SOME HISTORICAL RECORDS
It would have astonished the first visitors to Niué not a little if
they could have lived to see the island now. The first foreigner to
land on the island after the Tongan invasion under Kau-ulu-fonua in
the sixteenth century was Captain Cook, and his experience would have
led no one to suppose that the natives would take kindly to strangers.
They were, in fact, the only Polynesians who would have nothing to say
to him. On Monday, June 20th, 1774, he landed on the north-west side
of the island, at a spot probably not far from Tuapa, and, seeing no
natives, rowed southward in his boat to a rift in the cliff, which, to
judge from his description, must have been none other than Alofi. Here
two canoes, hauled up upon the sand, tempted him to land, after his men
had been posted on a rocky point to guard against surprise. He had not
long to wait. Voices were heard in the thick undergrowth, and in a few
minutes a band of men, naked save for a waistband, smeared from head
to foot with black paint, and armed with throwing spears and slings,
ran out into the open. His friendly gestures met with no response. They
came at him "with the ferocity of wild boars and threw their darts."
One of them struck Lieutenant Spearman on the arm with a stone from
his sling, and another threw a spear at Cook at five yards that went
near to ending the great navigator's career before ever he saw Hawaii.
The spear missed his shoulder by a hair's-breadth, and the musket with
which he tried to shoot the man missed fire, though when he afterwards
fired it in the air, the powder exploded. The marines immediately
opened fire, and at the report the natives took to their heels without
suffering any loss. Cook wisely refrained from making further attempts
to open relations with them, for the island was wooded to the edge of
the cliff, and, the villages at that time being little fortresses in
the interior, he saw no houses. Naming the place "Savage Island," a
title which the natives now resent, he bore away to the north.
The first white man to land upon the island after Cook's visit did
so under dramatic circumstances. It appears from the account of an
aged native, who described the occurrence to Mr. W. G. Lawes as an
eye-witness, that a whaler was lying off the island bartering with the
natives, who were as wild and savage in appearance as Cook described
them. As the ship got under weigh the master savagely threw one of
his men overboard among the supposed cannibals, who took him ashore
in their canoes. The natives were in great perplexity what should be
done under such unprecedented circumstances. Many took their stand upon
the ancient law. Salt water was in the stranger's eyes--he must die!
On the other hand, it was evident that the man had not landed of his
own free will. The matter was settled by giving him a canoe victualled
with bananas and cocoanuts and sending him out to sea. Returning to an
unfrequented part of the coast under cover of night, he lay hid in a
cave for several days, and succeeded in getting on board another whaler
cruising in the neighbourhood.
In 1830 the pioneer missionary, John Williams, visited Niué in the
_Messenger of Peace_,[6] on his way from Aitutaki to Samoa, where he
intended to found a mission. Perceiving some natives on a sandy beach,
which must have been the present landing-place at Avatele, he made
signals of peace by waving a white flag, and, as soon as these were
returned, he despatched a boat manned by natives only. They found the
islanders drawn up in battle array, each having three or four spears,
a sling, and a belt filled with large stones. They laid aside their
arms as soon as they were satisfied that there were no Europeans in
the boat, and presented the _utu_, or peace-offering, receiving small
presents in return. This ceremony performed, they ventured out to the
ship in their canoes, but Mr. Williams could prevail upon only one of
them--the old man who endeavoured, with some success, to make the white
men's flesh creep with the war dance--to come on board the ship. While
he was retained as a hostage the boat party was permitted to land,
but, night coming on, the hostage was landed, and the vessel stood out
to sea. The old man had received with indifference an axe, a knife,
and a looking-glass, but he broke into transports of joy when he was
presented with a pearl shell.
On the following day Williams landed the two Aitutaki teachers and
their wives, whom he intended to leave as pioneers of Christianity.
