Transcribed from the 1908 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
BEING AN ACCOUNT OF EXPERIENCES AND
OBSERVATIONS IN THE MARQUESAS, PAUMOTUS
AND GILBERT ISLANDS IN THE COURSE OF
TWO CRUSES, ON THE YACHT ‘CASCO’ (1888)
AND THE SCHOONER ‘EQUATOR’ (1889)
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
FINE-PAPER EDITION
* * * * *
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1908
* * * * *
_All rights resverved_
CONTENTS
PART 1: THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER
I. AN ISLAND LANDFALL
II. MAKING FRIENDS
III. THE MAROON
IV. DEATH
V. DEPOPULATION
VI. CHIEFS AND TAPUS
VII. HATIHEU
VIII. THE PORT OF ENTRY
IX. THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA
X. A PORTRAIT AND A STORY
XI. LONG-PIG—A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE
XII. THE STORY OF A PLANTATION
XIII. CHARACTERS
XIV. IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY
XV. THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA
PART II: THE PAUMOTUS
I. THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO—ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE
II. FAKARAVA: AN ATOLL AT HAND
III. A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND
IV. TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS
V. A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL
VI. GRAVEYARD STORIES
PART III: THE GILBERTS
I. BUTARITARI
II. THE FOUR BROTHERS
III. AROUND OUR HOUSE
IV. A TALE OF A TAPU
V. A TALE OF A TAPU—_continued_
VI. THE FIVE DAYS’ FESTIVAL
VII. HUSBAND AND WIFE
PART IV: THE GILBERTS—APEMAMA
I. THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE ROYAL TRADER
II. THE KING OF APEMAMA: FOUNDATION OF EQUATOR TOWN
III. THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN
IV. THE KING OF APEMAMA: EQUATOR TOWN AND THE PALACE
V. KING AND COMMONS
VI. THE KING OF APEMAMA: DEVIL-WORK
VII. THE KING OF APEMAMA
PART 1: THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER I—AN ISLAND LANDFALL
For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while
before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the
afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It
was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling
to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had
attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit’s
schooner yacht, the _Casco_, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San
Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and
was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to
return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward
in a trading schooner, the _Equator_, of a little over seventy tons,
spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert
group, and reached Samoa towards the close of ’89. By that time
gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had
gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new
interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and
I decided to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third
cruise, in the trading steamer _Janet Nicoll_. If more days are granted
me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man
most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the
foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from
the uttermost parts of the sea.
That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson’s hero is
less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them;
they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind
fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a
visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more
rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power
upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside
travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea
and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit
as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Cæsars.
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first
sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a
virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon was an hour down
by four in the morning. In the east a radiating centre of brightness
told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline, the morning bank was
already building, black as ink. We have all read of the swiftness of the
day’s coming and departure in low latitudes; it is a point on which the
scientific and sentimental tourist are at one, and has inspired some
tasteful poetry. The period certainly varies with the season; but here
is one case exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four,
the sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could
distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon. Eight
degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval was passed
on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall
heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then
approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness.
Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the
starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in
cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun
displayed the needles of Ua-pu. These pricked about the line of the
horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they
stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit
signboard of a world of wonders.
Not one soul aboard the _Casco_ had set foot upon the islands, or knew,
except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was
with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the bosom
of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The land
heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses;
its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and
olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of
vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with
the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial
canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was no
beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot. Somewhere, in
that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and
somewhere to the east of it—the only sea-mark given—a certain headland,
known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and
distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary of nature.
These we were to find; for these we craned and stared, focused glasses,
and wrangled over charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close
ahead before we found them. To a ship approaching, like the _Casco_,
from the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a
striking coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange, austere,
and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane, or Adam and
Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers.
Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear the
explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there
was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that
quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze,
the _Casco_ skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach
and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The
trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have
been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the
Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more
considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now
with a deeper entry; and the _Casco_, hauling her wind, began to slide
into the bay of Anaho. The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so
graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen
crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of
mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it
was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every
crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there
like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the
razor edges of the summit.
Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,
continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way, appearing
motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs;
a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred
fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a house or two
appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and one of these
surrounded with what seemed a garden. These conspicuous habitations,
that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of the passage of
whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands and not found
their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing
(in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a
grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc
of reef. For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and
neighbours of the surf. ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man
departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long
as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a
blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay.
Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon
her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my
soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any
diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from
that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.
Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the
hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across
the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European clothes:
the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief, Taipi-Kikino.
‘Captain, is it permitted to come on board?’ were the first words we
heard among the islands. Canoe followed canoe till the ship swarmed with
stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in a shirt, some
in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and
these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful
patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as
something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange
and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity—all
talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with
us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices
palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome; no show of civility; no
hand extended save that of the chief and Mr. Regler. As we still
continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint ran high and rude;
and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our meanness amid jeering
laughter. Amongst other angry pleasantries—‘Here is a mighty fine ship,’
said he, ‘to have no money on board!’ I own I was inspired with sensible
repugnance; even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their power; we
had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they
were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of timid cautions;
and as for the trader, whose presence might else have reassured me, were
not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native
outrage? When he reads this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can
afford to smile.
Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was filled
from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned generations,
squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with
embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are large, luminous, and
melting; they are like the eyes of animals and some Italians. A kind of
despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs,
and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and
a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate
communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of
some alien planet.
To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to cross
the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify his diet.
But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose
toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on
every hand of us, constraining and preventing. I was now to see what men
might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered
by Cæsar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian. By
the same step I had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of
kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied;
and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images. Methought,
in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I returned
home (for in those days I still projected my return) I should have but
dipped into a picture-book without a text. Nay, and I even questioned if
my travels should be much prolonged; perhaps they were destined to a
speedy end; perhaps my subsequent friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there,
sitting silent with the rest, for a man of some authority, might leap
from his hams with an ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a
rush, and the ship’s company butchered for the table.
There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor
anything more groundless. In my experience of the islands, I had never
again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-day, I should
be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised. The majority of Polynesians
are easy folk to get in touch with, frank, fond of notice, greedy of the
least affection, like amiable, fawning dogs; and even with the
Marquesans, so recently and so imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered
barbarism, all were to become our intimates, and one, at least, was to
mourn sincerely our departure.