THE KING OF ALL NIUÉ
For a few hours His Majesty could lay aside the cares of state, and I
was able to make his acquaintance. He faced the camera without a trace
of embarrassment, though he had probably never seen one before, and he
consented, at my entreaty, to be photographed without his helmet. He
is a withered, grey-bearded, querulous old man, and he looks the age
assigned to him--seventy-six; but, despite the ravages of age and the
blemish of a missing eye, there is an air of decision and obstinacy
about him which does not belie his character. For it is by sheer
tenacity of purpose that Tongia has attained his present giddy eminence.
The institutions of Niué have always been republican. In heathen
times the king was theoretically an officer elected by the people;
in practice he was a figure-head set up by the war-party (_toa_) who
happened to have the upper hand for the moment. And since, in the
see-saw of intertribal warfare, Fortune sometimes frowned upon his
supporters, and the hopes of the opposition were always centred in
the murder of the king, from the day of his election he went in peril
of his life. In fact, a violent death was so often the portion of the
titular ruler of the island that it became as difficult to find a
candidate for royal honours as it was to discover a person to serve
heir to a _damnosa hereditas_ in Rome before Justinian. About the
middle of the last century the supply failed altogether: for eighty
years there was no king at all, and the island seems to have got
on very well without one. But with the arrival of the missionaries
and the cessation of war the office was discovered to have some
attractions, and Tuitonga, a chief of Alofi, leaned his back against
the stone[3]--the time-honoured symbol of the assumption of supreme
power. His successor, Fataäiki, also of Alofi, was described by
Commodore Goodenough as the most remarkable chief he had seen in the
Pacific, and, at his death in 1897, no one was found worthy to succeed
him. His son, the young man who had acted as our pilot, was addicted
to strong waters, and even if he had been otherwise eligible, he had
put himself out of court by refusing to vacate the house built by the
people as an official residence, but, owing to an oversight, erected on
Fataäiki's private land. There was an interregnum for two years, and
only one man in the island thought that there need ever again be a king
of Niué-Fekai.[4] That man was Tongia.
Tongia was headman of Tuapa, and if he had attained no greater eminence
until he was past seventy, it was owing to no foolish modesty on his
part. You may, it seems, choose your own surname in Niué, and the
name he chose in early life was Folofonua, which is "Horse"--the
most terrible of all the beasts known to the men of that day. When
horses lost their terrors and became vulgar, he took a name more
awe-inspiring still--Puleteaki, which is "Great Ruler"; but, lest men
should forget his importance for lack of reminder, he changed that for
Tongia, the highest title he knew. A full year he waited for someone
to suggest an election to the throne, and then, at one of the monthly
councils, he took the matter in hand himself. As no one seemed to covet
the dignity, how would it do, he asked, to elect _him_? When they had
recovered from their astonishment, his colleagues adduced reasons
enough why it would not do: to begin with, they had done very well
without a king, and (if he would have the brutal truth) should they
ever find themselves in need of one, there were ten other good men and
true from whom to choose. They, in fact, were adamant, but Tongia knew
that drops of water will wear even adamant away. He had experienced
seventy years of opposition, and he had always had his way in the end.
He dangled the empty crowning-stone before them at Fono after Fono,
until in very weariness they let him have his will of them. It made
little difference to them then, for in Niué there is no civil list.
The king lives like any other landowner, on the produce of his own
plantation, and the rent which his poor relations pay him in kind.
Occasionally, when these fail him, he suggests how becoming it would
be in his people if they were to bring him an offering of food, or
even money, and they, mindful of the manner in which their liege lord
attained his present dignity, murmur, "Anything for a quiet life," and
hasten to stop his mouth.
Whether he is begging or merely asserting his importance, there is an
air of conscious rectitude about Tongia that is impressive. Like most
men who have done great things in the world, he has no sense of humour;
I do not think he has ever been known to smile. He has gone through
life in a deadly earnest, beside which the purpose in other men was but
the purpose of butterflies. He had been but a few days king when he
heard of the Queen's Jubilee of 1897. "Has the Queen of England been
told of me?" he asked Mr. Head. "What? Has no one thought of telling
her that I am king of all Niué--of Niué-Fekai?" Yet he must not be
called vain, if the old definition be just which sets forth that "the
conceited man is he who thinks well of himself and thinks that others
do so too; the vain man is he who thinks well of himself and _wishes_
that others thought so too; but the proud man is he who thinks well
of himself and does not care a jot whether others think well of him
or not." Upon this exegesis Tongia is a proud man. Knowing that he
was versed in ancient lore, I asked him some questions about the Niué
custom in time of war. "Tell him," he said to Mr. Lawes, "that the
greatest warrior of old time was my father. There has been none like
him in the world before or since." I tried my question in three several
forms, but His Majesty, knowing better than I what I wanted to know,
entertained me with anecdotes of his dashing father until I dropped my
point.