They were "handled, smelt, and all but tasted," and, perceiving a vast
multitude of natives gathering thoroughly equipped for war, they took
alarm, and rowed off to the ship with one native, whom they persuaded
to embark with them. This man wore the handle of an old clasp knife
attached to his girdle, thus giving colour to the report that a few
months earlier the natives had cut off a boat belonging to a passing
vessel, and had murdered all the crew. The Aitutaki teachers, not
unnaturally, objected to be left unprotected among these inhospitable
people, and begged to be taken on to Samoa. To this Williams assented,
not out of fear for their lives, which he thought would be in no
danger, but because he thought it probable that they would be despoiled
of everything they possessed.
He now set about inducing two natives to sail with him to the Society
Islands, with the idea of restoring them to Niué after a course of
instruction in the Mission school. With the greatest difficulty he
persuaded two lads to embark, but no sooner did they see their island
vanishing in the offing than they became frantic with grief, tearing
their hair, "and howling in the most affecting manner." Nor would they
eat, drink, or sleep for three days. They turned with disgust from meat
and howled piteously, for, having never seen meat before, they took it
for human flesh, and concluded that they had been taken on board as
sea-stock for the voyage. On the third day, however, their fears were
allayed by seeing a pig killed and cooked, and gradually they became
reconciled to their new companions and pleased at the prospect of
seeing new countries. They stayed some months with Williams in Samoa,
and re-embarked with him in August, 1830, to return to their island.
"Very favourable impressions had been made on one of them, but the
other had resisted every effort to instruct him." Baffled by calms and
light head winds, the ship ran out of provisions, and was compelled to
bear away for Rarotonga without landing the boys, at which they showed
much disappointment, until they were comforted by the assurance that
by going first to Raiatea, they would be able to return home with more
valuable presents. A few months later they were landed at Niué by Mr.
Crook, one of the original missionaries who came out in the _Duff_ in
1797, and Williams saw no more of them.
Perhaps it was as well. Dr. Turner, who visited Niué in 1848, says that
shortly after the two lads' return influenza broke out, and they were
accused of bringing the disease from Tahiti, which was not unlikely,
seeing that Williams speaks more than once of its prevalence among the
Mission families. One of the lads was killed, together with his father;
the other contrived to escape in a whaler in company with a boy named
Peniamina Nukai, who entered the Mission school in Samoa. In 1842 this
boy returned to Niué in the Mission ship _Camden_, but so threatening
was the attitude of his countrymen that he had to leave again by
the same vessel. After another spell of four years in the school he
returned to his island in October, 1846, in the _John Williams_. On his
landing an armed crowd assembled to kill him. They wanted him to send
his canoe, his chest, and all his property back to the ship, saying
that the foreign wood would cause disease among them. He told them to
examine the wood--it was the same that grew on their own island--and as
for himself, how should he, a Niuéan like themselves, have more control
over disease than they? Thereupon they broke up into two parties, the
one for sparing his life, the other for giving him the shortest shrift.
"Let us do it now," they said; "let us do it now while he is alone, and
before the disease comes; presently others will join him, and it will
be difficult." Night came on, but the people, fearing the infection,
refused him shelter, and sent him to a deserted fortress, where he
wandered about in the rain, until one man, moved either by compassion
or scepticism, ventured to give him asylum for the night. Next day he
began to display the treasures of his chest, purchasing many friends at
the cost of his whole outfit.
The heathen priests, seeing their occupation in jeopardy, now set
to work to compass his death by witchcraft, and perhaps much of the
success of the Mission was due to the fact that he was too tough for
their spells. Other villages began to wish that they had Mission
teachers with the attendant blessings of hatchets and fish-hooks.
On August 29th, 1848, Dr. Turner, having obtained permission to send
Samoan teachers to the island, sailed for Samoa with two more Niué boys
to be trained in the Mission school. In October, 1849, a Samoan teacher
named Paulo was landed at Avatele, and he was followed afterwards by
four others, Amosa, Samuela, Sakaio, and Paula.
