BYWAYS OF CUSTOM
Among those who had made speeches to us after the dancing was the
headman of Hakupu village, whose features had been destroyed by the
ravages of lupus. The roof of his mouth being also involved, his
speech was hardly intelligible even to Mr. Lawes. "I am afflicted, as
you see," he said, "yet could I not bear to let this day pass without
bidding you welcome to Niué-Fekai." I questioned Mr. Head about the
diseases of the natives. He said that yaws (Frambæsia, so called from
the strawberry-like appearance of the eruption), and phthisis, coughs
and colds were quite unknown before the arrival of the Samoan teachers.
The people, when he first arrived on the island, generally died of old
age. The diseases of that time were _makulokuli_, an urinary trouble,
lupus and scrofula. Since intercourse with ships has become common,
there has been ample justification for the policy that earned for the
Niuéans from Cook the title of Savage Islanders. Nowadays every child
has yaws as a matter of course, though, being a contagious disease,
it might easily be stamped out by isolation. Whooping-cough has never
left the island since its introduction. Measles, brought in two years
ago by a labourer returning from abroad, occasioned about one hundred
deaths, but though it lasted twelve months, so efficient was the native
quarantine of infected villages that Tuapa escaped it altogether. The
worst form of contagious disease, unknown thirty-four years ago, is
said now to be common in the tertiary stage, especially among infants.
As its name, _tona Tahiti_ (Tahitian yaws), implies, it was introduced
from Tahiti during the sixties. There is not much ophthalmia, and
deformities are rare. There are a few cases of insanity--our friend,
the Admiral's sister, is fast qualifying to rank among them--and the
people do not treat them kindly.
Serious illness is still regarded as possession by the spirit of
some dead person, and a necessary part of the treatment is to evict
the spirit in possession. I have already told how a mother destroyed
her daughter's grave by fire in order to burn the spirit that was
afflicting her. Nearly all the old women are medical practitioners.
The number of herbal decoctions that they administer to a sick
person is incredible. If one fails in working a cure before their eyes,
they administer another, and if the patient persists in dying after
drinking them all, as is not uncommon, they lay the blame upon the
spirit, and their practice suffers no injury. The best known of these
native doctors exact heavy fees in kind for their services, but their
faith in their own nostrums must be rather slender, for they
themselves, when taken ill, resort to the Mission dispensary. Mr.
Lawes and Mr. Head, who both dispense medicines for the natives,
are agreed in finding that the natives are more susceptible to the
action of drugs than Europeans, and require smaller doses.
[Illustration: A GRAVE IN TONGA
Made of coral, white sand, and polished black pebbles. The garlands
worn by friends are suspended above as a mark of affection
_From a photograph by J. Martin, Auckland._
To face page 134
]
Families are large. Five or six children are quite common, and there is
more than one woman now alive who has given birth to sixteen children.
There used to be no barren women, though now childless women are not
unknown. These generally adopt children, whom they treat with the same
affection as if they had borne them. The marriage of first cousins
is not popular as in Fiji, though there is a trace of the sentiment
that has produced the curious custom of concubitancy practised by the
Fijians. The offspring of two sisters are absolutely forbidden to
marry, but the children of two brothers, or of a brother and sister,
may do so without shocking the sentiments of the community. In the
case of the offspring of two sisters the prohibition dates from a time
when a man who married one member of a family had a right to marry all
her sisters, and it was never certain that the children of sisters had
not the same father. The population of 4,576, as will be seen in the
returns in the appendix, is now stationary.
Relationships are traced back for four or five generations. The people
seem to be in a transition state between Patriarchy and Matriarchy. A
grown-up son inherits his father's house and land, but the daughters
seem to have claims upon their mother's brother, and though these
claims are universally recognised, there is nothing approaching the
extraordinary rights of the Fijian _vasu_.
