CHAPTER XV—THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA

It had chanced (as the _Casco_ beat through the Bordelais Straits for

Taahauku) she approached on one board very near the land in the opposite

isle of Tauata, where houses were to be seen in a grove of tall

coco-palms. Brother Michel pointed out the spot. ‘I am at home now,’

said he. ‘I believe I have a large share in these cocoa-nuts; and in

that house madame my mother lives with her two husbands!’ ‘With two

husbands?’ somebody inquired. ‘_C’est ma honte_,’ replied the brother

drily.

A word in passing on the two husbands. I conceive the brother to have

expressed himself loosely. It seems common enough to find a native lady

with two consorts; but these are not two husbands. The first is still

the husband; the wife continues to be referred to by his name; and the

position of the coadjutor, or _pikio_, although quite regular, appears

undoubtedly subordinate. We had opportunities to observe one household

of the sort. The _pikio_ was recognised; appeared openly along with the

husband when the lady was thought to be insulted, and the pair made

common cause like brothers. At home the inequality was more apparent.

The husband sat to receive and entertain visitors; the _pikio_ was

running the while to fetch cocoa-nuts like a hired servant, and I

remarked he was sent on these errands in preference even to the son.

Plainly we have here no second husband; plainly we have the tolerated

lover. Only, in the Marquesas, instead of carrying his lady’s fan and

mantle, he must turn his hand to do the husband’s housework.

The sight of Brother Michel’s family estate led the conversation for some

while upon the method and consequence of artificial kinship. Our

curiosity became extremely whetted; the brother offered to have the whole

of us adopted, and some two days later we became accordingly the children

of Paaaeua, appointed chief of Atuona. I was unable to be present at the

ceremony, which was primitively simple. The two Mrs. Stevensons and Mr.

Osbourne, along with Paaaeua, his wife, and an adopted child of theirs,

son of a shipwrecked Austrian, sat down to an excellent island meal, of

which the principal and the only necessary dish was pig. A concourse

watched them through the apertures of the house; but none, not even

Brother Michel, might partake; for the meal was sacramental, and either

creative or declaratory of the new relationship. In Tahiti things are

not so strictly ordered; when Ori and I ‘made brothers,’ both our

families sat with us at table, yet only he and I, who had eaten with

intention were supposed to be affected by the ceremony. For the adoption

of an infant I believe no formality to be required; the child is handed

over by the natural parents, and grows up to inherit the estates of the

adoptive. Presents are doubtless exchanged, as at all junctures of

island life, social or international; but I never heard of any

banquet—the child’s presence at the daily board perhaps sufficing. We

may find the rationale in the ancient Arabian idea that a common diet

makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that ‘he is the father

who gives the child its morning draught.’ In the Marquesan practice, the

sense would thus be evanescent; from the Tahitian, a mere survival, it

will have entirely fled. An interesting parallel will probably occur to

many of my readers.

What is the nature of the obligation assumed at such a festival? It will

vary with the characters of those engaged, and with the circumstances of

the case. Thus it would be absurd to take too seriously our adoption at

Atuona. On the part of Paaaeua it was an affair of social ambition; when

he agreed to receive us in his family the man had not so much as seen us,

and knew only that we were inestimably rich and travelled in a floating

palace. We, upon our side, ate of his baked meats with no true _animus

affiliandi_, but moved by the single sentiment of curiosity. The affair

was formal, and a matter of parade, as when in Europe sovereigns call

each other cousin. Yet, had we stayed at Atuona, Paaaeua would have held

himself bound to establish us upon his land, and to set apart young men

for our service, and trees for our support. I have mentioned the

Austrian. He sailed in one of two sister ships, which left the Clyde in

coal; both rounded the Horn, and both, at several hundred miles of

distance, though close on the same point of time, took fire at sea on the

Pacific. One was destroyed; the derelict iron frame of the second, after

long, aimless cruising, was at length recovered, refitted, and hails

to-day from San Francisco. A boat’s crew from one of these disasters

reached, after great hardships, the isle of Hiva-oa. Some of these men

vowed they would never again confront the chances of the sea; but alone

of them all the Austrian has been exactly true to his engagement, remains

where he landed, and designs to die where he has lived. Now, with such a

man, falling and taking root among islanders, the processes described may

be compared to a gardener’s graft. He passes bodily into the native

stock; ceases wholly to be alien; has entered the commune of the blood,

shares the prosperity and consideration of his new family, and is

expected to impart with the same generosity the fruits of his European

skill and knowledge. It is this implied engagement that so frequently

offends the ingrafted white. To snatch an immediate advantage—to get

(let us say) a station for his store—he will play upon the native custom

and become a son or a brother for the day, promising himself to cast down

the ladder by which he shall have ascended, and repudiate the kinship so

soon as it shall grow burdensome. And he finds there are two parties to

the bargain. Perhaps his Polynesian relative is simple, and conceived

the blood-bond literally; perhaps he is shrewd, and himself entered the

covenant with a view to gain. And either way the store is ravaged, the

house littered with lazy natives; and the richer the man grows, the more

numerous, the more idle, and the more affectionate he finds his native

relatives. Most men thus circumstanced contrive to buy or brutally

manage to enforce their independence; but many vegetate without hope,

strangled by parasites.

We had no cause to blush with Brother Michel. Our new parents were kind,

gentle, well-mannered, and generous in gifts; the wife was a most

motherly woman, the husband a man who stood justly high with his

employers. Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be deposed; and

in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable substitute. He went always

scrupulously dressed, and looked the picture of propriety, like a dark,

handsome, stupid, and probably religious young man hot from a European

funeral. In character he seemed the ideal of what is known as the good

citizen. He wore gravity like an ornament. None could more nicely

represent the desired character as an appointed chief, the outpost of

civilisation and reform. And yet, were the French to go and native

manners to revive, fancy beholds him crowned with old men’s beards and

crowding with the first to a man-eating festival. But I must not seem to

be unjust to Paaaeua. His respectability went deeper than the skin; his

sense of the becoming sometimes nerved him for unexpected rigours.

One evening Captain Otis and Mr. Osbourne were on shore in the village.

All was agog; dancing had begun; it was plain it was to be a night of

festival, and our adventurers were overjoyed at their good fortune. A

strong fall of rain drove them for shelter to the house of Paaaeua, where

they were made welcome, wiled into a chamber, and shut in. Presently the

rain took off, the fun was to begin in earnest, and the young bloods of

Atuona came round the house and called to my fellow-travellers through

the interstices of the wall. Late into the night the calls were

continued and resumed, and sometimes mingled with taunts; late into the

night the prisoners, tantalised by the noises of the festival, renewed

their efforts to escape. But all was vain; right across the door lay

that god-fearing householder, Paaaeua, feigning sleep; and my friends had

to forego their junketing. In this incident, so delightfully European,

we thought we could detect three strands of sentiment. In the first

place, Paaaeua had a charge of souls: these were young men, and he judged

it right to withhold them from the primrose path. Secondly, he was a

public character, and it was not fitting that his guests should

countenance a festival of which he disapproved. So might some strict

clergyman at home address a worldly visitor: ‘Go to the theatre if you

like, but, by your leave, not from my house!’ Thirdly, Paaaeua was a man

jealous, and with some cause (as shall be shown) for jealousy; and the

feasters were the satellites of his immediate rival, Moipu.

For the adoption had caused much excitement in the village; it made the

strangers popular. Paaaeua, in his difficult posture of appointed chief,

drew strength and dignity from their alliance, and only Moipu and his

followers were malcontent. For some reason nobody (except myself)

appears to dislike Moipu. Captain Hart, who has been robbed and

threatened by him; Father Orens, whom he has fired at, and repeatedly

driven to the woods; my own family, and even the French officials—all

seemed smitten with an irrepressible affection for the man. His fall had

been made soft; his son, upon his death, was to succeed Paaaeua in the

chieftaincy; and he lived, at the time of our visit, in the shoreward

part of the village in a good house, and with a strong following of young

men, his late braves and pot-hunters. In this society, the coming of the

_Casco_, the adoption, the return feast on board, and the presents

exchanged between the whites and their new parents, were doubtless

eagerly and bitterly canvassed. It was felt that a few years ago the

honours would have gone elsewhere. In this unwonted business, in this

reception of some hitherto undreamed-of and outlandish potentate—some

Prester John or old Assaracus—a few years back it would have been the

part of Moipu to play the hero and the host, and his young men would have

accompanied and adorned the various celebrations as the acknowledged

leaders of society. And now, by a malign vicissitude of fortune, Moipu

must sit in his house quite unobserved; and his young men could but look

in at the door while their rivals feasted. Perhaps M. Grévy felt a touch

of bitterness towards his successor when he beheld him figure on the

broad stage of the centenary of eighty-nine; the visit of the _Casco_

which Moipu had missed by so few years was a more unusual occasion in

Atuona than a centenary in France; and the dethroned chief determined to

reassert himself in the public eye.

Mr. Osbourne had gone into Atuona photographing; the population of the

village had gathered together for the occasion on the place before the

church, and Paaaeua, highly delighted with this new appearance of his

family, played the master of ceremonies. The church had been taken, with

its jolly architect before the door; the nuns with their pupils; sundry

damsels in the ancient and singularly unbecoming robes of tapa; and

Father Orens in the midst of a group of his parishioners. I know not

what else was in hand, when the photographer became aware of a sensation

in the crowd, and, looking around, beheld a very noble figure of a man

appear upon the margin of a thicket and stroll nonchalantly near. The

nonchalance was visibly affected; it was plain he came there to arouse

attention, and his success was instant. He was introduced; he was civil,

he was obliging, he was always ineffably superior and certain of himself;

a well-graced actor. It was presently suggested that he should appear in

his war costume; he gracefully consented; and returned in that strange,

inappropriate and ill-omened array (which very well became his handsome

person) to strut in a circle of admirers, and be thenceforth the centre

of photography. Thus had Moipu effected his introduction, as by

accident, to the white strangers, made it a favour to display his finery,

and reduced his rival to a secondary _rôle_ on the theatre of the

disputed village. Paaaeua felt the blow; and, with a spirit which we

never dreamed he could possess, asserted his priority. It was found

impossible that day to get a photograph of Moipu alone; for whenever he

stood up before the camera his successor placed himself unbidden by his

side, and gently but firmly held to his position. The portraits of the

pair, Jacob and Esau, standing shoulder to shoulder, one in his careful

European dress, one in his barbaric trappings, figure the past and

present of their island. A graveyard with its humble crosses would be

the aptest symbol of the future.

