The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-estimated.
The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak with
elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has a
tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an attempt upon the
others.
And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters
abound. Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the
bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and hamlet;
and even where these are unserviceable, the natives themselves have often
scraped up a little English, and in the French zone (though far less
commonly) a little French-English, or an efficient pidgin, what is called
to the westward ‘Beach-la-Mar,’ comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now
taught, besides, in the schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of
British ships, and the nearness of the States on the one hand and the
colonies on the other, it may be called, and will almost certainly
become, the tongue of the Pacific. I will instance a few examples. I
met in Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he
had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one word of
German. I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in Rapa-iti that
while the children had the utmost difficulty or reluctance to learn
French, they picked up English on the wayside, and as if by accident. On
one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in the Carolines, my friend Mr.
Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the lads playing cricket on the beach
and talking English; and it was in English that the crew of the _Janet
Nicoll_, a set of black boys from different Melanesian islands,
communicated with other natives throughout the cruise, transmitted
orders, and sometimes jested together on the fore-hatch. But what struck
me perhaps most of all was a word I heard on the verandah of the Tribunal
at Noumea. A case had just been heard—a trial for infanticide against an
ape-like native woman; and the audience were smoking cigarettes as they
awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable French lady, not far from
tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared she would engage the
prisoner to be her children’s nurse. The bystanders exclaimed at the
proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke no language.
‘_Mais_, _vous savez_,’ objected the fair sentimentalist; ‘_ils
apprennent si vite l’anglais_!’
But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first stage of
my relations with natives I was helped by two things. To begin with, I
was the show-man of the _Casco_. She, her fine lines, tall spars, and
snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon, and the white, the gilt,
and the repeating mirrors of the tiny cabin, brought us a hundred
visitors. The men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms, as their
fathers fathomed out the ships of Cook; the women declared the cabins
more lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in
the chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I
have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and
delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions. Biscuit,
jam, and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the
photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their everyday
costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in three weeks’
sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign; alien faces,
barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered, in the swerving
cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise. Her Majesty was often
recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss her photograph; Captain
Speedy—in an Abyssinian war-dress, supposed to be the uniform of the
British army—met with much acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew
Lang were admired in the Marquesas. There is the place for him to go
when he shall be weary of Middlesex and Homer.
It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth some
knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not much
beyond a century has passed since these were in the same convulsive and
transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both cases an alien
authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed, new customs
introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding money as the means and
object of existence. The commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound
to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the
cherished practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,
proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under cloud of
night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving Highlander;
long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-eating Kanaka. The
grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and resentments, the alarms and
sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs, reminded me continually of the days
of Lovat and Struan. Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a
touchy punctilio, are common to both races: common to both tongues the
trick of dropping medial consonants. Here is a table of two widespread
Polynesian words:—
_House_. _Love_.
{12}
Tahitian FARE AROHA
New Zealand WHARE
Samoan FALE TALOFA
Manihiki FALE ALOHA
Hawaiian HALE ALOHA
Marquesan HA’E KAOHA
The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan instances,
is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots. Stranger still,
that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch, written with an
apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a perished consonant,
is to be heard in Scotland to this day. When a Scot pronounces water,
better, or bottle—_wa’er_, _be’er_, or _bo’le_—the sound is precisely
that of the catch; and I think we may go beyond, and say, that if such a
population could be isolated, and this mispronunciation should become the
rule, it might prove the first stage of transition from _t_ to _k_, which
is the disease of Polynesian languages. The tendency of the Marquesans,
however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very common
letter _l_, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is agreeable to any
Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon grows used to these
barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will you find such names as
_Haaii_ and _Paaaeua_, when each individual vowel must be separately
uttered.
These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own
folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not only inclined me
to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but continually modified my
judgment. A polite Englishman comes to-day to the Marquesans and is
amazed to find the men tattooed; polite Italians came not long ago to
England and found our fathers stained with woad; and when I paid the
return visit as a little boy, I was highly diverted with the backwardness
of Italy: so insecure, so much a matter of the day and hour, is the
pre-eminence of race. It was so that I hit upon a means of communication
which I recommend to travellers. When I desired any detail of savage
custom, or of superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my
fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism:
Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater’s head, the second-sight, the Water
Kelpie,—each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the black bull’s
head of Stirling procured me the legend of _Rahero_; and what I knew of
the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and
helped me to understand, about the _Tevas_ of Tahiti. The native was no
longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were
opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must rouse and
share; or he had better content himself with travels from the blue bed to
the brown. And the presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole
party to walk in clouds of darkness.
