I
If you want to study psychology go to the wilds. The minds of
civilised men and women are so covered with embroidery that the true
texture is almost hidden; their faces have been used so long for masks
that form and expression cannot be relied on. Amongst savages you come
sometimes upon the strangest facts bearing upon the structure of mind,
facts that lose half their significance in the atmosphere of London,
yet which, all the same, are not unconnected with our processes of
reasoning and conduct.
I was sitting with Brent in the house of Ibanez, the agent of the
Southern Islands Soap Syndicate, an institution that turns cocoanut
trees and native labour into soap, mats, margarine, dollars and
dividends, beats up the blue Pacific with the propellers of filthy
steamboats and has its offices in San Francisco, London and New York.
We were sitting, to speak more strictly, in the verandah, the southern
night lay before us and a million stars were lighting the sea.
Tahori, a native boy, and one of Ibanez’s servants, had just brought
along a big tray with cigars and drinks and placed it on a table by
us. I noticed that he wore white cotton gloves. Brent had also noticed
the fact.
“What’s wrong with that chap’s hands?” asked Brent.
“Tahori’s?” replied our host. “Nothing—only he must not touch glass.”
“Tabu?”
“Yes. He only helps occasionally in household work when Mauri is away.
I got over the difficulty of his waiting upon me by giving him gloves
in case he accidentally touched a tumbler or bottle; even with the
gloves on he will not handle anything in the way of glass knowingly;
the cook puts the things on that tray, and when he takes it back to
the kitchen she will clear it.”
“I thought all that was dying out,” said Brent.
“So it is, but it still hangs about. Tahori is a South Island boy. I
don’t know why the tabu about glass came about, makes it awkward for
him as a servant.”
“No one knows,” said Brent. “I’ve seen chaps that were under tabu
preventing them from eating oysters and others that daren’t touch the
skin of a shark or the wood of such and such a tree, no one knows
why.”
“What do they suppose would happen to them if they broke the tabu?” I
asked.
“They couldn’t,” said Brent.
“Couldn’t?”
“No, they couldn’t. I’m talking of the real old Islanders whose minds
haven’t been loosened up by missionaries and such, though I’m not so
sure it wouldn’t hold good for the present-day ones too, and I’m
saying that a chap like that couldn’t break his tabu not if he wanted
to, not if his life depended on it; beliefs are pretty strong things,
but this is something stronger even than a belief; maybe it’s the
mixture of a custom and a belief, and that makes it have such a hold
on the mind, but there it is—I’ve seen it.”
“Seen a man unable to break his tabu?”
“Seen the effects, anyhow, same as you might see the wreck of a ship
lying on a beach. I doubt if you’d see the same thing these days,
though there’s no telling; anyhow, it was away back in the early
nineties and I’d just come up from the Tongas to Tahiti, getting a
lift in the _Mason Gower_, she was an old trading schooner the
missionaries had collared and turned into a Bible ship, and I lent my
hand with the cooking to pay for my passage.
“I’d had a quarrel with Slane and parted from him, taking my share of
the money we had in common, and I hadn’t seen him for six months and
more. I hadn’t prospered either, losing nearly every buck in a
blackbirding venture I ought never to have gone in for.
“I hadn’t more than ten dollars in my belt when I landed at Papeete,
but I’d saved my dunnage and had some decent clothes and the luck to
fall in with Billy Heffernan at the club. Billy was one of the Sydney
boys; he wasn’t more than twenty-five, but he’d seen more of the world
than most and lost two fortunes which he’d made with his own hands.
That was the sort Billy was, and when I struck him at Papeete he was
recovering from his last bust-up and had got the money together for
another venture.
“His first fortune had been made over Sing Yang opium, which isn’t
opium no more than Sam Shu is honest drink; then he’d done a deal in
shell and pulled it off and lost the money in copra, and now he was
after precious coral.
“When I met him in the bar I said: ‘Hello, Heff—what are you after
down here,’ and he says, ‘Coral.’
“‘Well, you’ll find lots of it,’ says I, thinking he was joking, and
then I found it was precious coral he was talking of. You see there’s
about a hundred different sorts of coral. Coral’s made by worms. If
you go on any reef and knock a chunk off between tide marks you’ll
find your chunk has got worms hanging out of it. I’ve done it often in
different parts, and I’ve been surprised to find the difference in
those worms. Some are a foot long and as thin as a hair, and some are
an inch thick and as long as your finger; some are like snails and
some are like lobsters and prawns in shape; some are yellow and some
blue. Above tide marks you don’t find anything, just solid rock. Well,
there’s just as many different sorts of coral as there is worms, and
there’s only one sort of precious coral and it’s a pale pink, the
colour of a rose leaf, and that’s what Heffernan was after. He’d heard
of an island in the Paumotus which isn’t very far from Tahiti, and by
all accounts it was a good fishing ground for pink coral, and more
than that, it was said the Queen of the place—for it was run by a
woman—had a lot of the stuff for sale—Tawela was her name.