We are all impressed with the belief that Moipu had planned his campaign

from the beginning to the end. It is certain that he lost no time in

pushing his advantage. Mr. Osbourne was inveigled to his house; various

gifts were fished out of an old sea-chest; Father Orens was called into

service as interpreter, and Moipu formally proposed to ‘make brothers’

with Mata-Galahi—Glass-Eyes,—the not very euphonious name under which Mr.

Osbourne passed in the Marquesas. The feast of brotherhood took place on

board the _Casco_. Paaaeua had arrived with his family, like a plain

man; and his presents, which had been numerous, had followed one another,

at intervals through several days. Moipu, as if to mark at every point

the opposition, came with a certain feudal pomp, attended by retainers

bearing gifts of all descriptions, from plumes of old men’s beard to

little, pious, Catholic engravings.

I had met the man before this in the village, and detested him on sight;

there was something indescribably raffish in his looks and ways that

raised my gorge; and when man-eating was referred to, and he laughed a

low, cruel laugh, part boastful, part bashful, like one reminded of some

dashing peccadillo, my repugnance was mingled with nausea. This is no

very human attitude, nor one at all becoming in a traveller. And, seen

more privately, the man improved. Something negroid in character and

face was still displeasing; but his ugly mouth became attractive when he

smiled, his figure and bearing were certainly noble, and his eyes superb.

In his appreciation of jams and pickles, in is delight in the

reverberating mirrors of the dining cabin, and consequent endless

repetition of Moipus and Mata-Galahis, he showed himself engagingly a

child. And yet I am not sure; and what seemed childishness may have been

rather courtly art. His manners struck me as beyond the mark; they were

refined and caressing to the point of grossness, and when I think of the

serene absent-mindedness with which he first strolled in upon our party,

and then recall him running on hands and knees along the cabin sofas,

pawing the velvet, dipping into the beds, and bleating commendatory

‘_mitais_’ with exaggerated emphasis, like some enormous over-mannered

ape, I feel the more sure that both must have been calculated. And I

sometimes wonder next, if Moipu were quite alone in this polite

duplicity, and ask myself whether the _Casco_ were quite so much admired

in the Marquesas as our visitors desired us to suppose.

I will complete this sketch of an incurable cannibal grandee with two

incongruous traits. His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he

speaks to-day with an ill-favoured lustfulness. And when he said

good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful

eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto of

Marquesan high society, he wrote upon her mind a sentimental impression

which I try in vain to share.

PART II: THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER I—THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO—ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE

In the early morning of 4th September a whale-boat manned by natives

dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round the spouting

promontory. On the shore level it was a hot, breathless, and yet crystal

morning; but high overhead the hills of Atuona were all cowled in cloud,

and the ocean-river of the trades streamed without pause. As we crawled

from under the immediate shelter of the land, we reached at last the

limit of their influence. The wind fell upon our sails in puffs, which

strengthened and grew more continuous; presently the _Casco_ heeled down

to her day’s work; the whale-boat, quite outstripped, clung for a noisy

moment to her quarter; the stipulated bread, rum, and tobacco were passed

in; a moment more and the boat was in our wake, and our late pilots were

cheering our departure.

This was the more inspiriting as we were bound for scenes so different,

and though on a brief voyage, yet for a new province of creation. That

wide field of ocean, called loosely the South Seas, extends from tropic

to tropic, and from perhaps 123 degrees W. to 150 degrees E., a

parallelogram of one hundred degrees by forty-seven, where degrees are

the most spacious. Much of it lies vacant, much is closely sown with

isles, and the isles are of two sorts. No distinction is so continually

dwelt upon in South Sea talk as that between the ‘low’ and the ‘high’

island, and there is none more broadly marked in nature. The Himalayas

are not more different from the Sahara. On the one hand, and chiefly in

groups of from eight to a dozen, volcanic islands rise above the sea; few

reach an altitude of less than 4000 feet; one exceeds 13,000; their tops

are often obscured in cloud, they are all clothed with various forests,

all abound in food, and are all remarkable for picturesque and solemn

scenery. On the other hand, we have the atoll; a thing of problematic

origin and history, the reputed creature of an insect apparently

unidentified; rudely annular in shape; enclosing a lagoon; rarely

extending beyond a quarter of a mile at its chief width; often rising at

its highest point to less than the stature of a man—man himself, the rat

and the land crab, its chief inhabitants; not more variously supplied

with plants; and offering to the eye, even when perfect, only a ring of

glittering beach and verdant foliage, enclosing and enclosed by the blue

sea.

In no quarter are the atolls so thickly congregated, in none are they so

varied in size from the greatest to the least, and in none is navigation

so beset with perils, as in that archipelago that we were now to thread.

The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by

this multiplicity of reefs, the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from

the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are,

besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the

charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of

these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the

wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance

offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving

that my captain risked the _Casco_ in such waters. I believe, indeed, it

is almost understood that yachts are to avoid this baffling archipelago;

and it required all my instances—and all Mr. Otis’s private taste for

adventure—to deflect our course across its midst.

For a few days we sailed with a steady trade, and a steady westerly

current setting us to leeward; and toward sundown of the seventh it was

supposed we should have sighted Takaroa, one of Cook’s so-called King

George Islands. The sun set; yet a while longer the old

moon—semi-brilliant herself, and with a silver belly, which was her

successor—sailed among gathering clouds; she, too, deserted us; stars of

every degree of sheen, and clouds of every variety of form disputed the

sub-lustrous night; and still we gazed in vain for Takaroa. The mate

stood on the bowsprit, his tall grey figure slashing up and down against

the stars, and still

‘nihil astra praeter

Vidit et undas.

The rest of us were grouped at the port anchor davit, staring with no

less assiduity, but with far less hope on the obscure horizon. Islands

we beheld in plenty, but they were of ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’

and vanished at a wink, only to appear in other places; and by and by not

only islands, but refulgent and revolving lights began to stud the

darkness; lighthouses of the mind or of the wearied optic nerve, solemnly

shining and winking as we passed. At length the mate himself despaired,

scrambled on board again from his unrestful perch, and announced that we

had missed our destination. He was the only man of practice in these

waters, our sole pilot, shipped for that end at Tai-o-hae. If he

declared we had missed Takaroa, it was not for us to quarrel with the

fact, but, if we could, to explain it. We had certainly run down our

southing. Our canted wake upon the sea and our somewhat drunken-looking

course upon the chart both testified with no less certainty to an

impetuous westward current. We had no choice but to conclude we were

again set down to leeward; and the best we could do was to bring the

_Casco_ to the wind, keep a good watch, and expect morning.

I slept that night, as was then my somewhat dangerous practice, on deck

upon the cockpit bench. A stir at last awoke me, to see all the eastern

heaven dyed with faint orange, the binnacle lamp already dulled against

the brightness of the day, and the steersman leaning eagerly across the

wheel. ‘There it is, sir!’ he cried, and pointed in the very eyeball of

the dawn. For awhile I could see nothing but the bluish ruins of the

morning bank, which lay far along the horizon, like melting icebergs.

Then the sun rose, pierced a gap in these _débris_ of vapours, and

displayed an inconsiderable islet, flat as a plate upon the sea, and

spiked with palms of disproportioned altitude.

So far, so good. Here was certainly an atoll; and we were certainly got

among the archipelago. But which? And where? The isle was too small

for either Takaroa: in all our neighbourhood, indeed, there was none so

inconsiderable, save only Tikei; and Tikei, one of Roggewein’s so-called

Pernicious Islands, seemed beside the question. At that rate, instead of

drifting to the west, we must have fetched up thirty miles to windward.

And how about the current? It had been setting us down, by observation,

all these days: by the deflection of our wake, it should be setting us

down that moment. When had it stopped? When had it begun again? and

what kind of torrent was that which had swept us eastward in the

interval? To these questions, so typical of navigation in that range of

isles, I have no answer. Such were at least the facts; Tikei our island

turned out to be; and it was our first experience of the dangerous

archipelago, to make our landfall thirty miles out.

The sight of Tikei, thrown direct against the splendour of the morning,

robbed of all its colour, and deformed with disproportioned trees like

bristles on a broom, had scarce prepared us to be much in love with

atolls. Later the same day we saw under more fit conditions the island

of Taiaro. _Lost in the Sea_ is possibly the meaning of the name. And

it was so we saw it; lost in blue sea and sky: a ring of white beach,

green underwood, and tossing palms, gem-like in colour; of a fairy, of a

heavenly prettiness. The surf ran all around it, white as snow, and

broke at one point, far to seaward, on what seems an uncharted reef.

There was no smoke, no sign of man; indeed, the isle is not inhabited,

only visited at intervals. And yet a trader (Mr. Narii Salmon) was

watching from the shore and wondering at the unexpected ship. I have

spent since then long months upon low islands; I know the tedium of their

undistinguished days; I know the burden of their diet. With whatever

envy we may have looked from the deck on these green coverts, it was with

a tenfold greater that Mr. Salmon and his comrades saw us steer, in our

trim ship, to seaward.

The night fell lovely in the extreme. After the moon went down, the

heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars. And as I lay in the cockpit

and looked upon the steersman I was haunted by Emerson’s verses:

‘And the lone seaman all the night

Sails astonished among stars.’

By this glittering and imperfect brightness, about four bells in the

first watch we made our third atoll, Raraka. The low line of the isle

lay straight along the sky; so that I was at first reminded of a towpath,

and we seemed to be mounting some engineered and navigable stream.

Presently a red star appeared, about the height and brightness of a

danger signal, and with that my simile was changed; we seemed rather to

skirt the embankment of a railway, and the eye began to look

instinctively for the telegraph-posts, and the ear to expect the coming

of a train. Here and there, but rarely, faint tree-tops broke the level.

And the sound of the surf accompanied us, now in a drowsy monotone, now

with a menacing swing.

The isle lay nearly east and west, barring our advance on Fakarava. We

must, therefore, hug the coast until we gained the western end, where,

through a passage eight miles wide, we might sail southward between

Raraka and the next isle, Kauehi. We had the wind free, a lightish air;

but clouds of an inky blackness were beginning to arise, and at times it

lightened—without thunder. Something, I know not what, continually set

us up upon the island. We lay more and more to the nor’ard; and you

would have thought the shore copied our manœuvre and outsailed us. Once

and twice Raraka headed us again—again, in the sea fashion, the quite

innocent steersman was abused—and again the _Casco_ kept away. Had I

been called on, with no more light than that of our experience, to draw

the configuration of that island, I should have shown a series of

bow-window promontories, each overlapping the other to the nor’ard, and

the trend of the land from the south-east to the north-west, and behold,

on the chart it lay near east and west in a straight line.

