papeite I made the acquaintance of René, a Frenchman, who was a
clever violin-player. He was at that time working as a clerk in the
Tahitian Commissioner’s offices and played at the Papeite opera house
which was something on the lines of a bush town music hall in Australia.
He was very kind to me and gave me several good lessons on playing the
violin, for he had studied under some of the best French masters. He had
some splendid duets for two violins and one night, when they had a ball
on at the Papeite Government House, he recommended me and I got the
engagement to go with him, and we played the duets together. He was a
much better performer than I was, but he gave me the solo part and did
all he could to get me the credit of the concert. All went off very well
indeed till, when René and I were having supper with all the high folk
of Papeite and I was feeling in very high spirits at the turn my luck
had taken, for I was nearly on my beam ends when René got me that job, I
bent over from my chair and looked out of the door and saw that my
violin which I had left by the hat-rack had disappeared! I got up and
rushed off like a shot, and as I did so I saw one of the Tahitian
servants bolting through the door with the violin. Shouting at the top
of my voice I ran after him, cleared the steps with one jump, and there
up the moonlit street ran the thief holding my violin in one hand. I had
no revolver with me, otherwise I would have fired, for I was desperate.
My violin was my all, and the fear of losing it put renewed vigour in my
feet and I was gaining on the cursed thief. “Stop or I fire!” I shouted,
and as he was leaving the straight track he turned, and I held my hand
up, as he thought, to shoot. In the moonlight he saw my white hand
upheld, and thinking it held a gun he threw the fiddle down and rushed
off into the scrub. My fiddle was none the worse for the adventure, but
I was, for the night was close and sweltering hot, and I arrived back to
the supper-table bathed in sweat and half dead.
I was at that time lodging in the north of the town with a storekeeper.
In the same room where I was also slept a trader; his name was M’Neil,
and he had been very ill and was at that time convalescent. He admitted
to me that he had been drinking too heavily and had made up his mind to
be a teetotaller, and, as he told me what a curse drink was, he kept
lifting a bottle of whisky from under his bed and taking a pull at it,
saying, “Man, jist a wee snack for the gude time’s sake.” He was really
trying to break himself of the habit, and instead of drinking
half-a-bottle at a time was just taking it in sips. By midnight he was
quite drunk, and started weeping over his past sins, and kept me awake
nearly all night saying over and over again—“Ma lad, keep off th’ drink,
’twill be your ruin.” He was not a bad man at all, and when he was sober
during the day, and I played him old Scotch songs, for he would not for
one moment let me play anything but Scotch melodies, the tears would
rise in his eyes. He died two days after and I felt very much cut up,
for I saw him die and he gave me an old purse, saying, “Take it, guid
lad, and think of me.” His old comrade, a Scotchman, came in from up the
street, held his hand and completely broke down, crying like a little
child as M’Neil closed his eyes for ever. I still remember how that
Scotch friend rose up, looked under poor M’Neil’s bed, and gently pulled
the half-full whisky bottle out, put it under his coat and left the
room, still sobbing, for M’Neil and he had had many good times together
and many a long talk and deep drink in that room as they lived over
their old days in Bonny Scotland.
I was naturally very depressed after the death of M’Neil; I had only
known him a few days, but in those few days I seemed to know more of his
true character than you could see through in another man in ten years. I
remember after a day or so I got in with a Dutch fellow named “Van
Blank.” He was also a lodger in my dwelling-place and he had held the
Scotchman’s arm as he stood by M’Neil’s grave; otherwise I think poor
old Mac (I cannot remember his name) would have fallen in. He had
imbibed considerably, and it took Van Blank and I the whole afternoon to
get him back to his room and put him to bed.
René, my violin friend, went off to Matahiva on some business, and I was
at my wit’s end to know how to get some cash and get away from Papeite.