The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the west of
the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A grove of palms,
perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as for a triumph) with
fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour. A road runs from end to
end of the covert among beds of flowers, the milliner’s shop of the
community; and here and there, in the grateful twilight, in an air filled
with a diversity of scents, and still within hearing of the surf upon the
reef, the native houses stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same word,
as we have seen, represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a
shade of difference, the abode of man. But although the word be the
same, the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among
the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most
commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses of
Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the polite
Samoan—none of these can be compared with the Marquesan _paepae-hae_, or
dwelling platform. The paepae is an oblong terrace built without cement
or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty feet in length, raised from
four to eight feet from the earth, and accessible by a broad stair.
Along the back of this, and coming to about half its width, runs the open
front of the house, like a covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat
and almost elegant in its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an
endlong coaming, some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a
lamp and one of White’s sewing-machines the only marks of civilization.
On the outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a
shed; at the other there is perhaps a pen for pigs; the remainder is the
evening lounge and _al fresco_ banquet-hall of the inhabitants. To some
houses water is brought down the mountains in bamboo pipes, perforated
for the sake of sweetness. With the Highland comparison in my mind, I
was struck to remember the sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I
have sat and been entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands. Two
things, I suppose, explain the contrast. In Scotland wood is rare, and
with materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is
excluded. And in Scotland it is cold. Shelter and a hearth are needs so
pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day after a bare
bellyful, and at night when he saith, ‘Aha, it is warm!’ he has not
appetite for more. Or if for something else, then something higher; a
fine school of poetry and song arose in these rough shelters, and an air
like ‘_Lochaber no more_’ is an evidence of refinement more convincing,
as well as more imperishable, than a palace.
To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and
dependants resort. In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes, and
the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps the lamp
glints already between the pillars and the house, you shall behold them
silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and children; and the dogs
and pigs frisk together up the terrace stairway, switching rival tails.
The strangers from the ship were soon equally welcome: welcome to dip
their fingers in the wooden dish, to drink cocoanuts, to share the
circulating pipe, and to hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of
the French, the Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San
Francisco and New Yo’ko. In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any
tourist, I have met the same plain and dignified hospitality.
I have mentioned two facts—the distasteful behaviour of our earliest
visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon the
cushions—which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan manners. The
great majority of Polynesians are excellently mannered; but the Marquesan
stands apart, annoying and attractive, wild, shy, and refined. If you
make him a present he affects to forget it, and it must be offered him
again at his going: a pretty formality I have found nowhere else. A hint
will get rid of any one or any number; they are so fiercely proud and
modest; while many of the more lovable but blunter islanders crowd upon a
stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies. A slight or an
insult the Marquesan seems never to forget. I was one day talking by the
wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes suddenly to flash
and his stature to swell. A white horseman was coming down the mountain,
and as he passed, and while he paused to exchange salutations with
myself, Hoka was still staring and ruffling like a gamecock. It was a
Corsican who had years before called him _cochon sauvage—coçon chauvage_,
as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was
scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder
into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding
silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he
took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature
of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa-nuts; and in Hoka’s view
articles of food were things that a gentleman should give, not sell; or
at least that he should not sell to any friend. On another occasion I
gave my boat’s crew a luncheon of chocolate and biscuits. I had sinned,
I could never learn how, against some point of observance; and though I
was drily thanked, my offerings were left upon the beach. But our worst
mistake was a slight we put on Toma, Hoka’s adoptive father, and in his
own eyes the rightful chief of Anaho. In the first place, we did not
call upon him, as perhaps we should, in his fine new European house, the
only one in the hamlet. In the second, when we came ashore upon a visit
to his rival, Taipi-Kikino, it was Toma whom we saw standing at the head
of the beach, a magnificent figure of a man, magnificently tattooed; and
it was of Toma that we asked our question: ‘Where is the chief?’ ‘What
chief?’ cried Toma, and turned his back on the blasphemers. Nor did he
forgive us. Hoka came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of
all the countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the
_Casco_. The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute.
The flying city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James’s Park
affords but a pale figure of the _Casco_ anchored before Anaho; for the
Londoner has still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan passes to
his grave through an unbroken uniformity of days.
On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a valedictory
party came on board: nine of our particular friends equipped with gifts
and dressed as for a festival. Hoka, the chief dancer and singer, the
greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the handsomest young fellows in the
world-sullen, showy, dramatic, light as a feather and strong as an ox—it
would have been hard, on that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there
stooped and silent, his face heavy and grey. It was strange to see the
lad so much affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of
the curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so
gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the
half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:
strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan, the
last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all been given
to us by their possessors—their chief merchandise, for which they had
sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers, which they pressed on
us for nothing as soon as we were friends. The last visit was not long
protracted. One after another they shook hands and got down into their
canoe; when Hoka turned his back immediately upon the ship, so that we
saw his face no more. Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and
facing us with gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis
dipped the ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats. This was the
farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and
though the _Casco_ remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not one
returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided appearing on
the beach. This reserve and dignity is the finest trait of the
Marquesan.