We had but just repeated our manœuvre and kept away—for not more than

five minutes the railway embankment had been lost to view and the surf to

hearing—when I was aware of land again, not only on the weather bow, but

dead ahead. I played the part of the judicious landsman, holding my

peace till the last moment; and presently my mariners perceived it for

themselves.

‘Land ahead!’ said the steersman.

‘By God, it’s Kauehi!’ cried the mate.

And so it was. And with that I began to be sorry for cartographers. We

were scarce doing three and a half; and they asked me to believe that (in

five minutes) we had dropped an island, passed eight miles of open water,

and run almost high and dry upon the next. But my captain was more sorry

for himself to be afloat in such a labyrinth; laid the _Casco_ to, with

the log line up and down, and sat on the stern rail and watched it till

the morning. He had enough of night in the Paumotus.

By daylight on the 9th we began to skirt Kauehi, and had now an

opportunity to see near at hand the geography of atolls. Here and there,

where it was high, the farther side loomed up; here and there the near

side dipped entirely and showed a broad path of water into the lagoon;

here and there both sides were equally abased, and we could look right

through the discontinuous ring to the sea horizon on the south.

Conceive, on a vast scale, the submerged hoop of the duck-hunter, trimmed

with green rushes to conceal his head—water within, water without—you

have the image of the perfect atoll. Conceive one that has been partly

plucked of its rush fringe; you have the atoll of Kauehi. And for either

shore of it at closer quarters, conceive the line of some old Roman

highway traversing a wet morass, and here sunk out of view and there

re-arising, crowned with a green tuft of thicket; only instead of the

stagnant waters of a marsh, the live ocean now boiled against, now buried

the frail barrier. Last night’s impression in the dark was thus

confirmed by day, and not corrected. We sailed indeed by a mere causeway

in the sea, of nature’s handiwork, yet of no greater magnitude than many

of the works of man.

The isle was uninhabited; it was all green brush and white sand, set in

transcendently blue water; even the coco-palms were rare, though some of

these completed the bright harmony of colour by hanging out a fan of

golden yellow. For long there was no sign of life beyond the vegetable,

and no sound but the continuous grumble of the surf. In silence and

desertion these fair shores slipped past, and were submerged and rose

again with clumps of thicket from the sea. And then a bird or two

appeared, hovering and crying; swiftly these became more numerous, and

presently, looking ahead, we were aware of a vast effervescence of winged

life. In this place the annular isle was mostly under water, carrying

here and there on its submerged line a wooded islet. Over one of these

the birds hung and flew with an incredible density like that of gnats or

hiving bees; the mass flashed white and black, and heaved and quivered,

and the screaming of the creatures rose over the voice of the surf in a

shrill clattering whirr. As you descend some inland valley a not

dissimilar sound announces the nearness of a mill and pouring river.

Some stragglers, as I said, came to meet our approach; a few still hung

about the ship as we departed. The crying died away, the last pair of

wings was left behind, and once more the low shores of Kauehi streamed

past our eyes in silence like a picture. I supposed at the time that the

birds lived, like ants or citizens, concentred where we saw them. I have

been told since (I know not if correctly) that the whole isle, or much of

it, is similarly peopled; and that the effervescence at a single spot

would be the mark of a boat’s crew of egg-hunters from one of the

neighbouring inhabited atolls. So that here at Kauehi, as the day before

at Taiaro, the _Casco_ sailed by under the fire of unsuspected eyes. And

one thing is surely true, that even on these ribbons of land an army

might lie hid and no passing mariner divine its presence.

CHAPTER II—FAKARAVA: AN ATOLL AT HAND

By a little before noon we were running down the coast of our

destination, Fakarava: the air very light, the sea near smooth; though

still we were accompanied by a continuous murmur from the beach, like the

sound of a distant train. The isle is of a huge longitude, the enclosed

lagoon thirty miles by ten or twelve, and the coral tow-path, which they

call the land, some eighty or ninety miles by (possibly) one furlong.

That part by which we sailed was all raised; the underwood excellently

green, the topping wood of coco-palms continuous—a mark, if I had known

it, of man’s intervention. For once more, and once more unconsciously,

we were within hail of fellow-creatures, and that vacant beach was but a

pistol-shot from the capital city of the archipelago. But the life of an

atoll, unless it be enclosed, passes wholly on the shores of the lagoon;

it is there the villages are seated, there the canoes ply and are drawn

up; and the beach of the ocean is a place accursed and deserted, the fit

scene only for wizardry and shipwreck, and in the native belief a

haunting ground of murderous spectres.

By and by we might perceive a breach in the low barrier; the woods

ceased; a glittering point ran into the sea, tipped with an emerald shoal

the mark of entrance. As we drew near we met a little run of sea—the

private sea of the lagoon having there its origin and end, and here, in

the jaws of the gateway, trying vain conclusions with the more majestic

heave of the Pacific. The _Casco_ scarce avowed a shock; but there are

times and circumstances when these harbour mouths of inland basins vomit

floods, deflecting, burying, and dismasting ships. For, conceive a

lagoon perfectly sealed but in the one point, and that of merely

navigable width; conceive the tide and wind to have heaped for hours

together in that coral fold a superfluity of waters, and the tide to

change and the wind fall—the open sluice of some great reservoirs at home

will give an image of the unstemmable effluxion.

We were scarce well headed for the pass before all heads were craned over

the rail. For the water, shoaling under our board, became changed in a

moment to surprising hues of blue and grey; and in its transparency the

coral branched and blossomed, and the fish of the inland sea cruised

visibly below us, stained and striped, and even beaked like parrots. I

have paid in my time to view many curiosities; never one so curious as

that first sight over the ship’s rail in the lagoon of Fakarava. But let

not the reader be deceived with hope. I have since entered, I suppose,

some dozen atolls in different parts of the Pacific, and the experience

has never been repeated. That exquisite hue and transparency of

submarine day, and these shoals of rainbow fish, have not enraptured me

again.

Before we could raise our eyes from that engaging spectacle the schooner

had slipped betwixt the pierheads of the reef, and was already quite

committed to the sea within. The containing shores are so little

erected, and the lagoon itself is so great, that, for the more part, it

seemed to extend without a check to the horizon. Here and there, indeed,

where the reef carried an inlet, like a signet-ring upon a finger, there

would be a pencilling of palms; here and there, the green wall of wood

ran solid for a length of miles; and on the port hand, under the highest

grove of trees, a few houses sparkled white—Rotoava, the metropolitan

settlement of the Paumotus. Hither we beat in three tacks, and came to

an anchor close in shore, in the first smooth water since we had left San

Francisco, five fathoms deep, where a man might look overboard all day at

the vanishing cable, the coral patches, and the many-coloured fish.

Fakarava was chosen to be the seat of Government from nautical

considerations only. It is eccentrically situate; the productions, even

for a low island, poor; the population neither many nor—for Low

Islanders—industrious. But the lagoon has two good passages, one to

leeward, one to windward, so that in all states of the wind it can be

left and entered, and this advantage, for a government of scattered

islands, was decisive. A pier of coral, landing-stairs, a harbour light

upon a staff and pillar, and two spacious Government bungalows in a

handsome fence, give to the northern end of Rotoava a great air of

consequence. This is confirmed on the one hand by an empty prison, on

the other by a gendarmerie pasted over with hand-bills in Tahitian,

land-law notices from Papeete, and republican sentiments from Paris,

signed (a little after date) ‘Jules Grévy, _Perihidente_.’ Quite at the

far end a belfried Catholic chapel concludes the town; and between, on a

smooth floor of white coral sand and under the breezy canopy of

coco-palms, the houses of the natives stand irregularly scattered, now

close on the lagoon for the sake of the breeze, now back under the palms

for love of shadow.

Not a soul was to be seen. But for the thunder of the surf on the far

side, it seemed you might have heard a pin drop anywhere about that

capital city. There was something thrilling in the unexpected silence,

something yet more so in the unexpected sound. Here before us a sea

reached to the horizon, rippling like an inland mere; and behold! close

at our back another sea assaulted with assiduous fury the reverse of the

position. At night the lantern was run up and lit a vacant pier. In one

house lights were seen and voices heard, where the population (I was

told) sat playing cards. A little beyond, from deep in the darkness of

the palm-grove, we saw the glow and smelt the aromatic odour of a coal of

cocoa-nut husk, a relic of the evening kitchen. Crickets sang; some

shrill thing whistled in a tuft of weeds; and the mosquito hummed and

stung. There was no other trace that night of man, bird, or insect in

the isle. The moon, now three days old, and as yet but a silver crescent

on a still visible sphere, shone through the palm canopy with vigorous

and scattered lights. The alleys where we walked were smoothed and

weeded like a boulevard; here and there were plants set out; here and

there dusky cottages clustered in the shadow, some with verandahs. A

public garden by night, a rich and fashionable watering-place in a

by-season, offer sights and vistas not dissimilar. And still, on the one

side, stretched the lapping mere, and from the other the deep sea still

growled in the night. But it was most of all on board, in the dead

hours, when I had been better sleeping, that the spell of Fakarava seized

and held me. The moon was down. The harbour lantern and two of the

greater planets drew vari-coloured wakes on the lagoon. From shore the

cheerful watch-cry of cocks rang out at intervals above the organ-point

of surf. And the thought of this depopulated capital, this protracted

thread of annular island with its crest of coco-palms and fringe of

breakers, and that tranquil inland sea that stretched before me till it

touched the stars, ran in my head for hours with delight.

So long as I stayed upon that isle these thoughts were constant. I lay

down to sleep, and woke again with an unblunted sense of my surroundings.