I was offered a job by some missionaries to go off to Rarotonga to help
in mission work for awhile. I considered seriously becoming a missionary
myself, as it seemed a paying game, and I never saw a mission man of any
sect on the beach hard up. Van Blank had long since joined the mission
and he introduced me to several young Tahitian mission girls who were
devout Christians. They were mostly very good-looking, wore more
clothing than the inland natives, were splendid dancers, and down in the
thatched homesteads of the village of Tetua I went and stayed with Van
Blank, and those mission girls, good gracious me! stood on their heads,
screamed with laughter, waved their legs as I played the fiddle and all
went back to the barbarian stage in five seconds, and after the dance I
had to fly with Van Blank as twenty of them strove to embrace us, all at
once! Next day Blank and I saw them in the mission-room teaching the
native children to sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” or a tune of that
type, and as we looked in the school door they looked up at us gravely
with their earnest dark eyes as though we were absolute strangers to the
wild carousal of the night before. You could tramp the world over and
never find people so clever in their cunning as the Tahitian Islanders,
and yet they are, as I found, staunch friends in adversity and would
never give a white man away to his superiors. And so all the creed
denominations go swimmingly along, safe and happy in the giant hypocrisy
of reformation that has brought such changes to the Pacific Isle, such
happiness to the reformers, and such deceit into the hearts of the
reformed.
A large trading schooner, the _Austral_, at this time arrived in Tahiti
and I once more secured a job as second mate and left the island. I
heard that her final destination was Samoa and Tonga; she was then bound
for the Marquesas Islands. Before leaving the “Society Group” she called
at “Fakarava,” “Raiatea” and “Takaroa,” beautiful Isles they were too,
standing lonely out there in the wide Pacific, covered with luxurious
tropical trees that sheltered the velvety skinned natives, many of whom
were as wild as the savages of Captain Cook’s days. Indeed, all the
races that I came in contact with were as wild at heart as ever their
ancestors were; but they were clever, and they soon discovered the best
policy, which was hammered into them by the arrival of a warship and a
gun battery to smash them up and let them see the white man’s power and
the wisdom of following all his desires and ceasing all their own
desires. Then the missionaries came and the traders brought the rum, and
the money to buy the rum, and gave the women the opportunity to obtain
the money, for it was the women of the South Seas that started to get
the money and shared it with their native husbands. I think that must be
the origin of the name “White Slave Traffic” of modern England. I know
from my own eyes and from the lips of the sufferers of those far-off
Isles that the Black Slave Traffic was a monstrous traffic beside which
the English “White Slave Traffic” is a kind of sacred concert,
comparatively speaking.
As far as I could judge and criticise the civilising influence of
Christianity in the South Seas was this—the English, French and Germans
discovered a beautiful land in the South Seas; a few months after
arriving they blew the heads of some of the natives off, cowed them
completely, took a battalion of sailors inland to the wild native
village and those sailors all fell madly in love with the beautiful
dark-eyed women who stood trembling before them, and by the time they
were due to become mothers the fathers were in England, being paid their
leave money at Chatham, while the missionaries, hot with haste, were
outbound for the same Islands to reform the grieving mothers and make
them more upright in their morals. When those missionaries arrived they
put a “penny in the slot machine” on the shore, nailed a large tract on
each wall of the heathen village homesteads, and then called the people
Christianised as they knelt in their nudeness and penitence at their
feet in chanting rows, repeating the Lord’s Prayer with bowed heads, as
the missionaries lifted their eyes heavenward and did not miss their
boot-laces till long after the reformed heathen had departed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XVI
Hafiao—Rival Marquesan Queens—Behind the Veil—Vaca Mountain—I meet
R.L.S.—Thakambau the Last of the Fijian Kings—Apia
AFTER a monotonous voyage of adverse winds and a typhoon that brought
seas over and washed me out of my bunk, smashed our deck in and carried
away all the cordage and boats, we arrived at “Hivaoa.” The natives swam
out to us in shoals; on they came as the anchor dropped, lines and lines
of bobbing frizzly heads with swimming eyes, gliding along to the
paddling hands level with the water, while racing along in front of them
came canoes heavily laden with cargoes of natives evidently more
successful in life than the poverty-stricken swimmers who only possessed
their own skins. We threw ropes over the ship’s side and up they came,
clambering, and danced over the decks. Stalwart, fine fellows they were,
with large lustrous eyes, and as soon as they leapt to the deck and
shook themselves as dogs do after a swim, they started rushing about
singing and jabbering for a job to take us ashore in their canoes, and
the skipper stood by his cabin aft with a big cigar in his mouth,
shouting, “Keep yer eye on the God-damned devils,” for he had turned his
head for one moment and with native alertness one of them had dived into
his cabin and collared his best white duck suit. Down came a large
wooden plank over the poor devil’s head as he dropped the suit on deck
and with a bound went over the side into the sea.
