Over the whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we
find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of
even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian
trembled for the future. We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin’s
theory of coral islands, and suppose a rise of the sea, or the subsidence
of some former continental area, to have driven into the tops of the
mountains multitudes of refugees. Or we may suppose, more soberly, a
people of sea-rovers, emigrants from a crowded country, to strike upon
and settle island after island, and as time went on to multiply
exceedingly in their new seats. In either case the end must be the same;
soon or late it must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and
that famine is at hand. The Polynesians met this emergent danger with
various expedients of activity and prevention. A way was found to
preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty feet in
depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am told, in the
Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the teeming people,
and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and cannibalism. Among
the Hawaiians—a hardier people, in a more exacting climate—agriculture
was carried far; the land was irrigated with canals; and the fish-ponds
of Molokai prove the number and diligence of the old inhabitants.
Meanwhile, over all the island world, abortion and infanticide prevailed.
On coral atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were
enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment. On Vaitupu, in the
Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau, but
one. On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is related that
the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared.
This is characteristic. For no people in the world are so fond or so
long-suffering with children—children make the mirth and the adornment of
their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries.
‘Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.’ The stray bastard
is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted
children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I
may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far
as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of
observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous
Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with
embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be
the better for a beating. It is a daily matter in some eastern islands
to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and the mother, so far
from punishing, scarce ventures to resist. In some, when his child was
born, a chief was superseded and resigned his name; as though, like a
drone, he had then fulfilled the occasion of his being. And in some the
lightest words of children had the weight of oracles. Only the other
day, in the Marquesas, if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger, I
am assured the stranger would be slain. And I shall have to tell in
another place an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki having
taken a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted the
situation and loaded me with gifts.
With such sentiments the necessity for child-destruction would not fail
to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling in the
Tahitian brotherhood of Oro. At a certain date a new god was added to
the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished and made popular.
Oro was his name, and he may be compared with the Bacchus of the
ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to island;
they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes; sang,
danced, acted; gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength; and were the
artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group. Their
life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the
highest in the land aspired to join the brotherhood. If a couple stood
next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of
policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a
mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of
conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its
members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave
offspring—I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design
seems obvious. Famine menacing the islands, and the needful remedy
repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind by these trappings of
mystery, pleasure, and parade. This is the more probable, and the
secret, serious purpose of the institution appears the more plainly, if
it be true that, after a certain period of life, the obligation of the
votary was changed; at first, bound to be profligate: afterwards,
expected to be chaste.
Here, then, we have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men,
child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle,
invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan
salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers,
the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition
of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm.
And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in the
Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter
Island, we find the same race perishing like flies. Why this change?
Or, grant that the coming of the whites, the change of habits, and the
introduction of new maladies and vices, fully explain the depopulation,
why is that depopulation not universal? The population of Tahiti, after
a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary. I hear of a
similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight
increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as healthy and at
least as fruitful as before the change. Grant that the Tahitians, the
Maoris, and the Paumotuans have become inured to the new conditions; and
what are we to make of the Samoans, who have never suffered?
Those who are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be ready
with solutions. Thus I have heard the mortality of the Maoris attributed
to their change of residence—from fortified hill-tops to the low, marshy
vicinity of their plantations. How plausible! And yet the Marquesans
are dying out in the same houses where their fathers multiplied. Or take
opium. The Marquesas and Hawaii are the two groups the most infected
with this vice; the population of the one is the most civilised, that of
the other by far the most barbarous, of Polynesians; and they are two of
those that perish the most rapidly. Here is a strong case against opium.
But let us take unchastity, and we shall find the Marquesas and Hawaii
figuring again upon another count. Thus, Samoans are the most chaste of
Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely fertile; Marquesans are
the most debauched: we have seen how they are perishing; Hawaiians are
notoriously lax, and they begin to be dotted among deserts. So here is a
case stronger still against unchastity; and here also we have a
correction to apply. Whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, neither
friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived
the time of danger. One last example: syphilis has been plausibly
credited with much of the sterility. But the Samoans are, by all
accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is
not seriously to be argued that the Samoans have escaped syphilis.
These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any particular
cause, or even from many in a single group. I have in my eye an able and
amiable pamphlet by the Rev. S. E. Bishop: ‘Why are the Hawaiians Dying
Out?’ Any one interested in the subject ought to read this tract, which
contains real information; and yet Mr. Bishop’s views would have been
changed by an acquaintance with other groups. Samoa is, for the moment,
the main and the most instructive exception to the rule. The people are
the most chaste and one of the most temperate of island peoples. They
have never been tried and depressed with any grave pestilence. Their
clothing has scarce been tampered with; at the simple and becoming tabard
of the girls, Tartuffe, in many another island, would have cried out; for
the cool, healthy, and modest lava-lava or kilt, Tartuffe has managed in
many another island to substitute stifling and inconvenient trousers.
