TONGA REVISITED
Our holidays were over; our real work was now to begin. As we steamed
past the islet of Atatá and opened the low, monotonous shores of
Tongatabu, stretching crescent-wise as far as the eye could reach, I
wondered how the impulsive, faction-riven little people would receive
me. Ten years ago I had been escorted to the steamer by the Lords and
Commons in procession, but I had then been a Tongan Minister of the
Crown working my hardest to bolster the independence of my adopted
country; now I was an Englishman charged with a very different errand.
There is an apparent inconsistency about the two rôles that calls for
explanation. Ten years bring many changes in the circumstances of
little states. When I was last in Tonga, Hawaii was independent; three
great Powers were still wrangling over Samoa; countless islands in the
Pacific were yet unclaimed. All had fallen now, and eyes had been cast
upon Tonga--the last independent state in the Pacific. She could make
no resistance; her seizure was only a question of months, unless she
had a powerful protector. For political, strategic, and geographical
reasons England could not afford to tolerate a foreign Power in
possession of the best harbour in the Pacific islands within striking
distance of Fiji. And with the new agreement between England and
Germany the last prop to Tongan independence had been cut away. Until
then, the coaling station ceded to the Germans had been a guarantee
against seizure by another Power, while British interests had acted
as a check upon Germany. But now that the Germans had ceded all their
treaty rights to us, we had either to take what was given to us, or
leave the field open to others. In extending our protection, therefore,
to the Tongans we were serving their interests even more than our own.
The reports which we had heard in Sydney, Fiji, and Samoa were very
conflicting. All agreed in one thing--that, since the newspapers
announcing us had been received, our arrival was awaited with anxiety;
but, while some declared that the Tongans would resist the loss of
their independence to the last man, others asserted that they would
not be satisfied with a Protectorate, but would ask for annexation. I
flattered myself that I knew the little people too well to believe the
latter forecast.
As the white line of houses that marked the capital grew in definition,
I began to notice changes. There stood the palace and its church as
trim as ever within the stone-walled compound, but to the westward,
where a native could be seen running up the British ensign, a wooden
bungalow had replaced the picturesque old native-built consulate.
These had been prosperous years with the Tongans; there was not a
native-built house to be seen; trim little weather-board cottages had
sprung up everywhere, and in the vacant space beside the government
offices of my day there now stood a pretentious wooden building,
the new House of Parliament. Naturally the traders, who had had the
erecting of all these, had prospered too, and the line of stores on
the eastern side of the town were resplendent in new paint. Two houses
only in all the half-mile--ruinous, rain-washed, and neglected--told
their own tale. They belonged to old Tungi and his son Tukuaho, my dear
lamented colleague; with them and with their owners the years had dealt
unkindly, as I shall presently relate.
The town was asleep in the sun; its trim, grassy streets stretching
away inland were utterly deserted; it was like a toy town,
fresh-painted from the shop before the miniature inhabitants have
been taken out of their packing box. Nukualofa is, indeed, unlike any
other town in the world. Not long ago a friend of mine encountered an
American tourist, just landed from a steamer, gaping at a street corner
where four ways meet, and asked him what he was looking at. "Sir,"
he replied, "they tell me that this is the business quarter of this
capital, and I'm going to watch these four grass-walks till I see a
human being. But I've wasted ten minutes, and I'll have to give it up."
We were boarded by my friend, Dr. Donald Maclennan, who, as the only
practitioner in the group, is the hardest-worked man in Tonga. He has
had a remarkable career. A Scotsman, educated in Canada, he practised
first in San Francisco and afterwards in Hawaii, where he became a
close friend of the native queen and the royalist party. When the
Revolution of 1893 resulted in annexation by the United States, he
made a tour round the Pacific islands without a definite intention
of settling, and chanced to reach Tonga when the government was in
desperate need of a medical officer. He accepted the post temporarily
and has remained ever since, having by his skill, his independence, his
distaste for politics, and his unselfish and fearless devotion to duty,
inspired extraordinary confidence in the king, the people, and the
Europeans--a feat which no foreigner has ever accomplished before.
It being necessary that we should take up our quarters on shore, we
accepted Dr. Maclennan's hospitality with an alacrity that was almost
indecent, since we knew, and he did not, the tax that we were to levy
upon him. He had to submit to our society, to endless interruptions
from messengers, and to an invasion by the entire court retinue on
a memorable night when he was kept up till half-past two to witness
the signing of the treaty in his dining-room. But he bore it all with
untiring good humour to the end, and buried us beneath a load of
obligation that would weigh very heavily upon me if he were conscious
of it.
