The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is
perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height of
males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in action,
graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and duller, are still
comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no race more viable; and
yet death reaps them with both hands. When Bishop Dordillon first came
to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but
newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his
fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to
readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar.
There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any
genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have
been neglected: ‘He shall be able to see,’ ‘He shall be able to tell,’
‘He shall be able to charm,’ said the friendly godmothers; ‘But he shall
not be able to hear,’ exclaimed the last. The tribe of Hapaa is said to
have numbered some four hundred, when the small-pox came and reduced them
by one-fourth. Six months later a woman developed tubercular
consumption; the disease spread like a fire about the valley, and in less
than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created
solitude. A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races,
the tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard this story the date
staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible. Early in the
year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first case of
phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by the month
of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, and that was a
boy who had been absent at his schooling. And depopulation works both
ways, the doors of death being set wide open, and the door of birth
almost closed. Thus, in the half-year ending July 1888 there were twelve
deaths and but one birth in the district of the Hatiheu. Seven or eight
more deaths were to be looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel,
the observant gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this rate it is
no matter of surprise if the population in that part should have declined
in forty years from six thousand to less than four hundred; which are,
once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the estimated figures. And the
rate of decline must have even accelerated towards the end.
A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from Anaho to
Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling, but cruelly
steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted house which stands
highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily down upon its roof; the
_Casco_ well out in the bay, and rolling for a wager, shrank visibly; and
presently through the gap of Tari’s isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang
cloudlike on the horizon. Over the summit, where the wind blew really
chill, and whistled in the reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of
the pandanus, we stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale
and bay of Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides.
On the fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to
seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one practicable
breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is crowded with
lovely and valuable trees,—orange, breadfruit, mummy-apple, cocoa, the
island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the banana. Four perennial
streams water and keep it green; and along the dell, first of one, then
of another, of these, the road, for a considerable distance, descends
into this fortunate valley. The song of the waters and the familiar
disarray of boulders gave us a strong sense of home, which the exotic
foliage, the daft-like growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of
the banyan, the black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of
the native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed.
The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more
melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is
deserted, the superstructure—pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical
timber—speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the
stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone,
or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity. We must
have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms. On the
main road of the island, where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr.
Osbourne tells me they are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads
have been made long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their
desertion, and must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through
the bush, the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these
survivals: the gravestones of whole families. Such ruins are tapu {29}
in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become
outposts of the kingdom of the grave. It might appear a natural and
pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the rearguard of perished
thousands, that their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of
their fathers. I believe, in fact, the custom rests on different and
more grim conceptions. But the house, the grave, and even the body of
the dead, have been always particularly honoured by Marquesans. Until
recently the corpse was sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and
sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of
mummy. Offerings are still laid upon the grave. In Traitor’s Bay, Mr.
Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son’s. And the
sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the
laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred
for the French.
The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race.
The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from
his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to
support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the
reality with relief. He does not even seek to support a disappointment;
at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic
love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave. Hanging is now
the fashion. I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end
of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though this be a common
form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will
continue popular in the Marquesas. Far more suitable to Marquesan
sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which
offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time
for those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such
remarkable importance. The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs killed,
the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house; and then it
is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of achievement, his
life all rounded in, his robes (like Cæsar’s) adjusted for the final act.
Praise not any man till he is dead, said the ancients; envy not any man
till you hear the mourners, might be the Marquesan parody. The coffin,
though of late introduction, strangely engages their attention. It is to
the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy. For ten
years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the other day,
they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the woman’s soul is
at rest. I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation.
The Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will
than of the body. I was told the Tahitians have a word for it,
_erimatua_, but cannot find it in my dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau,
has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady, has
routed them from their houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the
roads, and in two days has seen them cured. But this other remedy is
more original: a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement—perhaps I should
rather say this acquiescence—has been known, at the fulfilment of his
crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his coffin—to
revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be restored for years
to his occupations—carving tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old
men’s beards. From all this it may be conceived how easily they meet
death when it approaches naturally. I heard one example, grim and
picturesque. In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was
seized with the disease; he had no thought of recovery; had his grave dug
by a wayside, and lived in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and
smoking with the passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally
unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.
This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to the
Marquesan. What is peculiar is the widespread depression and acceptance
of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the
songs are forgotten. It is true that some, and perhaps too many, of them
are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit to support or to
revive them. At the last feast of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed
tears when he beheld the inanimate performance of the dancers. When the
people sang for us in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of
their repertory. They were only young folk present, they said, and it
was only the old that knew the songs. The whole body of Marquesan poetry
and music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited
generation. The full import is apparent only to one acquainted with
other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh song for
every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for instance) a
band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve keep up their
minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song following another without
pause. In like manner, the Marquesan, never industrious, begins now to
cease altogether from production. The exports of the group decline out
of all proportion even with the death-rate of the islanders. ‘The coral
waxes, the palm grows, and man departs,’ says the Marquesan; and he folds
his hands. And surely this is nature. Fond as it may appear, we labour
and refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid eye
upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one is to
succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether
Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It is natural,
also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from
his lethargy. Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a
wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in
the day; yet when we arrived, the trader’s store-house was entirely
empty; and before we left it was near full. So long as the circus was
there, so long as the _Casco_ was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved
every one to make his visit; and to this end every woman must have a new
dress, and every man a shirt and trousers. Never before, in Mr. Regler’s
experience, had they displayed so much activity.
In their despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts
and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not
least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to
ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long
while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed,
wrung the _Cascos_ by the hand as for a final separation. Certain
presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal
roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and as the
traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another described
them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from none could
I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or wherefore they
were dreaded. We may be sure at least they represent the dead; for the
dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-pervasive. ‘When a native
says that he is a man,’ writes Dr. Codrington, ‘he means that he is a man
and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast. The intelligent
agents of this world are to his mind the men who are alive, and the
ghosts the men who are dead.’ Dr. Codrington speaks of Melanesia; from
what I have learned his words are equally true of the Polynesian. And
yet more. Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful suspicion rests
generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest cannibals of all,
are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs. I hazard the guess
that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the dead, continuing their
life’s business of the cannibal ambuscade, and lying everywhere unseen,
and eager to devour the living. Another superstition I picked up through
the troubled medium of Tari Coffin’s English. The dead, he told me, came
and danced by night around the paepae of their former family; the family
were thereupon overcome by some emotion (but whether of pious sorrow or
of fear I could not gather), and must ‘make a feast,’ of which fish, pig,
and popoi were indispensable ingredients. So far this is clear enough.
But here Tari went on to instance the new house of Toma and the
house-warming feast which was just then in preparation as instances in
point. Dare we indeed string them together, and add the case of the
deserted ruin, as though the dead continually besieged the paepaes of the
living: were kept at arm’s-length, even from the first foundation, only
by propitiatory feasts, and, so soon as the fire of life went out upon
the hearth, swarmed back into possession of their ancient seat?
I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions. On the cannibal ghost
I shall return elsewhere with certainty. And it is enough, for the
present purpose, to remark that the men of the Marquesas, from whatever
reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts. Conceive how this
must tell upon the nerves in islands where the number of the dead already
so far exceeds that of the living, and the dead multiply and the living
dwindle at so swift a rate. Conceive how the remnant huddles about the
embers of the fire of life; even as old Red Indians, deserted on the
march and in the snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame
expiring, and the night around populous with wolves.