Lastly, and perhaps chiefly, so far from their amusements having been
curtailed, I think they have been, upon the whole, extended. The
Polynesian falls easily into despondency: bereavement, disappointment,
the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient
pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from
life. The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life
are striking; and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas. In
Samoa, on the other hand, perpetual song and dance, perpetual games,
journeys, and pleasures, make an animated and a smiling picture of the
island life. And the Samoans are to-day the gayest and the best
entertained inhabitants of our planet. The importance of this can
scarcely be exaggerated. In a climate and upon a soil where a livelihood
can be had for the stooping, entertainment is a prime necessity. It is
otherwise with us, where life presents us with a daily problem, and there
is a serious interest, and some of the heat of conflict, in the mere
continuing to be. So, in certain atolls, where there is no great gaiety,
but man must bestir himself with some vigour for his daily bread, public
health and the population are maintained; but in the lotos islands, with
the decay of pleasures, life itself decays. It is from this point of
view that we may instance, among other causes of depression, the decay of
war. We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary business of war
on the great scale, trailing epidemics and leaving pestilential corpses
in its train, that we have almost forgotten its original, the most
healthful, if not the most humane, of all field sports—hedge-warfare.
From this, as well as from the rest of his amusements and interests, the
islander, upon a hundred islands, has been recently cut off. And to
this, as well as to so many others, the Samoan still makes good a special
title.
Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:—Where there have
been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there
the race survives. Where there have been most, important or unimportant,
salutary or hurtful, there it perishes. Each change, however small,
augments the sum of new conditions to which the race has to become
inured. There may seem, _a priori_, no comparison between the change
from ‘sour toddy’ to bad gin, and that from the island kilt to a pair of
European trousers. Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more
hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of
pin-pricks. We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the
missionary. In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent
authority; the king becomes his _mairedupalais_; he can proscribe, he can
command; and the temptation is ever towards too much. Thus (by all
accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own knowledge) the
Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more or less degree
unliveable to their converts. And the mild, uncomplaining creatures
(like children in a prison) yawn and await death. It is easy to blame
the missionary. But it is his business to make changes. It is surely
his business, for example, to prevent war; and yet I have instanced war
itself as one of the elements of health. On the other hand, it were,
perhaps, easy for the missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard
every change as an affair of weight. I take the average missionary; I am
sure I do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate
to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago.
Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands) that change
of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.
There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet criticism. I
have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during fevers, mistaken
treatment of children, native doctoring, or abortion—all causes
frequently adduced. And I have said nothing of them because they are
conditions common to both epochs, and even more efficient in the past
than in the present. Was it not the same with unchastity, it may be
asked? Was not the Polynesian always unchaste? Doubtless he was so
always: doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably chaste
visitors from Europe. Take the Hawaiian account of Cook: I have no doubt
it is entirely fair. Take Krusenstern’s candid, almost innocent,
description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider the
disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war of
lust) the American missionaries were once shelled by an English
adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American
warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas, and
carry off a complement of women for the cruise; consider, besides, how
the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods, as appears
plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii; and again, in the story of
the discovery of Tutuila, when the really decent women of Samoa
prostituted themselves in public to the French; and bear in mind how it
was the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the business of
the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.
Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue
never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even in the
most degraded islands, has been further degradation. Mr. Lawes, the
missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity had
declined there since the coming of the whites. In heathen time, if a
girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or brother would dash the infant
down the cliffs; and to-day the scandal would be small. Or take the
Marquesas. Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection, the
young were strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to look
upon one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it) like
dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu
escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a fortnight in
promiscuous liberty. Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my
authority, and declare themselves better informed. I should prefer the
statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood
alone, which it is far from doing) to the report of the most honest
traveller. A ship of war comes to a haven, anchors, lands a party,
receives and returns a visit, and the captain writes a chapter on the
manners of the island. It is not considered what class is mostly seen.
Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge
England by the ladies who parade Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen who
share with them their hire. Stanislao’s opinion of a decay of virtue
even in these unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his
very example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced
by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii. And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we
might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners. I do not think
that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now
obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count
paternal kinship. It is not possible to give details; suffice it that
their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and
vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy, reason,
and almost life itself are in abeyance.