Captain Erskine touched at Niué in H.M.S. _Havannah_ on July 6th, 1849,
but did not land owing to the heavy swell from the westward. Numbers of
the natives boarded the ship from their canoes, prepossessing Erskine
favourably with their fearlessness and their honesty. One of them
puzzled him by repeating the Samoan salutation of "Alofa!" and going
through the pantomime of prayer, intending, doubtless, to inform him of
the presence of Samoan teachers on the island.
Long before Dr. Turner's next visit in 1859 the whole population, with
the exception of ten irreconcilables, was nominally Christian. The five
Samoans had, indeed, changed the face of the country. The natives,
formerly scattered about in little strongholds in the bush, were now
congregating in settled villages round the school-houses; they had
caught the garment-epidemic in its most aggravated form, and, as the
missionary records complacently, they were all decently clothed from
head to foot (we only, who have seen it, can realise the appalling
nature of this reform); they had completed a six-foot road round the
coast, which would "enable a missionary to take a horse all round
the island, a distance of forty or fifty miles, perhaps"; they had
abandoned war and infanticide; they no longer cut down the fruit-trees
of the dead; they had even changed their manner of house-building.
All this is an extraordinary result for five Samoans to have achieved
unaided in half a dozen years.
The breaking down of the old system of exclusiveness was not an unmixed
blessing to the islanders. Hitherto the whalers, knowing the reputation
of the place, had given it a wide berth. As early as 1830 John Williams
had found evidence in support of the story that they had cut off and
murdered the boat's crew of a passing vessel, and in 1847 an American
whaler lying off the island had not ventured to land to cut firewood
until Peniamina showed the captain his paper of credentials as a
Mission teacher. With the establishment of free intercourse the visits
of ships became frequent. Whalers introduced a terrible disease; Bully
Hayes, as will be presently related, found it a virgin field for
"blackbirding."
[Illustration: "DECENTLY CLOTHED FROM HEAD TO FOOT!"
To face page 78
]
The first European missionary who settled on the island was the Rev.
G. Pratt, who was followed a few months later by the Rev. W. G. Lawes,
now the head of the London Mission in New Guinea, the elder brother
of our kind host. He came out direct from England with his wife in
August, 1861, and found himself priest, prime minister, lawgiver,
and physician all in one. He must have suffered terribly from the
strain of isolation. Occasionally he obtained American papers from
passing whalers--in one case a ship calling in 1862 supplied him with
a Boston journal of 1834--but oftener he had the mortification of
seeing ships pass in the offing without communicating with the shore.
More than once English men-of-war actually had communication with the
natives, but left again without knowing that there were white people
on the island, or that there was a practicable landing-place.[7] Mr.
Lawes' first intercourse with Englishmen took place in June, 1862,
when H.M.S. _Fawn_ (Captain Cator), the first steam vessel to visit
Niué, put in, expecting to find the natives as Cook and Williams
described them. Lieutenant Hood has left us an interesting account
of this visit.[8] The natives were then in the first blush of their
conversion. Less sophisticated than they are now, and as warm-hearted,
they overwhelmed their visitors with the heartiness of their welcome.
"Pleasant surprises," wrote Mr. Hood, "are amongst the most agreeable
things in life. I don't remember ever being better pleased than with
our reception at Savage Island." But the fever of foreign travel had
already seized upon them. They importuned the captain to give them a
passage in the ship; and it was then common, some days after whalers
had left the coast, for two or three half-starved wretches to make
their appearance from the hold. Force had generally to be used to drive
the would-be emigrants into their canoes when a vessel was leaving, and
it was reported that among the unhappy wretches labouring in slavery
in the guano pits of the Chincha Islands were a few Savage Islanders.
The great enemy to the prosperity of the island is the labour trade.