“Ships keep clear of the Paumotus on account of the currents that run
every which way and the winds that aren’t dependable. Heff had his
information from a whaling captain who’d struck the place the year
before and had talk with the Kanakas. He was on the beach broken down
with drink, and gave the location for twenty dollars. He said he
didn’t think they were a dependable lot, but they had the stuff, and
if Heffernan didn’t mind taking risks he might make a fortune. Heff
asked the old chap why he hadn’t gone in for the business himself, and
he answered that he would have done so only he had no trade goods;
nothing but whale oil, and the Kanakas didn’t want that, they wanted
knives and tobacco and any sort of old guns and print calico and so
on. Heft didn’t know where to get any such things as these, and hadn’t
the money if he had known, nor a ship to lade them into, but next day,
by good luck, came blowing in the _Mary Waters_, owned and captained
by Matt Sellers, a Boston chap who’d come round to the Pacific in a
whaler out of Martha’s Vineyard, skipped at the Society Islands not
liking the society on board, and risen from roustabout to recruiter
and recruiter to captain and owner. He’d brought a mixed cargo from
’Frisco on spec to the Marquesas, couldn’t find a market and had come
on to Papeete, couldn’t find a market and came into the club for a
drink, fell into the arms, as you may say, of Heffernan, and that did
him. He hadn’t been talking half an hour with Heff when he sees
clearly that the hand of the Almighty was in the business, and that a
sure fortune was waiting for him if he’d only take the trouble to pick
it up. His trade goods were just the things wanted to buy the stuff,
and he only had to put out for the Paumotus to get it. That was the
way Heff mesmerised him. Then they had a talk as to the profits, and
Sellers agreed to give Heff twenty-five per cent. commission on the
deal.
“I blew into the business, as I was saying, by meeting Heffernan a few
days later—day before the _Mary Waters_ was due to sail—and, seeing
no chance of doing much in Papeete, I joined in with them at second
officer’s pay, but without any duty, only to lend a hand if there
should be a dust-up.
“Next day we started, steering a course almost due east. We weren’t
long in finding out we’d struck the Paumotus, tide rips everywhere and
reefs, then you’d see cocoanut trees growing out of the sea ahead and
presently you’d be skimming by a beach of coral not ten feet above the
sea level with cocoanut trees blowing in the wind and Kanaka children
shouting at you. Very low free board those atoll islands have, and
I’ve heard of ships being blown right over the beaches into the
lagoons. We passed a big island like that, and then, two days after,
we raised Utiali; that was the name of the island the whaler captain
had given to Heffernan with the latitude and longitude. It wasn’t down
in the South Pacific Directory. They’ve got it there now, but in those
days there was no mention of Utiali, though the whaler captains knew
it well enough, but a whaler captain would never bother to report an
island; if he’d struck the New Jerusalem he wouldn’t have done more
than log it as a place where you could take on milk and honey. Whales
was all they cared for, and blubber.
“We came along up and found the place answering to all descriptions,
lagoon about a mile wide, break to the east, good show of cocoanut
trees and deep soundings all to north-east and south, with another
island not bigger than the palm of your hand to west running out from
a line of reef that joined with the beach of Utiali.
“If the place had been painted blue with the name in red on it, it
couldn’t have been plainer.
“We came along to the eastward till we saw the opening, and got
through without any bother just on the slack.
“It was a pretty place to look at. I’ve never seen a stretch of water
that pleased me more than that lagoon; maybe it was the depth or
something to do with the water itself, but it was more forget-me-not
colour than sea blue, and where it was green in the shallows or the
ship shadow, that green was brighter and different from any green I’ve
ever seen.
“Maybe that’s why precious coral grew there, since the water colours
were so clear and bright, the coral colours following suit would hit
on new ideas, so to speak, but however that may have been, there was
no denying the fact that Utiali was a garden, and the native houses on
shore seemed the gardeners’ cottages—had that sort of innocent look.
“We dropped the hook close in shore on to a flower bed where you could
see the sea anemones and the walking shells as clear as if there
wasn’t more than two foot of water over them, and before the schooner
had settled to the first drag of the ebb that was beginning to set,
canoes began to come off with Kanakas in them.