[Illustration: KING TONGIA
To face page 38
]
In order to give éclat to the ceremony of hoisting the flag, which
is in itself a somewhat brief and barren entertainment, I had asked
Captain Ravenhill to invite the volunteer drum and fife band belonging
to the ship to take part in it. He objected that the band had not
played together for many months, but as the Niuéans had never heard
a band of any kind, and were not likely to be a critical audience,
we decided to send the invitation. Half an hour later the island was
startled by the spirited performance of the "British Grenadiers."
It brought the whole population to the flagstaff at a run, and I
doubt whether musicians ever played to so attentive an audience since
Joshua's trumpets played their symphony before the walls of Jericho.
We needed no crier to remind the people of the historic hour; when
the guard of honour landed not even a dog was missing. The sky had
clouded, and a gentle rain was falling as the guard formed up, but
ere I had done reading the proclamation, the sun came out to see
another gap in its course filled by the flag on which it never sets.
As the signalman slowly ran up the Jack, the band played the National
Anthem, and a royal salute thundered from the guns of the ship lying at
anchor below us. To stand at the salute in a hot sun until the whole
twenty-one guns have been fired is a tedious ordeal, and I could not
help my eyes ranging right and left of me to the faces of the crowd.
It was a strange scene. Here were some thousands of natives, clad for
the most part in clothes made by the slop-tailors of Europe, gazing
in open-mouthed wonder at a handful of officers in gold-laced uniform
performing a ceremony intended in some way to change the tenour of
their lives. And behind lay the island, unchanged and unchangeable
through the centuries. Overhead were the trees that had looked down
upon the assault upon Cook by the native grandsires of these orderly
Christians, who set upon him "with the fury of wild boars," brandishing
paddle-clubs, and throwing these same lances that arm the king's
bodyguard. The foreigner has been too strong for them, but the island
will be too strong for the foreigner. The foreigner has landed and
brought with him the disease they feared so much, but let him hoist
flags and fire guns once a week until the Last Trump, he will never
conquer the stern fact that the island lies remote from the great
highways of the ocean, and turns a frowning cliff, against which the
great rollers shatter themselves unavailingly, upon those who would
beguile her into commerce.
[Illustration: HOISTING THE UNION JACK OVER SAVAGE ISLAND
April 21st, 1900
To face page 40
]
With the smoke of the last gun still floating in the air, I turned
to congratulate the king upon being now under the protection of Her
Majesty. He shook hands with me and thanked me in a bewildered way.
And looking round upon these hundreds of "British Protected Persons,"
who had changed their international status so suddenly, I could not
help wondering what they (or, indeed, anybody else) thought had been
effected by the change.
And here let me say a word about Protectorates. The word was invented
by the lawyers a few years ago when the scramble for the world began,
and there are those who think that if the man who first conceived the
idea had been led out quietly to a lethal chamber, the world would have
been saved a great deal of worry and vexation. In the old days when a
nation wanted a land it took it, dishonestly, it may be, but at least
openly, and tried to govern it after such fashion as lay within its
power. But when the scramble began, the European Powers had to invent
a polite way of saying to one another, "We have taken this country,
not because we mean to use it, but because we do not mean you to have
it! We take it under 'our protection.'" Under the old system nations
recognised some responsibility towards the land they seized; they
were at least responsible for its good government; under the new they
recognise none except the duty of crying "Hands off!" to the others,
until action is forced upon them by internal disorder. Now mark the
hair-splitting that ensues. No man can serve two masters. The men of
Niué owe allegiance to their own sovereign; they cannot also owe it
to the Queen; and a man who owes no allegiance to the Queen cannot be
a British subject. And yet when you guarantee him protection at home,
it would be unreasonable to refuse him protection while sojourning
abroad. If not a British subject, yet something British he must be.
The lawyers had to invent another term, and they called him a "British
Protected Person." When a black man is a British subject it is bad
enough. A Fijian residing in Tonga has a child by a Tongan woman. If he
was legally married to her the child is British, and must be tried by
a British court; if they were not legally married it is Tongan, and is
under the jurisdiction of Tongan magistrates. And the wretched consul
has to test the legality of the native marriage. If it was a heathen
marriage the case is worse, for the courts have never settled whether
heathen marriages, performed after the custom of the country, are
marriages at all in the eye of the law of England. But when a "British
Protected Person" has a child, we are treading upon thin ice indeed,
and I presume that every consul follows the dictates of such conscience
as he may have left to him. One need not go further than Siam to
see how the system may be abused. You have only to rake in half the
population as Protected Persons to establish a very fair claim to the
Protectorate of the soil on which they live, and this is precisely what
the French Consul, by inscribing all disaffected Siamese as French
citizens, is doing.
The invention of the Protectorate is, of course, very useful in certain
cases. Many of the Pacific Islands are the natural heritage of the
future Australian people, and it would have been most unfair to them to
allow alien nations to seize upon points of vantage about their very
gates. It would have been equally unfair to the English taxpayer and to
the natives of the islands to assume the government of countries that
were content to be under the authority of their own chiefs. If the idea
of the Protectorate had entered the heads of politicians sixty years
ago, the French would not now own Tahiti and New Caledonia, nor the
Germans the Marshalls, the Northern Solomons, and Northern New Guinea.