If any of us flattered himself that the town would wake up when it
learned of our arrival, he was disappointed. Flags, it is true,
fluttered up to the head of every staff, but the beach and the streets
were still deserted. At three o'clock we ran the Tongan ensign to the
masthead and saluted it, and the report of the first gun did certainly
produce some stir. Little Tongan guardsmen began to bustle about the
guard-room at the shore end of the wharf; presently a score of them
hauled out a couple of five-pounders mounted on iron carriages, and
trundled them to the foot of the flagstaff. The Tongan ensign fluttered
down; the Jack was run up in its place and saluted with remarkable
precision and regularity, for the guns must have been dangerously hot
before the twenty-one had been fired. Presently a boat was manned,
and a burly gentleman in frock-coat and silk hat, whom even at that
distance I could recognise as Tui Belehake, embarked in her and came on
board.
The lineal descendant of the gods had carried the ten years easily.
His hair was a shade greyer, but the brightness of his eye and the
natural gaiety of his laugh were not abated. With the exception of poor
Tukuaho, all my old friends were well; they had heard of my coming
through the newspapers, and rejoiced at it, though they knew not the
cause (and here the hereditary laugh carried a tremor of nervousness);
a princess had been born to the king six weeks before, and he, as His
Majesty's father, chuckled at the thought of being a grandfather, and
touched lightly on the still burning question of the king's marriage,
which had not disturbed him, for all it had threatened revolution. And
"Misa Beika" was back again. He laughed long and loud at this admission
and the reminiscences that it evoked.
I must here digress to explain what had taken place since my term of
office ten years before. In 1893 King George had died, at the age
of ninety-seven, of a chill supposed to have been brought on by his
obstinate habit of bathing at daybreak in the sea, and had been buried
in a huge mound thrown up in the public square of Nukualofa, known
as the Malaekula, or Red Square. Contrary to expectation, his great
great-grandson, Taufa'ahau, had succeeded him without disturbance,
under the title of George Tubou II. Not long after his accession he
had dismissed Tukuaho, appointing him governor of Vavau, and had
made Sateki, my auditor-general, premier in his stead. For a time
the premier had had an European clerk, but the native government had
gradually come to dispense with all Europeans except the Customs staff.
This meant, of course, that it had sought unofficial and irresponsible
advice from traders, and, during the last few months, the government
was said to have been in the hands of a Hebrew firm, which contracted
for the public supplies. In the eighth year of the king's reign it was
felt that it was time for him to marry. Overtures are said to have
been made to more than one Polynesian princess, but public feeling
ran high in favour of Ofa, a near kinswoman of Tukuaho, and therefore
a chief woman of the Haatakalaua line. The betrothal was announced,
and preparations had already been made for the royal wedding, when
the king announced that he preferred Lavinia, Kubu's daughter, who,
though descended from the Tui Tonga on her father's side, inherited
inferior rank and congenital weakness from her mother. A meeting of all
the high chiefs was summoned in Nukualofa, which recommended the king
to make Ofa his queen; but His Majesty's reply, that, if he were not
allowed to marry Lavinia, he would not marry at all, threw the meeting
into confusion, and he was permitted to have his way under protest.
It seems that the Lavinia party, though numerically inferior, trotted
out that ancient stalking horse, the Constitution, to prove to their
antagonists that inasmuch as "it shall not be lawful for any member of
the royal family, who is likely to succeed to the throne, to marry
any person without the consent of the king," the king was free to give
consent to his own marriage with any person he pleased. This argument,
so characteristic of the sophistry of the Tongan mind, was gravely
set forth to me in a letter from my old colleague Asibeli Kubu, the
father of His Majesty's preference; it reminded me of a legal judgment
delivered during Mr. Baker's term of office, when two men, indicted for
the theft of a pig, were sentenced to ten years' penal servitude for
conspiracy, because in the evidence it had transpired that by mutual
agreement one of the accused had kept watch while the other did the
stealing. "Therefore," said his worship, "not only did you steal the
pig, which is a small matter in itself, but you conspired together to
steal it; and having sought in the index of this code for the clause
concerning conspiracy, I find the minimum sentence to be ten years. To
that term I sentence you, and you may think yourselves fortunate that I
do not punish you for the theft as well."
To have the "Konisitutone" thrown at their heads was more than the
nobles had reckoned upon. They might be wrong in law, but they knew
what they wanted, and they broke up their meeting grumbling, and
departed, each to his own home. The king, boycotted by all but his
immediate adherents and the relations of his bride, kept close within
the palace compound; the marriage feast was but sparsely attended,
and the dissatisfaction of the people vented itself in attempts to
burn public buildings and the houses of unpopular members of the royal
party. The last of these incendiary attempts had occurred shortly
before my visit.