The land is the common property of the septs, represented by their
heads. The present boundaries are not of old standing, for in fighting
times the braves (_toa_) ignored all rights, and seized upon any land
they thought themselves strong enough to hold, and some of this spirit
still survives. But there is land enough for all and to spare, and
the junior members of a sept come to their laird whenever they are in
need of land to plant on. There is individual ownership in a sense,
because a title can be acquired by cultivation, and the sons inherit
their father's land; but no landowner can demise his holding to anyone
outside the limits of his sept, and, in default of heirs, the land
reverts to the head of the sept for assignment to other members of it.
The headman receives a sort of rent in the form of labour and produce,
and the firstfruits, formerly offered to the gods, are sometimes
presented to him. Last year the Pacific Islands Company applied for a
lease of two hundred acres in the interior for a plantation, and as
there were no native plantations on the land, they considered that
the refusal of their application was due to mere obstruction. As King
Tongia had laid great emphasis upon one of his laws which prohibited
the sale of land to foreigners, I thought it possible that he did
not understand the difference between a lease and a sale, and I was
at some pains to explain that the company was not asking him to do
anything contrary to the spirit of the law. But he replied that the
refusal rested upon other grounds. The persons who had expressed their
willingness to lease were in fact not the exclusive owners. Every
member of several different septs would claim a voice in granting the
lease, and the boundaries of this unoccupied land were so ill-defined
that the division of the rent would lead to endless bickering and
dispute. Moreover it might well happen that the poorer members of some
of the septs would be left landless, on the excuse that the lease of so
large an area had eaten up the land for which they might have applied.
He satisfied me that the boundaries would have to be settled by some
sort of commission before it would be prudent to grant leases for
plantations.
Like all the Polynesians, the Niuéans are possessed by an earth-hunger
that nothing will satisfy. Most of the jealousy between villages has
its root in land disputes, and the land question is daily becoming
more complicated through the system that allows titles to be acquired
by cultivation, because the entanglements can no longer be cut
periodically by the sword, or rather by the paddle-shaped club. The
planting of plantains or of yams by leave of the owner confers no
title, but the planting of cocoanuts and other fruit trees does so. In
Fiji it is not uncommon for one man to own the land and another the
trees growing upon it, but in Niué the trees carry the land with them.
Thus, there being no boundary marks, encroachment by tree-planting
is a continual source of friction. It presses particularly hard upon
widows and orphans, whose protests against tree-planting are unheeded,
and who are frequently robbed of land inherited from their dead
husbands and fathers in this way. The excuse usually given for this
injustice is that widows and orphans are in wrongful possession, for
their connection with the dead man's sept ceases with his death, and
they should go back to their own kin for land to plant on; but that
this argument is regarded as sophistry is shown by the fact that the
majority of natives condemn the practice.
I have purposely refrained from touching on the flora and fauna of Niué
because they are subjects that are better left by the passing traveller
to the specialist, who is certain sooner or later to visit so promising
a field as a solitary island originally destitute of domestic animals.
Unlike human customs, which change with the old order, the fauna of
an island is not affected by the fictions of human statecraft; the
birds and the lizards and the land-shells will continue to breed their
kind under the Union Jack as they did when the Pulangi Tau swayed the
destinies of Niué-Fekai. But I must make an exception in favour of the
_Musca Domestica_, the common house-fly. All the later visitors agree
in describing the swarms of flies as an Egyptian plague. The bodies
of the men who came off the ships were black with them, and I knew
of them by reputation long before we arrived at the island. We were
prepared for the worst when our royal pilot boarded us, and we were
astonished to find that he came on board unattended. One of our first
questions was, "Where are your flies?" and we found that the Europeans
on shore shared our surprise. At Christmas, 1899, they had been as bad
as ever: then came February and March, unusually wet months, and the
flies entirely disappeared. During our stay not a fly was seen. Those
are the facts: entomologists must explain them. The house-fly, as most
people know, takes something under fourteen days from the laying of the
egg to the hatching of the pupa. The voracious larvæ are supposed to
earn their living by scavenging, but the Niuéans have dispensed with
their services for some months without being one penny the worse. Their
satisfaction will be short-lived: a new breed will be introduced by the
steamers, and Niué will be fly-blown again.