I was never weary of calling up the image of that narrow causeway, on

which I had my dwelling, lying coiled like a serpent, tail to mouth, in

the outrageous ocean, and I was never weary of passing—a mere

quarter-deck parade—from the one side to the other, from the shady,

habitable shores of the lagoon to the blinding desert and uproarious

breakers of the opposite beach. The sense of insecurity in such a thread

of residence is more than fanciful. Hurricanes and tidal waves over-leap

these humble obstacles; Oceanus remembers his strength, and, where houses

stood and palms flourished, shakes his white beard again over the barren

coral. Fakarava itself has suffered; the trees immediately beyond my

house were all of recent replantation; and Anaa is only now recovered

from a heavier stroke. I knew one who was then dwelling in the isle. He

told me that he and two ship captains walked to the sea beach. There for

a while they viewed the oncoming breakers, till one of the captains

clapped suddenly his hand before his eyes and cried aloud that he could

endure no longer to behold them. This was in the afternoon; in the dark

hours of the night the sea burst upon the island like a flood; the

settlement was razed all but the church and presbytery; and, when day

returned, the survivors saw themselves clinging in an abattis of uprooted

coco-palms and ruined houses.

Danger is but a small consideration. But men are more nicely sensible of

a discomfort; and the atoll is a discomfortable home. There are some,

and these probably ancient, where a deep soil has formed and the most

valuable fruit-trees prosper. I have walked in one, with equal

admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge breadfruits, eating

bananas and stumbling among taro as I went. This was in the atoll of

Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands alone in my experience. To

give the opposite extreme, which is yet far more near the average, I will

describe the soil and productions of Fakarava. The surface of that

narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral lime-stone, like

volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I

believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck.

Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white,

and these parts are the least productive. The plants (such as they are)

spring from and love the broken coral, whence they grow with that

wonderful verdancy that makes the beauty of the atoll from the sea. The

coco-palm in particular luxuriates in that stern _solum_, striking down

his roots to the brackish, percolated water, and bearing his green head

in the wind with every evidence of health and pleasure. And yet even the

coco-palm must be helped in infancy with some extraneous nutriment, and

through much of the low archipelago there is planted with each nut a

piece of ship’s biscuit and a rusty nail. The pandanus comes next in

importance, being also a food tree; and he, too, does bravely. A green

bush called _miki_ runs everywhere; occasionally a purao is seen; and

there are several useless weeds. According to M. Cuzent, the whole

number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed, even if

it reaches to, one score. Not a blade of grass appears; not a grain of

humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to make the semblance of

a garden; such gardens as bloom in cities on the window-sill. Insect

life is sometimes dense; a cloud o’ mosquitoes, and, what is far worse, a

plague of flies blackening our food, has sometimes driven us from a meal

on Apemama; and even in Fakarava the mosquitoes were a pest. The land

crab may be seen scuttling to his hole, and at night the rats besiege the

houses and the artificial gardens. The crab is good eating; possibly so

is the rat; I have not tried. Pandanus fruit is made, in the Gilberts,

into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle with at the end of

a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no use for it. The rest of

the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such as Fakarava, can be summed up

in the favourite jest of the archipelago—cocoa-nut beefsteak. Cocoa-nut

green, cocoa-nut ripe, cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and

cocoa-nut to drink; cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold—such

is the bill of fare. And some of the entrées are no doubt delicious.

The germinated nut, cooked in the shell and eaten with a spoon, forms a

good pudding; cocoa-nut milk—the expressed juice of a ripe nut, not the

water of a green one—goes well in coffee, and is a valuable adjunct in

cookery through the South Seas; and cocoa-nut salad, if you be a

millionaire, and can afford to eat the value of a field of corn for your

dessert, is a dish to be remembered with affection. But when all is done

there is a sameness, and the Israelites of the low islands murmur at

their manna.

The reader may think I have forgot the sea. The two beaches do certainly

abound in life, and they are strangely different. In the lagoon the

water shallows slowly on a bottom of the fine slimy sand, dotted with

clumps of growing coral. Then comes a strip of tidal beach on which the

ripples lap. In the coral clumps the great holy-water clam (_Tridacna_)

grows plentifully; a little deeper lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and

sail the resplendent fish that charmed us at our entrance; and these are

all more or less vigorously coloured. But the other shells are white

like lime, or faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible

display; many of them dead besides, and badly rolled. On the ocean side,

on the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right

out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every scattered

fragment of the coral, an incredible plenty of marine life displays the

most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues. The reef itself has no

passage of colour but is imitated by some shell. Purple and red and

white, and green and yellow, pied and striped and clouded, the living

shells wear in every combination the livery of the dead reef—if the reef

be dead—so that the eye is continually baffled and the collector

continually deceived. I have taken shells for stones and stones for

shells, the one as often as the other. A prevailing character of the

coral is to be dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how

many varieties of shell have adopted the same fashion and donned the

disguise of the red spot. A shell I had found in plenty in the Marquesas

I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there were the red

spots. A lively little crab wore the same markings. The case of the

hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being the result of conscious

choice. This nasty little wrecker, scavenger, and squatter has learned

the value of a spotted house; so it be of the right colour he will choose

the smallest shard, tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and

go about the world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect

armour unless it was marked with the red spot.

Some two hundred yards distant is the beach of the lagoon. Collect the

shells from each, set them side by side, and you would suppose they came

from different hemispheres; the one so pale, the other so brilliant; the

one prevalently white, the other of a score of hues, and infected with

the scarlet spot like a disease. This seems the more strange, since the

hermit crabs pass and repass the island, and I have met them by the

Residency well, which is about central, journeying either way. Without

doubt many of the shells in the lagoon are dead. But why are they dead?

Without doubt the living shells have a very different background set for

imitation. But why are these so different? We are only on the threshold

of the mysteries.

Either beach, I have said, abounds with life. On the sea-side and in

certain atolls this profusion of vitality is even shocking: the rock

under foot is mined with it. I have broken off—notably in Funafuti and

Arorai {156}—great lumps of ancient weathered rock that rang under my

blows like iron, and the fracture has been full of pendent worms as long

as my hand, as thick as a child’s finger, of a slightly pinkish white,

and set as close as three or even four to the square inch. Even in the

lagoon, where certain shell-fish seem to sicken, others (it is notorious)

prosper exceedingly and make the riches of these islands. Fish, too,

abound; the lagoon is a closed fish-pond, such as might rejoice the fancy

of an abbot; sharks swarm there, and chiefly round the passages, to feast

upon this plenty, and you would suppose that man had only to prepare his

angle. Alas! it is not so. Of these painted fish that came in hordes

about the entering _Casco_, some bore poisonous spines, and others were

poisonous if eaten. The stranger must refrain, or take his chance of

painful and dangerous sickness. The native, on his own isle, is a safe

guide; transplant him to the next, and he is helpless as yourself. For

it is a question both of time and place. A fish caught in a lagoon may

be deadly; the same fish caught the same day at sea, and only a few

hundred yards without the passage, will be wholesome eating: in a

neighbouring isle perhaps the case will be reversed; and perhaps a

fortnight later you shall be able to eat of them indifferently from

within and from without. According to the natives, these bewildering

vicissitudes are ruled by the movement of the heavenly bodies. The

beautiful planet Venus plays a great part in all island tales and

customs; and among other functions, some of them more awful, she

regulates the season of good fish. With Venus in one phase, as we had

her, certain fish were poisonous in the lagoon: with Venus in another,

the same fish was harmless and a valued article of diet. White men

explain these changes by the phases of the coral.

It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious annular

gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of honest rock,

but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the clean sea and the

bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn boulder burrowed in by

worms, the lightest dust venomous as an apothecary’s drugs.

CHAPTER III—A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND

Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found the

island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the hours;

that we walked in that trim public garden of a town, among closed houses,

without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove some tenancy in the back

quarters; and, when we visited the Government bungalow, that Mr. Donat,

acting Vice-Resident, greeted us alone, and entertained us with cocoa-nut

punches in the Sessions Hall and seat of judgment of that widespread

archipelago, our glasses standing arrayed with summonses and census

returns. The unpopularity of a late Vice-Resident had begun the movement

of exodus, his native employés resigning court appointments and retiring

each to his own coco-patch in the remoter districts of the isle. Upon

the back of that, the Governor in Papeete issued a decree: All land in

the Paumotus must be defined and registered by a certain date. Now, the

folk of the archipelago are half nomadic; a man can scarce be said to

belong to a particular atoll; he belongs to several, perhaps holds a

stake and counts cousinship in half a score; and the inhabitants of

Rotoava in particular, man, woman, and child, and from the gendarme to

the Mormon prophet and the schoolmaster, owned—I was going to say

land—owned at least coral blocks and growing coco-palms in some adjacent

isle. Thither—from the gendarme to the babe in arms, the pastor followed

by his flock, the schoolmaster carrying along with him his scholars, and

the scholars with their books and slates—they had taken ship some two

days previous to our arrival, and were all now engaged disputing

boundaries. Fancy overhears the shrillness of their disputation mingle

with the surf and scatter sea-fowl. It was admirable to observe the

completeness of their flight, like that of hibernating birds; nothing

left but empty houses, like old nests to be reoccupied in spring; and

even the harmless necessary dominie borne with them in their

transmigration. Fifty odd set out, and only seven, I was informed,

remained. But when I made a feast on board the _Casco_, more than seven,

and nearer seven times seven, appeared to be my guests. Whence they

appeared, how they were summoned, whither they vanished when the feast

was eaten, I have no guess. In view of Low Island tales, and that awful

frequentation which makes men avoid the seaward beaches of an atoll, some

two score of those that ate with us may have returned, for the occasion,

from the kingdom of the dead.

It was this solitude that put it in our minds to hire a house, and

become, for the time being, indwellers of the isle—a practice I have ever

since, when it was possible, adhered to. Mr. Donat placed us, with that

intent, under the convoy of one Taniera Mahinui, who combined the

incongruous characters of catechist and convict. The reader may smile,

but I affirm he was well qualified for either part. For that of convict,

first of all, by a good substantial felony, such as in all lands casts

the perpetrator in chains and dungeons. Taniera was a man of birth—the

chief a while ago, as he loved to tell, of a district in Anaa of 800

souls. In an evil hour it occurred to the authorities in Papeete to

charge the chiefs with the collection of the taxes. It is a question if

much were collected; it is certain that nothing was handed on; and

Taniera, who had distinguished himself by a visit to Papeete and some

high living in restaurants, was chosen for the scapegoat. The reader

must understand that not Taniera but the authorities in Papeete were

first in fault. The charge imposed was disproportioned. I have not yet

heard of any Polynesian capable of such a burden; honest and upright

Hawaiians—one in particular, who was admired even by the whites as an

inflexible magistrate—have stumbled in the narrow path of the trustee.