Meanwhile, my old acquaintance Mr. Shirley Waldemar Baker, a person
so remarkable in the Pacific that it will some day be a public duty
to write his biography, had turned up again. Having spent several
years in Auckland after his deportation by the High Commissioner, he
had made overtures to the Free Church of Tonga to accept him as their
president. The Conference considered his application with the utmost
gravity, and replied that, while they would be glad to welcome him as
a minister, the office of president happened to be filled. That the
Church of his own creation should treat him so was more than he could
bear, and his next letter was a grim intimation that they would hear
of him again. Those who knew him best may have felt an uncomfortable
shiver at the threat, but none in his wildest dreams can have guessed
how he would carry it out. For when Mr. Baker came back to Tonga it was
as an emissary of the Church of England, speciously introduced to the
Tongans as the _Jiaji a Vika_ (the Church of Queen Victoria). Rebuffed
by the Bishop of Honolulu, to whom the Bishop of London has delegated
his authority over this part of the globe, he had persuaded the Bishop
of Dunedin to give him a licence as lay reader. It is no part of my
business to criticise this bishop's action, or to relate how the
bishops of New Zealand intervened to dissuade him from going himself to
Tonga to support his protégé, but I may be pardoned for asking under
what authority of custom or ecclesiastical law one bishop can issue a
licence for what is virtually the diocese of another.
The new Church was just the political weapon that the party of the
rejected princess wanted. It offered a proof of discontent, it was a
new experiment in Churches, and, above all, it annoyed the king. It was
safer than burning houses, because, at the first whisper of reprisal,
you could stand boldly forth and quote the Constitution about liberty
of conscience. At the time of our visit Ofa had joined the new Church
with most of her relations; and poor blind Tungi, her kinsman, had so
far conquered his aversion to Mr. Baker as to permit services to be
held in his premises. Mr. Baker had been careful not to define his
exact position to the Tongans. All that a stole and surplus could do
towards making him an ordained clergyman had been done. He did not
bother the Tongans with any nonsense about Church government; the one
thing he did understand was making a collection, and he held his first
while I was at Nukualofa. Something under three hundred adherents
subscribed nearly £200. I asked Ofa who kept the money. Had they
churchwardens?
"Churchwardens," she said, "what are they?"
I explained. No, they had no churchwardens.
"Then who keeps the money?"
"Misa Beika."
It was melancholy to see how cruelly Fortune had used Tungi, whom I had
left the most influential chief in Tonga. While his son Tukuaho was
still alive his sight had begun to fail, and he had made the voyage to
Samoa to consult a German oculist, who pronounced his case to be beyond
hope. Hardly had night closed in upon him when Tukuaho, his only son
and the most popular chief in Tonga, died suddenly of heart disease
while riding with the king. Then came the jilting of Ofa, his near
kinswoman, an insult to his family which must have hit him hard. He
had retired to his little house in Nukualofa and was living quietly on
the rents of the adjoining property, which he had enjoyed undisputed
for many years, when the government suddenly put in a claim to it and
dispossessed him, reducing him to poverty. I do not know the rights of
the matter; I only know that the man who, failing royal issue, stood
next to the throne, who was the most courtly and imposing of the chiefs
of the old time, the last repository of ancient lore and tradition, was
reduced to living in a hovel in which you would not stable a horse,
blind, deserted, and in utter penury. A few weeks after our departure
the last link with the past was severed by his death.
Beyond the birth of a princess three weeks before our arrival nothing
had occurred to change the position. The king was in voluntary
confinement in his compound, estranged from his chiefs, and consorting
with three of his ministers, his kinsmen, and his guardboys, who
tumbled into uniform only when a foreign ship was in port. The
government of the country was nominally in the hands of old Sateki, my
old auditor-general, then regarded as a sort of Sea-green Incorruptible,
but now openly accused of acting at the behest of the firm of Hebrew
merchants who were contractors to the government. The Treasury was
empty and the salaries in arrear, but the country was not in debt,
probably because its credit was not strong enough to carry a loan.
The chronic depletion of the Treasury was due partly to the
light-hearted Polynesian habit of turning money into goods on the first
opportunity, and partly to the light-fingered ease with which the Treasury
officials helped themselves to the contents of the till. It reminded me of
old times to hear that a sum of £2,000 was missing from one of the
sub-treasuries; that the treasurer, put upon his trial, had challenged an
audit; and that the auditors, after completing their task, had stated that
they were not quite sure whether the money had ever been received, or,
if it had been received, whether it had been paid out legitimately or
purloined. The foreshore was littered with dressed stone, intended for the
thief-proof treasury which had been projected even in my time--"to keep
out the rats," as the Chief Justice remarked facetiously, "only the rats
that gnaw the money-bags will come in through the door." The
Europeans made much of these defalcations as a factor in the general
discontent, but in reality the grumbling was confined to the European
traders, who naturally object to pay taxes under such conditions, for the
Tongan does not greatly care what becomes of his money after he has
paid it.
[Illustration: UILIAME TUNGI
THE BLIND CHIEF OF HAHAKE
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