AFFAIRS OF STATE
Mr. Lawes' fears were relieved by the messenger who had carried my
invitation to the king at Tuapa. The old gentleman, far from being
offended at our choice of Alofi for the meeting, had beamed upon him
with his left eye (the right is missing, and it was all he had to beam
with), and was already half-way to the royal lodging in Alofi. The
other messengers, returning from the more distant villages at intervals
during the evening, brought back news no less favourable. Early in the
morning persons sent out to reconnoitre reported that men were erecting
awnings on the green before the school-house, that the headmen of
villages had all arrived, and that His Majesty was being helped into
his uniform. Ten was the hour, and on the stroke of the hour Captain
Ravenhill landed with the portrait of the Queen, sent from Windsor as
a present to the king. The sun was very hot: English uniforms are
not built for a thermometer above eighty in the shade, and there was
therefore some excuse for our feelings when we walked on to the green
and found three men trying to fasten a mat to four stakes planted
anyhow in the grass. Half a dozen children were amusing themselves with
a running commentary upon how not to rig an awning, and that was all.
The hour that we spent in the school-house was the sultriest of my
experience, but it was cool and comfortable beside the language that
might have clothed our thoughts had Mr. Lawes not been present. That
we were impotent made it no better. There were no means of knowing
whether the king's unpunctuality was an intentional slight or merely
the innate inability of a native to keep an appointment, and there was
no certainty that he would choose to come at all. But although, as the
green began to fill with a gay-coloured, chattering crowd, I was at
one moment almost resolved to get to business without His Majesty, I
was restrained by the mortification of poor Mr. Lawes, who felt that
he had been charged with the arrangements, and whose hope that his
flock would do nothing to disgrace themselves was suffering so cruel
a check. The messengers who trod heels in the road leading to the
royal quarters brought back conflicting rumours. One said that the king
was arraying himself in the new rifle-green uniform imported for him
by a storekeeper; another that he was taking off his royal trousers
at the behest of a Samoan teacher, who asserted that trousers were
no trappings for an interview with the Queen's Commissioner; another
that he had sent for a trusted councillor to decide whether, if he
wore a Samoan petticoat, he might retain his military helmet with the
cock-feather plume to which he clave. What Mr. Lawes did not know
about the people was not worth knowing, and yet, so long have form and
ceremonial been abandoned by the Niuéans, that he was still inclined to
think that the king would stroll on to the green as if he was taking
the air, despite these reports of elaborate preparations.
The awnings were rigged at last--one for us, floored with planks, at
the door of the school-house, and the other facing it, with a couple of
wooden chairs for Their Majesties, and benches for the retinue. A crowd
of several hundred people--women and children for the most part--had
assembled when a man ran in to say that the royal procession was coming
up the road. There was but just time to post Amherst Webber with his
camera when the procession burst from behind the angle of the Mission
fence.
It was worth waiting for. I heard Mr. Lawes murmur, "Well, I never
thought they would do this!" The procession was headed by a dozen
men in slop clothes and villainous, billycock hats set at a rakish
angle. They all carried spears and paddle-shaped clubs in either
hand, and a similar rabble brought up the rear. In the middle of this
grotesque bodyguard walked the king and queen, both in petticoats, as
befits the sex to which they belonged, for if the queen was a young
woman, the king was assuredly an old one. To their united ages of
ninety-four His Majesty contributed seventy-six, but what he lacked in
youthful elasticity he made up in condescension, for she had been but
a beggar-maid--or what corresponds therewith in Niué, where beggary
is unknown--when he had played Cophetua to her a few months before
our visit. She wore a wreath of roses, he the soldier's helmet with
the cock's plume, which was all that the officious Samoan teacher
would leave him of his military uniform, and from which he refused to
be divided, although it assorted ill with his petticoat. To tell the
brutal truth, His Majesty was unsexed by the garments that had been
chosen for him, and his appearance justified the remark of a friend
who, holding the photographs of Their Majesties in his hand and
confusing them, exclaimed, "Why, the queen's got a beard!" With the
king was an angular old man in a strange, ill-fitting uniform and a tall
hat of ancient date, carefully brushed the wrong way to show its wealth
of nap; his uniform was bespattered with yellow anchors and other
nautical devices, and he carried a spear in either hand. Though we could
not discover that he had any connection with the court, he certainly
imparted to the royal procession an air of dignity that it sadly needed.
[Illustration: THE ROYAL PROCESSION
The King dons a helmet and petticoats for the occasion
To face page 26
]
As soon as the royal party had taken their seats under the awning
that faced ours the retinue fell upon the crowd with loud shouts,
brandishing their paddle-shaped clubs, making thereby a louder
disturbance than that which they were sent to quell; but the sight of
Mr. Lawes standing forth to interpret produced what passes for silence
in Niué. I gave my speech to Mr. Lawes sentence by sentence, using
my old experience as an interpreter of South Sea languages to cast
them in the form and length that are best suited to the translator.
But, had I disguised my remarks in the language of the accomplished
gentlemen who provide the copy for the halfpenny press, Mr. Lawes would
have triumphed over all difficulties. Mindful of his gentle tones in
conversation, I had suggested a doubt whether his voice would carry
easily over the wide interval between the awnings, and had evoked from
Mrs. Lawes an assurance that his voice would carry twice the distance.