It began in 1865, when the Germans took a number of young men to work
on their plantations in Samoa. In 1871 Messrs. Grice Sumner carried a
number of men to Malden Island at a wage of ten dollars a month, half
in trade and half in English money, with one month's wages paid in
advance. This has been the regulation wage since that date, and it is
not surprising that the island has been depopulated of its young men,
for it is double the profit that can be made by tillage of the land in
its present state, with the attractions of foreign travel thrown in.
Nevertheless, if they only knew it, the Niuéans might become passing
rich if they would stay at home and bestow their labour on the planting
of cocoanuts.
In early life Mr. Head had been in the employment of Bully Hayes,
the pirate. In the intervals of piracy Mr. Hayes had passed as a
law-abiding trader, and it was only when he wearied of the slow
returns accruing from the sale of calico that he turned to means of
quicker profit. One day, in 1868, he put in unexpectedly at Alofi,
and made himself so agreeable to the natives that sixty of them came
off to his vessel to gloat over the wonder of a foreign ship. With
that he slipped his cable and stood out to sea. The indignation of the
islanders at this outrage knew no bounds. It was at its height when
one morning, a week later, the joyful news spread that the ship was
returning. Mr. Hayes landed alone, and met Mr. Head on the village
green before all the natives. He was in high spirits, and had a ready
answer to Mr. Head's reproaches. "I told the beggars that I was going
to sail," he said, "but they wouldn't leave the ship. I couldn't stay
here a month. What could I do?" The men, he told the natives, were
all right. Finding that he had not provisions enough for so large a
company, he had landed them at a nice little island to the northward,
and had returned for food and water for the return voyage. If he had
meant to kidnap them, would he have returned like this? The story was
thin, but the natives were in no mood to test it. Provisions were
shipped in quantities, and the crew of Aitutaki men landed and made
friends with the people. That night word was brought to Mr. Head that
these gentry had made plans to elope with a number of girls, whose
heads they had turned with stories of foreign travel. He went at once
to the chiefs, and a guard was despatched hotfoot to the beach, only
to make out the schooner's lights in the offing. When they called the
roll they found that more than thirty girls were missing. This was the
last time Bully Hayes visited Niué. It was not till long afterwards
that Mr. Head heard the sequel to the story. Re-embarking the men, whom
he found half-starving, Hayes set sail for Tahiti, where he disposed
of the whole of his cargo to the highest bidder, or, as he chose to
put it, to the planter who paid the highest sum for their passage
money. He had promised to bring them back in two years, but they heard
no more of him. Many died in Tahiti; a few found their way to Samoa
and Queensland; a remnant, in which was King Tongia's daughter, now a
middle-aged woman, returned to Niué; the rest had scattered, who knows
whither?
[6] The _Messenger of Peace_ was the most remarkable vessel that ever
plied among the islands. She was built in Rarotonga, for the most part
by natives who had never handled tools before. Williams killed his
goats to make bellows for welding the bolts, and, when his iron ran
out, he fastened his planking with wooden trenails. Cocoanut fibre
stood for oakum, but there was not an ounce of pitch or paint for
caulking. She was of about sixty tons burden. When she put to sea with
her landsman captain, her crew of natives, who had never been to sea,
and her cargo of pigs, cocoanuts, and cats, she must have been a sight
to make a seaman weep.
[7] The vile anchorages of Niué are responsible for the loneliness
of the Europeans. Even in these days of more or less regular steam
communication among the islands the visits of ships are so rare that
the Europeans have come to believe in omens foretelling their arrival.
An insect settling on the dining-table is one of these, and the Mission
party laughingly recalled the fact that this portent had raised their
hopes two days before our arrival. Never were people so easy to
entertain. It happened that the captain had some new carbons of French
make to test in his searchlight, and the people took his experiments to
be a display of fireworks for their amusement. The brilliant flashes,
which, in the more sophisticated islands would not have drawn an
European to his door, were watched with rapture, and every native who
was entangled in the dazzling beam went frantic with delight.
[8] _The Cruise of H.M.S. "Fawn_," by T. H. HOOD, London, 1862.