And Taniera, when the pinch came, scorned to denounce accomplices; others

had shared the spoil, he bore the penalty alone. He was condemned in

five years. The period, when I had the pleasure of his friendship, was

not yet expired; he still drew prison rations, the sole and not unwelcome

reminder of his chains, and, I believe, looked forward to the date of his

enfranchisement with mere alarm. For he had no sense of shame in the

position; complained of nothing but the defective table of his place of

exile; regretted nothing but the fowls and eggs and fish of his own more

favoured island. And as for his parishioners, they did not think one

hair the less of him. A schoolboy, mulcted in ten thousand lines of

Greek and dwelling sequestered in the dormitories, enjoys unabated

consideration from his fellows. So with Taniera: a marked man, not a

dishonoured; having fallen under the lash of the unthinkable gods; a Job,

perhaps, or say a Taniera in the den of lions. Songs are likely made and

sung about this saintly Robin Hood. On the other hand, he was even

highly qualified for his office in the Church; being by nature a grave,

considerate, and kindly man; his face rugged and serious, his smile

bright; the master of several trades, a builder both of boats and houses;

endowed with a fine pulpit voice; endowed besides with such a gift of

eloquence that at the grave of the late chief of Fakarava he set all the

assistants weeping. I never met a man of a mind more ecclesiastical; he

loved to dispute and to inform himself of doctrine and the history of

sects; and when I showed him the cuts in a volume of Chambers’s

_Encyclopædia_—except for one of an ape—reserved his whole enthusiasm for

cardinals’ hats, censers, candlesticks, and cathedrals. Methought when

he looked upon the cardinal’s hat a voice said low in his ear: ‘Your foot

is on the ladder.’

Under the guidance of Taniera we were soon installed in what I believe to

have been the best-appointed private house in Fakarava. It stood just

beyond the church in an oblong patch of cultivation. More than three

hundred sacks of soil were imported from Tahiti for the Residency garden;

and this must shortly be renewed, for the earth blows away, sinks in

crevices of the coral, and is sought for at last in vain. I know not how

much earth had gone to the garden of my villa; some at least, for an

alley of prosperous bananas ran to the gate, and over the rest of the

enclosure, which was covered with the usual clinker-like fragments of

smashed coral, not only coco-palms and mikis but also fig-trees

flourished, all of a delicious greenness. Of course there was no blade

of grass. In front a picket fence divided us from the white road, the

palm-fringed margin of the lagoon, and the lagoon itself, reflecting

clouds by day and stars by night. At the back, a bulwark of uncemented

coral enclosed us from the narrow belt of bush and the nigh ocean beach

where the seas thundered, the roar and wash of them still humming in the

chambers of the house.

This itself was of one story, verandahed front and back. It contained

three rooms, three sewing-machines, three sea-chests, chairs, tables, a

pair of beds, a cradle, a double-barrelled gun, a pair of enlarged

coloured photographs, a pair of coloured prints after Wilkie and

Mulready, and a French lithograph with the legend: ‘_Le brigade du

Général Lepasset brûlant son drapeau devant Metz_.’ Under the stilts of

the house a stove was rusting, till we drew it forth and put it in

commission. Not far off was the burrow in the coral whence we supplied

ourselves with brackish water. There was live stock, besides, on the

estate—cocks and hens and a brace of ill-regulated cats, whom Taniera

came every morning with the sun to feed on grated cocoa-nut. His voice

was our regular réveille, ringing pleasantly about the garden:

‘Pooty—pooty—poo—poo—poo!’

Far as we were from the public offices, the nearness of the chapel made

our situation what is called eligible in advertisements, and gave us a

side look on some native life. Every morning, as soon as he had fed the

fowls, Taniera set the bell agoing in the small belfry; and the faithful,

who were not very numerous, gathered to prayers. I was once present: it

was the Lord’s day, and seven females and eight males composed the

congregation. A woman played precentor, starting with a longish note;

the catechist joined in upon the second bar; and then the faithful in a

body. Some had printed hymn-books which they followed; some of the rest

filled up with ‘eh—eh—eh,’ the Paumotuan tol-de-rol. After the hymn, we

had an antiphonal prayer or two; and then Taniera rose from the front

bench, where he had been sitting in his catechist’s robes, passed within

the altar-rails, opened his Tahitian Bible, and began to preach from

notes. I understood one word—the name of God; but the preacher managed

his voice with taste, used rare and expressive gestures, and made a

strong impression of sincerity. The plain service, the vernacular Bible,

the hymn-tunes mostly on an English pattern—‘God save the Queen,’ I was

informed, a special favourite,—all, save some paper flowers upon the

altar, seemed not merely but austerely Protestant. It is thus the

Catholics have met their low island proselytes half-way.

Taniera had the keys of our house; it was with him I made my bargain, if

that could be called a bargain in which all was remitted to my

generosity; it was he who fed the cats and poultry, he who came to call

and pick a meal with us like an acknowledged friend; and we long fondly

supposed he was our landlord. This belief was not to bear the test of

experience; and, as my chapter has to relate, no certainty succeeded it.

We passed some days of airless quiet and great heat; shell-gatherers were

warned from the ocean beach, where sunstroke waited them from ten till

four; the highest palm hung motionless, there was no voice audible but

that of the sea on the far side. At last, about four of a certain

afternoon, long cat’s-paws flawed the face of the lagoon; and presently

in the tree-tops there awoke the grateful bustle of the trades, and all

the houses and alleys of the island were fanned out. To more than one

enchanted ship, that had lain long becalmed in view of the green shore,

the wind brought deliverance; and by daylight on the morrow a schooner

and two cutters lay moored in the port of Rotoava. Not only in the outer

sea, but in the lagoon itself, a certain traffic woke with the reviving

breeze; and among the rest one François, a half-blood, set sail with the

first light in his own half-decked cutter. He had held before a court

appointment; being, I believe, the Residency sweeper-out. Trouble

arising with the unpopular Vice-Resident, he had thrown his honours down,

and fled to the far parts of the atoll to plant cabbages—or at least

coco-palms. Thence he was now driven by such need as even a Cincinnatus

must acknowledge, and fared for the capital city, the seat of his late

functions, to exchange half a ton of copra for necessary flour. And

here, for a while, the story leaves to tell of his voyaging.

It must tell, instead, of our house, where, toward seven at night, the

catechist came suddenly in with his pleased air of being welcome; armed

besides with a considerable bunch of keys. These he proceeded to try on

the sea-chests, drawing each in turn from its place against the wall.

Heads of strangers appeared in the doorway and volunteered suggestions.

All in vain. Either they were the wrong keys or the wrong boxes, or the

wrong man was trying them. For a little Taniera fumed and fretted; then

had recourse to the more summary method of the hatchet; one of the chests

was broken open, and an armful of clothing, male and female, baled out

and handed to the strangers on the verandah.

These were François, his wife, and their child. About eight a.m., in the

midst of the lagoon, their cutter had capsized in jibbing. They got her

righted, and though she was still full of water put the child on board.

The mainsail had been carried away, but the jib still drew her sluggishly

along, and François and the woman swam astern and worked the rudder with

their hands. The cold was cruel; the fatigue, as time went on, became

excessive; and in that preserve of sharks, fear hunted them. Again and

again, François, the half-breed, would have desisted and gone down; but

the woman, whole blood of an amphibious race, still supported him with

cheerful words. I am reminded of a woman of Hawaii who swam with her

husband, I dare not say how many miles, in a high sea, and came ashore at

last with his dead body in her arms. It was about five in the evening,

after nine hours’ swimming, that François and his wife reached land at

Rotoava. The gallant fight was won, and instantly the more childish side

of native character appears. They had supped, and told and retold their

story, dripping as they came; the flesh of the woman, whom Mrs. Stevenson

helped to shift, was cold as stone; and François, having changed to a dry

cotton shirt and trousers, passed the remainder of the evening on my

floor and between open doorways, in a thorough draught. Yet François,

the son of a French father, speaks excellent French himself and seems

intelligent.

It was our first idea that the catechist, true to his evangelical

vocation, was clothing the naked from his superfluity. Then it came out

that François was but dealing with his own. The clothes were his, so was

the chest, so was the house. François was in fact the landlord. Yet you

observe he had hung back on the verandah while Taniera tried his

’prentice hand upon the locks: and even now, when his true character

appeared, the only use he made of the estate was to leave the clothes of

his family drying on the fence. Taniera was still the friend of the

house, still fed the poultry, still came about us on his daily visits,

François, during the remainder of his stay, holding bashfully aloof. And

there was stranger matter. Since François had lost the whole load of his

cutter, the half ton of copra, an axe, bowls, knives, and clothes—since

he had in a manner to begin the world again, and his necessary flour was

not yet bought or paid for—I proposed to advance him what he needed on

the rent. To my enduring amazement he refused, and the reason he gave—if

that can be called a reason which but darkens counsel—was that Taniera

was his friend. His friend, you observe; not his creditor. I inquired

into that, and was assured that Taniera, an exile in a strange isle,

might possibly be in debt himself, but certainly was no man’s creditor.

Very early one morning we were awakened by a bustling presence in the

yard, and found our camp had been surprised by a tall, lean old native

lady, dressed in what were obviously widow’s weeds. You could see at a

glance she was a notable woman, a housewife, sternly practical, alive

with energy, and with fine possibilities of temper. Indeed, there was

nothing native about her but the skin; and the type abounds, and is

everywhere respected, nearer home. It did us good to see her scour the

grounds, examining the plants and chickens; watering, feeding, trimming

them; taking angry, purpose-like possession. When she neared the house

our sympathy abated; when she came to the broken chest I wished I were

elsewhere. We had scarce a word in common; but her whole lean body spoke

for her with indignant eloquence. ‘My chest!’ it cried, with a stress on

the possessive. ‘My chest—broken open! This is a fine state of things!’

I hastened to lay the blame where it belonged—on François and his

wife—and found I had made things worse instead of better. She repeated

the names at first with incredulity, then with despair. A while she

seemed stunned, next fell to disembowelling the box, piling the goods on

the floor, and visibly computing the extent of François’s ravages; and

presently after she was observed in high speech with Taniera, who seemed

to hang an ear like one reproved.

Here, then, by all known marks, should be my land-lady at last; here was

every character of the proprietor fully developed. Should I not approach

her on the still depending question of my rent? I carried the point to

an adviser. ‘Nonsense!’ he cried. ‘That’s the old woman, the mother.