There are Protectorates and Protectorates. In some you may have a
resident adviser who virtually rules the country; in others a resident
who is there to give advice when it is asked for; in others no resident
at all. To the first class belong Zanzibar and the protected states of
India; to the second, Tonga and Somaliland; and to the third, Niué;
but in every class the establishment of a Protectorate is probably the
prologue to annexation more or less delayed. Why then was the flag
hoisted? There is, in fact, no reason why the flag should be hoisted
in a Protectorate, for the mere hoisting of a piece of bunting is not
in itself an act of appropriation recognised by international lawyers.
At one time or another the British flag has been hoisted in many parts
of the world that now belong to other nations. The legally recognised
act is the reading of a proclamation, and of this the flag is a mere
symbol that adds nothing to the legality when it is there, nor takes
away from it when it is absent. As a general rule the flag is not
hoisted in countries that have a flag of their own. It has never been
hoisted in Zanzibar nor in the protected states of India. On the other
hand, a people like the Niuéans, who have no flag, and know that other
countries have one, would never consider the Protectorate effective
unless they were granted the outward symbol of their allegiance. As the
matter had been left to my discretion, I had no hesitation in giving
them what they wanted. Fortunately none of the complications attending
a Protectorate had time to arise in Niué, for six months later the
island was formally annexed to the Colony of New Zealand.
The king had a request to make. He had never been on board a
man-of-war. Would the captain invite him to pay the ship a visit that
very afternoon? The eleven headmen also had requests to make: they too
would like to be of the party. As each of the eleven would have brought
two friends, and each friend two cousins, Captain Ravenhill was advised
by Mr. Lawes to make stern discrimination. The captain's boat would be
sent for the king, the queen, and the king's son. No one else, on pain
of the captain's severe displeasure, was to take passage in her, but
the eleven would be welcomed provided that they came alone and found
their way off in their own canoes. Their Majesties were punctual, and
the boat was got away with Mr. Head's son, a well-educated half-caste,
as interpreter, and not more than two interlopers. All went well until
she neared the ship, and then the queen, after a whispered consultation
with her consort, began to take off her boots. This operation being
still in progress long after the boat was alongside the gangway, faces
began to peer curiously over the side, but the blue-jacket stationed at
the foot of the ladder preserved an admirable composure, and, when
Her Majesty had paddled up the steps in her stockings, he gravely
followed the procession, carrying the royal boots as if they were
insignia of office, to the suppressed merriment of his fellows, who
were drawn up to receive the royal party. After the usual entertainment
in the captain's cabin the king was shown over the ship. Neither the big
six-inch guns, nor the neat little three-pounders that are fired from the
shoulder like a shot-gun, seemed to impress him, and it was not until
he was shown into the chart-room that he began to show enthusiasm.
Deceived by the brass chimney of the heating stove, he declared it to
be the finest kitchen he had ever seen. It was in vain for the
interpreter to explain the real uses of the room. It was the
kitchen--anyone could see that for himself--and if the captain chose,
for reasons of his own, to lie about its real uses, he, Tongia, was
too old in the craft of this world to be taken in. When I questioned
him afterwards about his visit, he said without hesitation that the
part of the ship that he had most admired was the kitchen, and he clung
to the idea with the same tenacity that had won him the throne. When
the interpreter had hinted to him that it was time to take leave, the
king, producing a dollar from his waistband, signified his intention
of tipping the captain for the pleasant entertainment he had provided,
and the interpreter had the greatest difficulty in persuading him that
such an act would be contrary to the decencies of European custom.
A dollar was a very precious possession in the king's eyes, and it
puzzled him, after many years' experience of the breed, that any white
man should refuse to pocket money when it was offered him. The king was
half-way down the ladder when he turned back, and the smile faded from
the countenance of the captain, who thought that he was in for a second
visit; but it appeared that Tongia had suddenly remembered the foreign
custom of giving precedence to ladies, and he gallantly motioned to
the queen to precede him, and handed her boots down after her. At that
moment he caught sight of the red ensign flying at the fore, and asked
the captain to give him one like it. Pointing with some contempt to
the Jack floating proudly from the flagstaff on shore, he said that
the red ensign was the flag for him, the other being too dingy for his
taste. With great tact Captain Ravenhill explained that the red ensign
was the badge of merchant ships and second-class potentates, and that,
on seeing the Jack, visitors would at once recognise the importance
of Niué-Fekai, and would conduct themselves with a proper spirit of
respect.
[Illustration: THE QUEEN OF NIUÉ
To face page 46
]
[3] The two great stones against which Tongia's last two predecessors
had leaned may still be seen standing in the square before Alofi
Church. Tongia chose to have the ceremony at his own village of Tuapa.
[4] The following is a list of the kings as far back as their names are
recorded:--
1. Punimata of Halafualangi, who reigned at Fatuaua (died).
2. Galiaga of Pulaki (killed).
3. Patuavalu of Puato (died).
4. Pakieto of Utavavau (starved to death).
Interregnum of eighty years.
5. Tuitonga (succeeded 1876).
6. Fataäiki (succeeded 1888).
Interregnum of nearly two years.
7. Tongia (succeeded 1898).