It was after sunset before I went ashore, and with several of the crew
we roamed about visiting the natives in their thatched homes and saw the
native children romping around as they sneaked out of their beds to peep
at us and the swarthy mothers and fathers, squatting on the floor,
cross-legged, invited us to drink and eat. All about us as we walked
under the palms from one home to another we saw the shadows moving as
the men and women roamed about, passing from clump to clump of
palm-trees which shaded the Marquesan homesteads. It was just like some
fairyland, as over the clear skies shone the Southern stars, and often
came the singing of the natives and the beating of their wooden drums
from where some of the families were giving parties over a birthday or
the anniversary of a wedding, enjoying themselves in the same spirit as
they do in the suburban homes of English towns.
I saw a lot of old chiefs and wrinkled dethroned kings and queens during
my stay there. The girls were nearly all dressed in leafy girdles and
the youths likewise. I had heard a lot about Hivaoa from Hornecastle and
I remembered that he had several wives there and large grown-up
families, but I did not meet any of them to my knowledge. I only stayed
there two or three days and then joined the boat again and we left for
Nuka Hiva. The natives there I found were very similar to those of
Hivaoa, but the Island itself struck me as very prosperous, being a good
deal under cultivation. Whilst there I went inland alone and made
friends with a Marquesan chief named Hafiao. He could speak English
fairly well, also a little French. I remember him well, because he was
such an intellectual-looking old fellow and looked very much like
Gladstone, but he was more powerfully built and of course brown skinned.
He told me he was over a hundred years old, and he looked it too. He had
a nice house and three pretty native women looked after him. I am not so
sure that they were not his wives. He told me that nearly all the whites
that called at Nuka Hiva came especially inland to see him, and he was
as proud as anything when I told him that Robert Louis Stevenson was
greatly impressed by him and his kingly bearing. Of course I made that
all up, but while he puckered his wrinkled old face up and tried to tell
me of the “great white people” that had called upon him, he mentioned
the name of “Stessen” and from what he said I should imagine that he
meant “Stevenson,” for he described him to me at my request, and most
impressively told me that he was “good white mans who saw that he the
great Hafiao was no ordinary man, but a brave and mighty king of men.”
He also told me that R.L.S. had come especially across the seas from the
great “white country” to see him and kneel at his feet; and as he told
those tales of his proud imagination he lifted his intelligent eyes to
the skies and his shrivelled lips trembled with emotional pride at the
thought that, though he was no longer a ruler of men, there were white
men living who had bowed the knee to him and assured him that he still
lived in the memory of men as great as ever, though humbled by advancing
civilisation and the wrecking hand of cruel Time. And, to tell the
truth, that deserted forgotten old chief of barbarian Marquesan tribes
had more of the look of born kingship in his stalwart shrivelled
anatomy, as he sat there almost in tears over revived memories, than all
the kings of Europe bunched together; and I shall never regret going on
my knee before him and bowing my head in a moment of emotional impulse
as I bade him farewell and pressed a plug of ship’s tobacco into his
majestic hand, which gift so delighted him that he forgot the great
majesty that for a moment had crowned him, and with an aged shrill voice
shouted, “Good mans, white boy,” and stood upright and gave a kind of
delighted double shuffle at such a stroke of luck.