It doesn’t belong to her. I believe that’s the man the house belongs

to,’ and he pointed to one of the coloured photographs on the wall. On

this I gave up all desire of understanding; and when the time came for me

to leave, in the judgment-hall of the archipelago, and with the awful

countenance of the acting Governor, I duly paid my rent to Taniera. He

was satisfied, and so was I. But what had he to do with it? Mr. Donat,

acting magistrate and a man of kindred blood, could throw no light upon

the mystery; a plain private person, with a taste for letters, cannot be

expected to do more.

CHAPTER IV—TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS

The most careless reader must have remarked a change of air since the

Marquesas. The house, crowded with effects, the bustling housewife

counting her possessions, the serious, indoctrinated island pastor, the

long fight for life in the lagoon: here are traits of a new world. I

read in a pamphlet (I will not give the author’s name) that the Marquesan

especially resembles the Paumotuan. I should take the two races, though

so near in neighbourhood, to be extremes of Polynesian diversity. The

Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one of the

tallest—the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and not even

handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to religion,

childishly self-indulgent—the Paumotuan greedy, hardy, enterprising, a

religious disputant, and with a trace of the ascetic character.

Yet a few years ago, and the people of the archipelago were crafty

savages. Their isles might be called sirens’ isles, not merely from the

attraction they exerted on the passing mariner, but from the perils that

awaited him on shore. Even to this day, in certain outlying islands,

danger lingers; and the civilized Paumotuan dreads to land and hesitates

to accost his backward brother. But, except in these, to-day the peril

is a memory. When our generation were yet in the cradle and playroom it

was still a living fact. Between 1830 and 1840, Hao, for instance, was a

place of the most dangerous approach, where ships were seized and crews

kidnapped. As late as 1856, the schooner _Sarah Ann_ sailed from Papeete

and was seen no more. She had women on board, and children, the

captain’s wife, a nursemaid, a baby, and the two young sons of a Captain

Steven on their way to the mainland for schooling. All were supposed to

have perished in a squall. A year later, the captain of the _Julia_,

coasting along the island variously called Bligh, Lagoon, and Tematangi

saw armed natives follow the course of his schooner, clad in

many-coloured stuffs. Suspicion was at once aroused; the mother of the

lost children was profuse of money; and one expedition having found the

place deserted, and returned content with firing a few shots, she raised

and herself accompanied another. None appeared to greet or to oppose

them; they roamed a while among abandoned huts and empty thickets; then

formed two parties and set forth to beat, from end to end, the pandanus

jungle of the island. One man remained alone by the landing-place—Teina,

a chief of Anaa, leader of the armed natives who made the strength of the

expedition. Now that his comrades were departed this way and that, on

their laborious exploration, the silence fell profound; and this silence

was the ruin of the islanders. A sound of stones rattling caught the ear

of Teina. He looked, thinking to perceive a crab, and saw instead the

brown hand of a human being issue from a fissure in the ground. A shout

recalled the search parties and announced their doom to the buried

caitiffs. In the cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human

bones and singular and horrid curiosities. One was a head of golden

hair, supposed to be a relic of the captain’s wife; another was half of

the body of a European child, sun-dried and stuck upon a stick, doubtless

with some design of wizardry.

The Paumotuan is eager to be rich. He saves, grudges, buries money,

fears not work. For a dollar each, two natives passed the hours of

daylight cleaning our ship’s copper. It was strange to see them so

indefatigable and so much at ease in the water—working at times with

their pipes lighted, the smoker at times submerged and only the glowing

bowl above the surface; it was stranger still to think they were next

congeners to the incapable Marquesan. But the Paumotuan not only saves,

grudges, and works, he steals besides; or, to be more precise, he

swindles. He will never deny a debt, he only flees his creditor. He is

always keen for an advance; so soon as he has fingered it he disappears.

He knows your ship; so soon as it nears one island, he is off to another.

You may think you know his name; he has already changed it. Pursuit in

that infinity of isles were fruitless. The result can be given in a

nutshell. It has been actually proposed in a Government report to secure

debts by taking a photograph of the debtor; and the other day in Papeete

credits on the Paumotus to the amount of sixteen thousand pounds were

sold for less than forty—_quatre cent mille francs pour moins de mille

francs_. Even so, the purchase was thought hazardous; and only the man

who made it and who had special opportunities could have dared to give so

much.

The Paumotuan is sincerely attached to those of his own blood and

household. A touching affection sometimes unites wife and husband.

Their children, while they are alive, completely rule them; after they

are dead, their bones or their mummies are often jealously preserved and

carried from atoll to atoll in the wanderings of the family. I was told

there were many houses in Fakarava with the mummy of a child locked in a

sea-chest; after I heard it, I would glance a little jealously at those

by my own bed; in that cupboard, also, it was possible there was a tiny

skeleton.

The race seems in a fair way to survive. From fifteen islands, whose

rolls I had occasion to consult, I found a proportion of 59 births to 47

deaths for 1887. Dropping three out of the fifteen, there remained for

the other twelve the comfortable ratio of 50 births to 32 deaths. Long

habits of hardship and activity doubtless explain the contrast with

Marquesan figures. But the Paumotuan displays, besides, a certain

concern for health and the rudiments of a sanitary discipline. Public

talk with these free-spoken people plays the part of the Contagious

Diseases Act; in-comers to fresh islands anxiously inquire if all be

well; and syphilis, when contracted, is successfully treated with

indigenous herbs. Like their neighbours of Tahiti, from whom they have

perhaps imbibed the error, they regard leprosy with comparative

indifference, elephantiasis with disproportionate fear. But, unlike

indeed to the Tahitian, their alarm puts on the guise of self-defence.

Any one stricken with this painful and ugly malady is confined to the

ends of villages, denied the use of paths and highways, and condemned to

transport himself between his house and coco-patch by water only, his

very footprint being held infectious. Fe’efe’e, being a creature of

marshes and the sequel of malarial fever, is not original in atolls. On

the single isle of Makatea, where the lagoon is now a marsh, the disease

has made a home. Many suffer; they are excluded (if Mr. Wilmot be right)

from much of the comfort of society; and it is believed they take a

secret vengeance. The defections of the sick are considered highly

poisonous. Early in the morning, it is narrated, aged and malicious

persons creep into the sleeping village, and stealthily make water at the

doors of the houses of young men. Thus they propagate disease; thus they

breathe on and obliterate comeliness and health, the objects of their

envy. Whether horrid fact or more abominable legend, it equally depicts

that something bitter and energetic which distinguishes Paumotuan man.

The archipelago is divided between two main religions, Catholic and

Mormon. They front each other proudly with a false air of permanence;

yet are but shapes, their membership in a perpetual flux. The Mormon

attends mass with devotion: the Catholic sits attentive at a Mormon

sermon, and to-morrow each may have transferred allegiance. One man had

been a pillar of the Church of Rome for fifteen years; his wife dying, he

decided that must be a poor religion that could not save a man his wife,

and turned Mormon. According to one informant, Catholicism was the more

fashionable in health, but on the approach of sickness it was judged

prudent to secede. As a Mormon, there were five chances out of six you

might recover; as a Catholic, your hopes were small; and this opinion is

perhaps founded on the comfortable rite of unction.

We all know what Catholics are, whether in the Paumotus or at home. But

the Paumotuan Mormon seemed a phenomenon apart. He marries but the one

wife, uses the Protestant Bible, observes Protestant forms of worship,

forbids the use of liquor and tobacco, practises adult baptism by

immersion, and after every public sin, rechristens the backslider. I

advised with Mahinui, whom I found well informed in the history of the

American Mormons, and he declared against the least connection. ‘_Pour

moi_,’ said he, with a fine charity, ‘_les Mormons ici un petit

Catholiques_.’ Some months later I had an opportunity to consult an

orthodox fellow-countryman, an old dissenting Highlander, long settled in

Tahiti, but still breathing of the heather of Tiree. ‘Why do they call

themselves Mormons?’ I asked. ‘My dear, and that is my question!’ he

exclaimed. ‘For by all that I can hear of their doctrine, I have nothing

to say against it, and their life, it is above reproach.’ And for all

that, Mormons they are, but of the earlier sowing: the so-called

Josephites, the followers of Joseph Smith, the opponents of Brigham

Young.

Grant, then, the Mormons to be Mormons. Fresh points at once arise: What

are the Israelites? and what the Kanitus? For a long while back the sect

had been divided into Mormons proper and so-called Israelites, I never

could hear why. A few years since there came a visiting missionary of

the name of Williams, who made an excellent collection, and retired,

leaving fresh disruption imminent. Something irregular (as I was told)

in his way of ‘opening the service’ had raised partisans and enemies; the

church was once more rent asunder; and a new sect, the Kanitu, issued

from the division. Since then Kanitus and Israelites, like the

Cameronians and the United Presbyterians, have made common cause; and the

ecclesiastical history of the Paumotus is, for the moment, uneventful.

There will be more doing before long, and these isles bid fair to be the

Scotland of the South. Two things I could never learn. The nature of

the innovations of the Rev. Mr. Williams none would tell me, and of the

meaning of the name Kanitu none had a guess. It was not Tahitian, it was

not Marquesan; it formed no part of that ancient speech of the Paumotus,

now passing swiftly into obsolescence. One man, a priest, God bless him!

said it was the Latin for a little dog. I have found it since as the

name of a god in New Guinea; it must be a bolder man than I who should

hint at a connection. Here, then, is a singular thing: a brand-new sect,

arising by popular acclamation, and a nonsense word invented for its

name.

The design of mystery seems obvious, and according to a very intelligent

observer, Mr. Magee of Mangareva, this element of the mysterious is a

chief attraction of the Mormon Church. It enjoys some of the status of

Freemasonry at home, and there is for the convert some of the

exhilaration of adventure. Other attractions are certainly conjoined.

Perpetual rebaptism, leading to a succession of baptismal feasts, is

found, both from the social and the spiritual side, a pleasing feature.