In truth its power and resonance were astonishing, and for once in my
life I found it a positive pleasure to talk to a native through an
interpreter. The similarity of Niuéan and Tongan was so close that I
was able to appreciate the clever way in which he turned his sentences
so as to convey the exact meaning without a superfluous word. After the
usual compliments I explained that the Queen had answered the petition
of the late king by taking Niué under her protection; that the people
need never fear seizure of their country by one of the great Powers;
that their young men working on plantations in other countries would
henceforth be able to claim the protection of the British Consul;
and that, as a token of her solicitude for their welfare, the Queen
had sent them a portrait of herself to be the property of the Niuéan
people. The picture, an engraving of Her Majesty in the robes of her
Jubilee in 1887, was carried over to the king's awning. Then I improved
the occasion by giving them the results of a little calculation I
had made. Their island, denuded of its young men, had, in its record
harvest, produced but seven hundred tons of copra, valued at six
thousand pounds; if the young men who went abroad to earn twenty-four
pounds a year were to stay at home and plant cocoanuts, they would
soon be able to earn four times that amount from their own lands,
money would flow into the island, the women who had neither husbands
nor children would be bringing up families, and the chiefs, who now
encouraged their young men to go abroad for the sake of the beggarly
commission paid to them by the recruiting agent, would be richer than
they had ever dreamed.
On the previous afternoon a travelled Niuéan had asked me anxiously
whether the hoisting of the flag entailed _tukuhau_, the Tongan word
for taxes, an institution unknown in Niué save by report, and justly
dreaded on account of the stories brought back by those who had been
in Tonga, where labourers are made to pay £1 16_s._ to the Government
out of their wages. When I reassured him, the good news was passed
down the line of our followers, who received it with enthusiasm. A
repetition of this assurance as regards the immediate future made the
most appropriate peroration to my speech.
The king, who had till now sat like a bronze image, so deeply sunk
in his voluminous draperies that little could be seen of him but his
helmet, now shook himself, and returned thanks in a formal speech, from
which his real feelings could not be gathered; and I, warned by Mr.
Lawes that if I once allowed the pent-up flood of oratory to find an
open sluice, the river of talk would flow far into the night, went over
to shake hands with him and to invite him to come into the school-house
and sign the treaty. In Samoa, in Tonga, or in Fiji, this portion of
the proceedings would have been invested with some solemnity; in Niué
it was a children's game. The treaty was laid upon the schoolmaster's
standing desk, and three separate messengers were despatched to bring
ink, pens, and blotting-paper. The king sat apart in a Windsor chair;
the headmen, under the guise of electing three of their number to
witness the king's signature, were boiling over with jealousy; a troop
of children were playing noisily at the far end of the school-house,
and near us a woman was sitting on the floor, placidly suckling her
baby. Outside three of the club-bearers were haranguing the crowd,
which, having much to say on its own account, did not listen to
them. We had almost to shout to make ourselves heard, until some new
attraction took the fancy of the idlers, the earth shook to the thud of
running feet, and the orators were left to harangue to the babies who
were too tiny to run.
Now a difficulty arose. On the most liberal allotment of space--and
Niuéan calligraphy demanded full measure--there was room in the treaty
for but three signatures besides the king's. Eleven villages, and
space for only three! It meant that three headmen would be represented
to Queen Victoria as pre-eminent above their fellows. Mr. Lawes had
been listening to the discussion, and he hastened to assure me that
unless space could be found for four at least there would be trouble,
for it meant that the headman of Alofi would be left out. The other
seven mattered but little, for they were either amiable nonentities
themselves, or their villages were too insignificant to matter. Room
had to be made for Alofi, but his fingers were so tremulous with
indignation at the suggested insult that they could scarcely hold the
pen.
When the treaty was signed, I invited the chiefs to ask me questions,
suggesting at Mr. Lawes' instance that the king should be their
spokesman. His Majesty, fixing his single eye upon me, began in a
plaintive voice to recite the wise acts of his reign. He desired
me to take note that he had enacted two laws which would never be
abrogated: the one forbidding the sale of land to Europeans, and the
other prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquor to his people. I
hastened to assure him that these wise enactments (in which I suspected
the guiding hand of Mr. Lawes) had my full approval, provided that
no difficulties were thrown in the way of leasing land to Europeans
for trading purposes. This, the king assured me, was never the case;
they liked Europeans, and if their young men stole things from them,
the community made restitution and punished the culprits. What they
wanted was advice, and if the Queen sent an adviser to live among them,
it would be well. He agreed with me that it was ill to denude the
island of its young men, and I might count upon him to discourage the
practice.[2] Finally he commended Niué-Fekai to the keeping of God, who
had showed His favour to her this day in uniting her to England--the
"greatest nation in the world."
A messenger, who now arrived from the landing-place, explained the
defection of the crowd outside. A party had landed from the _Porpoise_
to erect the flagstaff that we had brought from Sydney. As soon
as the people understood their purpose, the crowbars and shovels
were snatched from the hands of the blue-jackets, and the natives
themselves, with shouts of laughter, fell to with a will upon the grave
of their independence. The blue-jackets, nothing loath to exercise
their unaccustomed rôle as foremen of works, were laughingly directing
operations, when some officious elders, scandalised by what they
considered to be a breach of manners, fell upon the volunteers with
their paddle-clubs and drove them off, though not before the happiest
relations had been established between the natives and their visitors.
[2] Here I may remark that His Majesty lacked his usual frankness, for
the first recruiting vessel that called after my visit found him as
active an ally as ever.