In that same village I also met wrinkled old native women who gazed with
scorn on the young native girls who wore tappa girdles from their waists
to their knees. One of them told me she had been the most beautiful
woman of the Islands and much loved by the bravest warriors of her day.
She was not unlike the old Marquesan Queen whom Hornecastle introduced
me to, who had had her photograph taken by the Judge’s son whom I met at
Samoa, but she had not the queenly bearing, and when I crept into the
next hut I learned from another dethroned queen that it was really she
who was once the most beautiful of queens and the envy of all brave
warriors, and she tried to get out of me what the “bad no good woman”
next door had told me; but I kept a still tongue, for I saw how things
were between them and did not wish them to murder each other over the
awful jealousy that I saw each had for the other. I can still see their
brown wrinkled faces under the starlit palms peeping from their den
doors as I bade them farewell and passed away. I never saw such evil
looks as they sideways gave each other as I crept quietly on. They each
thought they had succeeded in proving they were old-time queens. I did
not particularly like either of them, for each had gazed at me with odd
looks and stroked my white hand with their shrivelled dark paws,
smacking their remnants of lips, as though remembering old days and
cannibalistic feasts.
Of course it may have been purely imagination on my part, but I could
not help feeling as I did, for I had seen a good deal in my wanderings
among the South Sea Islanders, much more than I have told you in these
reminiscences—for there are things which I must leave out, things which
are too dreadful to describe in cold print to civilised eyes of the home
country, but are well known to the travellers of the days when I was a
boy and saw the smouldering out of the true savage races of the South
Seas. I lived on the Islands and mixed with the people as though I were
one of them, and though the outside world lived under the impression
that all the old savage instincts had died out, I knew that they had
not. The natives knew they would be punished for cannibalism and other
crimes of a bloodthirsty heathenish character, and so it was all
practised in secrecy, and to this day I will swear terrible things are
done on the quiet! Do not the civilised polished towns of Europe harbour
in their very midst men who are dangerous criminals and addicted to
heinous crimes? Often those very men mingle with you and even gain your
admiration and respect, for you do not dream of their true character,
and yet men think that the whole of the aboriginal South Sea races have
completely changed their old instincts, and all are now Christian, just
as they profess they are, and nothing is done under cover as it is done
under cover in European cities!
I remember how Hornecastle got hold of a book which praised the
reformation of the South Sea savage and the glorious work of the
American missionaries. The old fellow was eating an orange as he read,
and as he roared with laughter he swallowed the whole of the half
orange, turned purple in the face, and when the native put his fingers
down and cleared the throat passage the old chap sat upright, put his
hand on his stomach and, to my astonishment, still continued to explode
with laughter, roaring out at intervals as he nearly choked, “God help
the damned heathens,” “Holy Moses and Missionaries,” and then buried his
nose in the book and started to read again with extreme delight and
twinkling eyes, for I think of all men he knew the stealthy lives that
were being lived behind the veil of native life in the South Seas, where
often men disappeared and were never heard of again, as the Polynesians,
Melanesians and the half-castes saw the longed-for chance occur and got
their own back! Aye, there are hundreds of skeletons whitening in the
forest of those Pacific Isles, skeletons of men who fell by the stealthy
war club or had their heads blown off by the old-fashioned
breech-loading pistols given to the natives by traders for shiploads of
copra, palm oil, and sometimes for help in kidnapping girls, who often
disappeared from their homes and were never seen again.
I believe if a man like Hornecastle had written a book telling all that
he had seen in his own time and the time when I was on those Islands it
would have been one of the most terrible human documents ever read by
the eyes of men, so terrible in its revelations of bloodshed, trickery
and lust, both on the white and native side, that very few people would
have believed a quarter of the truth told. There are no more
undiscovered shores to be found in the world now, and never again in the
history of the world will the wanderers from a highly civilised race
suddenly come across primeval races in far seas, who will leap from the
forest and gaze with astonished eyes into the eyes of men who are their
brothers of long ago, lost in the dark of ages and returned to reform
the ways of the old, and heartily enjoy the change from the new.