More important is the fact that all the faithful enjoy office; perhaps

more important still, the strictness of the discipline. ‘The veto on

liquor,’ said Mr. Magee, ‘brings them plenty members.’ There is no doubt

these islanders are fond of drink, and no doubt they refrain from the

indulgence; a bout on a feast-day, for instance, may be followed by a

week or a month of rigorous sobriety. Mr. Wilmot attributes this to

Paumotuan frugality and the love of hoarding; it goes far deeper. I have

mentioned that I made a feast on board the _Casco_. To wash down ship’s

bread and jam, each guest was given the choice of rum or syrup, and out

of the whole number only one man voted—in a defiant tone, and amid shouts

of mirth—for ‘Trum’! This was in public. I had the meanness to repeat

the experiment, whenever I had a chance, within the four walls of my

house; and three at least, who had refused at the festival, greedily

drank rum behind a door. But there were others thoroughly consistent. I

said the virtues of the race were bourgeois and puritan; and how

bourgeois is this! how puritanic! how Scottish! and how Yankee!—the

temptation, the resistance, the public hypocritical conformity, the

Pharisees, the Holy Willies, and the true disciples. With such a people

the popularity of an ascetic Church appears legitimate; in these strict

rules, in this perpetual supervision, the weak find their advantage, the

strong a certain pleasure; and the doctrine of rebaptism, a clean bill

and a fresh start, will comfort many staggering professors.

There is yet another sect, or what is called a sect—no doubt

improperly—that of the Whistlers. Duncan Cameron, so clear in favour of

the Mormons, was no less loud in condemnation of the Whistlers. Yet I do

not know; I still fancy there is some connection, perhaps fortuitous,

probably disavowed. Here at least are some doings in the house of an

Israelite clergyman (or prophet) in the island of Anaa, of which I am

equally sure that Duncan would disclaim and the Whistlers hail them for

an imitation of their own. My informant, a Tahitian and a Catholic,

occupied one part of the house; the prophet and his family lived in the

other. Night after night the Mormons, in the one end, held their evening

sacrifice of song; night after night, in the other, the wife of the

Tahitian lay awake and listened to their singing with amazement. At

length she could contain herself no longer, woke her husband, and asked

him what he heard. ‘I hear several persons singing hymns,’ said he.

‘Yes,’ she returned, ‘but listen again! Do you not hear something

supernatural?’ His attention thus directed, he was aware of a strange

buzzing voice—and yet he declared it was beautiful—which justly

accompanied the singers. The next day he made inquiries. ‘It is a

spirit,’ said the prophet, with entire simplicity, ‘which has lately made

a practice of joining us at family worship.’ It did not appear the thing

was visible, and like other spirits raised nearer home in these

degenerate days, it was rudely ignorant, at first could only buzz, and

had only learned of late to bear a part correctly in the music.

The performances of the Whistlers are more business-like. Their meetings

are held publicly with open doors, all being ‘cordially invited to

attend.’ The faithful sit about the room—according to one informant,

singing hymns; according to another, now singing and now whistling; the

leader, the wizard—let me rather say, the medium—sits in the midst,

enveloped in a sheet and silent; and presently, from just above his head,

or sometimes from the midst of the roof, an aerial whistling proceeds,

appalling to the inexperienced. This, it appears, is the language of the

dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts,

writing, I was told, ‘as fast as a telegraph operator’; and the

communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest

triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip reported

of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation

on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these,

immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to the patient.

The whole business is very dreary, very silly, and very European; it has

none of the picturesque qualities of similar conjurations in New Zealand;

it seems to possess no kernel of possible sense, like some that I shall

describe among the Gilbert islanders. Yet I was told that many hardy,

intelligent natives were inveterate Whistlers. ‘Like Mahinui?’ I asked,

willing to have a standard; and I was told ‘Yes.’ Why should I wonder?

Men more enlightened than my convict-catechist sit down at home to

follies equally sterile and dull.

The medium is sometimes female. It was a woman, for instance, who

introduced these practices on the north coast of Taiarapu, to the scandal

of her own connections, her brother-in-law in particular declaring she

was drunk. But what shocked Tahiti might seem fit enough in the

Paumotus, the more so as certain women there possess, by the gift of

nature, singular and useful powers. They say they are honest,

well-intentioned ladies, some of them embarrassed by their weird

inheritance. And indeed the trouble caused by this endowment is so

great, and the protection afforded so infinitesimally small, that I

hesitate whether to call it a gift or a hereditary curse. You may rob

this lady’s coco-patch, steal her canoes, burn down her house, and slay

her family scatheless; but one thing you must not do: you must not lay a

hand upon her sleeping-mat, or your belly will swell, and you can only be

cured by the lady or her husband. Here is the report of an eye-witness,

Tasmanian born, educated, a man who has made money—certainly no fool. In

1886 he was present in a house on Makatea, where two lads began to

skylark on the mats, and were (I think) ejected. Instantly after, their

bellies began to swell; pains took hold on them; all manner of island

remedies were exhibited in vain, and rubbing only magnified their

sufferings. The man of the house was called, explained the nature of the

visitation, and prepared the cure. A cocoa-nut was husked, filled with

herbs, and with all the ceremonies of a launch, and the utterance of

spells in the Paumotuan language, committed to the sea. From that moment

the pains began to grow more easy and the swelling to subside. The

reader may stare. I can assure him, if he moved much among old residents

of the archipelago, he would be driven to admit one thing of two—either

that there is something in the swollen bellies or nothing in the evidence

of man.

I have not met these gifted ladies; but I had an experience of my own,

for I have played, for one night only, the part of the whistling spirit.

It had been blowing wearily all day, but with the fall of night the wind

abated, and the moon, which was then full, rolled in a clear sky. We

went southward down the island on the side of the lagoon, walking through

long-drawn forest aisles of palm, and on a floor of snowy sand. No life

was abroad, nor sound of life; till in a clear part of the isle we spied

the embers of a fire, and not far off, in a dark house, heard natives

talking softly. To sit without a light, even in company, and under

cover, is for a Paumotuan a somewhat hazardous extreme. The whole

scene—the strong moonlight and crude shadows on the sand, the scattered

coals, the sound of the low voices from the house, and the lap of the

lagoon along the beach—put me (I know not how) on thoughts of

superstition. I was barefoot, I observed my steps were noiseless, and

drawing near to the dark house, but keeping well in shadow, began to

whistle. ‘The Heaving of the Lead’ was my air—no very tragic piece.

With the first note the conversation and all movement ceased; silence

accompanied me while I continued; and when I passed that way on my return

I found the lamp was lighted in the house, but the tongues were still

mute. All night, as I now think, the wretches shivered and were silent.

For indeed, I had no guess at the time at the nature and magnitude of the

terrors I inflicted, or with what grisly images the notes of that old

song had peopled the dark house.

CHAPTER V—A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL

No, I had no guess of these men’s terrors. Yet I had received ere that a

hint, if I had understood; and the occasion was a funeral.

A little apart in the main avenue of Rotoava, in a low hut of leaves that

opened on a small enclosure, like a pigsty on a pen, an old man dwelt

solitary with his aged wife. Perhaps they were too old to migrate with

the others; perhaps they were too poor, and had no possessions to

dispute. At least they had remained behind; and it thus befell that they

were invited to my feast. I dare say it was quite a piece of politics in

the pigsty whether to come or not to come, and the husband long swithered

between curiosity and age, till curiosity conquered, and they came, and

in the midst of that last merrymaking death tapped him on the shoulder.

For some days, when the sky was bright and the wind cool, his mat would

be spread in the main highway of the village, and he was to be seen lying

there inert, a mere handful of a man, his wife inertly seated by his

head. They seemed to have outgrown alike our needs and faculties; they

neither spoke nor listened; they suffered us to pass without a glance;

the wife did not fan, she seemed not to attend upon her husband, and the

two poor antiques sat juxtaposed under the high canopy of palms, the

human tragedy reduced to its bare elements, a sight beyond pathos,

stirring a thrill of curiosity. And yet there was one touch of the

pathetic haunted me: that so much youth and expectation should have run

in these starved veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees

of life on a pleasure party.

On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time pressing,

he was buried the same day at four. The cemetery lies to seaward behind

Government House; broken coral, like so much road-metal, forms the

surface; a few wooden crosses, a few inconsiderable upright stones,

designate graves; a mortared wall, high enough to lean on, rings it

about; a clustering shrub surrounds it with pale leaves. Here was the

grave dug that morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the

nigh sea and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in his

house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence before

the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their eyes.

Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped in

white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind—not many, for not many

remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these were poor; the men

in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or the gorgeous

parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women, with a few

exceptions, brightly habited. Far in the rear came the widow, painfully

carrying the dead man’s mat; a creature aged beyond humanity, to the

likeness of some missing link.

The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone with

the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and a layman

took his office. Standing at the head of the open grave, in a white coat

and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and one eye bound with a

red handkerchief, he read solemnly that chapter in Job which has been

read and heard over the bones of so many of our fathers, and with a good

voice offered up two prayers. The wind and the surf bore a burthen. By

the cemetery gate a mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue.

In the midst the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the

coffin-stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned

her back to the grave and was playing with a leaf. Did she understand?

God knows. The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered and

threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral. Dust to

dust: but the grains of this dust were gross like cherries, and the true

dust that was to follow sat near by, still cohering (as by a miracle) in

the tragic semblance of a female ape.

So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral. The well-known

passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the grave

was filled, the mourners straggled homeward. With a little coarser grain

of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea, a stronger glare of

sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some incongruous colours of attire,

the well-remembered form had been observed.

By rights it should have been otherwise. The mat should have been buried

with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily reserved for

a fresh service. The widow should have flung herself upon the grave and

raised the voice of official grief, the neighbours have chimed in, and

the narrow isle rung for a space with lamentation. But the widow was

old; perhaps she had forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played

like a child with leaves and coffin-stretchers. In all ways my guest was

buried with maimed rites. Strange to think that his last conscious

pleasure was the _Casco_ and my feast; strange to think that he had

limped there, an old child, looking for some new good. And the good

thing, rest, had been allotted him.

But though the widow had neglected much, there was one part she must not

utterly neglect. She came away with the dispersing funeral; but the dead

man’s mat was left behind upon the grave, and I learned that by set of

sun she must return to sleep there. This vigil is imperative. From

sundown till the rising of the morning star the Paumotuan must hold his

watch above the ashes of his kindred. Many friends, if the dead have

been a man of mark, will keep the watchers company; they will be well

supplied with coverings against the weather; I believe they bring food,

and the rite is persevered in for two weeks. Our poor survivor, if,

indeed, she properly survived, had little to cover, and few to sit with

her; on the night of the funeral a strong squall chased her from her

place of watch; for days the weather held uncertain and outrageous; and

ere seven nights were up she had desisted, and returned to sleep in her

low roof. That she should be at the pains of returning for so short a

visit to a solitary house, that this borderer of the grave should fear a

little wind and a wet blanket, filled me at the time with musings. I

could not say she was indifferent; she was so far beyond me in experience

that the court of my criticism waived jurisdiction; but I forged excuses,

telling myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps suffered much,

perhaps understood nothing. And lo! in the whole affair there was no

question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy return of this

old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of uncommon fortitude.

Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail. I have said

the funeral passed much as at home. But when all was over, when we were

trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and down the path to

the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different spirit startled and

perhaps dismayed us. Two people walked not far apart in our procession:

my friend Mr. Donat—Donat-Rimarau: ‘Donat the much-handed’—acting

Vice-Resident, present ruler of the archipelago, by far the man of chief

importance on the scene, but known besides for one of an unshakable good

temper; and a certain comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the

comeliest on the isle, not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite.

Of a sudden, ere yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she

made a leap at the Resident, with pointed finger, shrieked a few words,

and fell back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth. ‘What did she

say to you?’ I asked. ‘She did not speak to _me_,’ said Donat, a shade

perturbed; ‘she spoke to the ghost of the dead man.’ And the purport of

her speech was this: ‘See there! Donat will be a fine feast for you

to-night.’

‘M. Donat called it a jest,’ I wrote at the time in my diary. ‘It seemed

to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as though she would

divert the ghost’s attention from herself. A cannibal race may well have

cannibal phantoms.’ The guesses of the traveller appear foredoomed to be

erroneous; yet in these I was precisely right. The woman had stood by in

terror at the funeral, being then in a dread spot, the graveyard. She

looked on in terror to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit,

loosed upon the isle. And the words she had cried in Donat’s face were

indeed a terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to

dedicate another in her stead. One thing is to be said in her excuse.

Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great

good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-caste.

For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of talisman

against the powers of hell. In no other way can they explain the

unpunished recklessness of Europeans.

CHAPTER VI—GRAVEYARD STORIES

With my superstitious friend, the islander, I fear I am not wholly frank,

often leading the way with stories of my own, and being always a grave

and sometimes an excited hearer. But the deceit is scarce mortal, since

I am as pleased to hear as he to tell, as pleased with the story as he

with the belief; and, besides, it is entirely needful. For it is scarce

possible to exaggerate the extent and empire of his superstitions; they

mould his life, they colour his thinking; and when he does not speak to

me of ghosts, and gods, and devils, he is playing the dissembler and

talking only with his lips. With thoughts so different, one must indulge

the other; and I would rather that I should indulge his superstition than

he my incredulity. Of one thing, besides, I may be sure: Let me indulge

it as I please, I shall not hear the whole; for he is already on his

guard with me, and the amount of the lore is boundless.

I will give but a few instances at random, chiefly from my own doorstep

in Upolu, during the past month (October 1890). One of my workmen was

sent the other day to the banana patch, there to dig; this is a hollow of

the mountain, buried in woods, out of all sight and cry of mankind; and

long before dusk Lafaele was back again beside the cook-house with

embarrassed looks; he dared not longer stay alone, he was afraid of

‘spirits in the bush.’ It seems these are the souls of the unburied

dead, haunting where they fell, and wearing woodland shapes of pig, or

bird, or insect; the bush is full of them, they seem to eat nothing, slay

solitary wanderers apparently in spite, and at times, in human form, go

down to villages and consort with the inhabitants undetected. So much I

learned a day or so after, walking in the bush with a very intelligent

youth, a native. It was a little before noon; a grey day and squally;

and perhaps I had spoken lightly. A dark squall burst on the side of the

mountain; the woods shook and cried; the dead leaves rose from the ground

in clouds, like butterflies; and my companion came suddenly to a full

stop. He was afraid, he said, of the trees falling; but as soon as I had

changed the subject of our talk he proceeded with alacrity. A day or two

before a messenger came up the mountain from Apia with a letter; I was in

the bush, he must await my return, then wait till I had answered: and

before I was done his voice sounded shrill with terror of the coming

night and the long forest road. These are the commons. Take the chiefs.

There has been a great coming and going of signs and omens in our group.

One river ran down blood; red eels were captured in another; an unknown

fish was thrown upon the coast, an ominous word found written on its

scales. So far we might be reading in a monkish chronicle; now we come

on a fresh note, at once modern and Polynesian. The gods of Upolu and

Savaii, our two chief islands, contended recently at cricket. Since then

they are at war. Sounds of battle are heard to roll along the coast. A

woman saw a man swim from the high seas and plunge direct into the bush;

he was no man of that neighbourhood; and it was known he was one of the

gods, speeding to a council. Most perspicuous of all, a missionary on

Savaii, who is also a medical man, was disturbed late in the night by

knocking; it was no hour for the dispensary, but at length he woke his

servant and sent him to inquire; the servant, looking from a window,

beheld crowds of persons, all with grievous wounds, lopped limbs, broken

heads, and bleeding bullet-holes; but when the door was opened all had

disappeared. They were gods from the field of battle. Now these reports

have certainly significance; it is not hard to trace them to political

grumblers or to read in them a threat of coming trouble; from that merely

human side I found them ominous myself. But it was the spiritual side of

their significance that was discussed in secret council by my rulers. I

shall best depict this mingled habit of the Polynesian mind by two

connected instances. I once lived in a village, the name of which I do

not mean to tell. The chief and his sister were persons perfectly

intelligent: gentlefolk, apt of speech. The sister was very religious, a

great church-goer, one that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found

afterwards that she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was

somewhat of a freethinker; at the least, a latitudinarian: he was a man,

besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an

impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected

superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had discovered

by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in the village

graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible authority, to task.

‘There is something wrong about your graveyard,’ said I, ‘which you must

attend to, or it may have very bad results.’ ‘Something wrong? What is

it?’ he asked, with an emotion that surprised me. ‘If you care to go

along there any evening about nine o’clock you can see for yourself,’

said I. He stepped backward. ‘A ghost!’ he cried.

In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to blame

another. Half blood and whole, pious and debauched, intelligent and

dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine with their recent

Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the old island deities.

So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly dwindled into village bogies;

so to-day, the theological Highlander sneaks from under the eye of the

Free Church divine to lay an offering by a sacred well.

I try to deal with the whole matter here because of a particular quality

in Paumotuan superstitions. It is true I heard them told by a man with a

genius for such narrations. Close about our evening lamp, within sound

of the island surf, we hung on his words, thrilling. The reader, in far

other scenes, must listen close for the faint echo.

This bundle of weird stories sprang from the burial and the woman’s

selfish conjuration. I was dissatisfied with what I heard, harped upon

questions, and struck at last this vein of metal. It is from sundown to

about four in the morning that the kinsfolk camp upon the grave; and

these are the hours of the spirits’ wanderings. At any time of the

night—it may be earlier, it may be later—a sound is to be heard below,

which is the noise of his liberation; at four sharp, another and a louder

marks the instant of the re-imprisonment; between-whiles, he goes his

malignant rounds. ‘Did you ever see an evil spirit?’ was once asked of a

Paumotuan. ‘Once.’ ‘Under what form?’ ‘It was in the form of a crane.’

‘And how did you know that crane to be a spirit?’ was asked. ‘I will

tell you,’ he answered; and this was the purport of his inconclusive

narrative. His father had been dead nearly a fortnight; others had

wearied of the watch; and as the sun was setting, he found himself by the

grave alone. It was not yet dark, rather the hour of the afterglow, when

he was aware of a snow-white crane upon the coral mound; presently more

cranes came, some white, some black; then the cranes vanished, and he saw

in their place a white cat, to which there was silently joined a great

company of cats of every hue conceivable; then these also disappeared,

and he was left astonished.

This was an anodyne appearance. Take instead the experience of

Rua-a-mariterangi on the isle of Katiu. He had a need for some pandanus,

and crossed the isle to the sea-beach, where it chiefly flourishes. The

day was still, and Rua was surprised to hear a crashing sound among the

thickets, and then the fall of a considerable tree. Here must be some

one building a canoe; and he entered the margin of the wood to find and

pass the time of day with this chance neighbour. The crashing sounded

more at hand; and then he was aware of something drawing swiftly near

among the tree-tops. It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so

that its hands were free for murder; it depended safely by the slightest

twigs; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua recognised it

for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging as it came. Prayer

was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, and it is to

prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes his escape. No merely human

expedition had availed.

This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was abroad

by day. And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of the night

watch and the many references to the rising of the morning star, it is no

singular exception. I could never find a case of another who had seen

this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in its habits; but others have heard the

fall of the tree, which seems the signal of its coming. Mr. Donat was

once pearling on the uninhabited isle of Haraiki. It was a day without a

breath of wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of

contumelious breezes. The divers were in the midst of the lagoon upon

their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in the camp.

Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native who accompanied

Donat into the wood in quest of sea-fowls’ eggs. In a moment, out of the

stillness, came the sound of the fall of a great tree. Donat would have

passed on to find the cause. ‘No,’ cried his companion, ‘that was no

tree. It was something _not right_. Let us go back to camp.’ Next

Sunday the divers were turned on, all that part of the isle was

thoroughly examined, and sure enough no tree had fallen. A little later

Mr. Donat saw one of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar

unaffected panic, on the same isle. But neither would explain, and it

was not till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the

occasion of their terrors.

But whether by day or night, the purpose of the dead in these abhorred

activities is still the same. In Samoa, my informant had no idea of the

food of the bush spirits; no such ambiguity would exist in the mind of a

Paumotuan. In that hungry archipelago, living and dead must alike toil

for nutriment; and the race having been cannibal in the past, the spirits

are so still. When the living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal

imagination drew the shocking inference that the dead might eat the

living. Doubtless they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere

malice. Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but

even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a cannibal

dainty. And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least in the far

eastern islands, is to prowl for food. It was as a dainty morsel for a

meal that the woman denounced Donat at the funeral. There are spirits

besides who prey in particular not on the bodies but on the souls of the

dead. The point is clearly made in a Tahitian story. A child fell sick,

grew swiftly worse, and at last showed signs of death. The mother

hastened to the house of a sorcerer, who lived hard by. ‘You are yet in

time,’ said he; ‘a spirit has just run past my door carrying the soul of

your child wrapped in the leaf of a purao; but I have a spirit stronger

and swifter who will run him down ere he has time to eat it.’ Wrapped in

a leaf: like other things edible and corruptible.

Or take an experience of Mr. Donat’s on the island of Anaa. It was a

night of a high wind, with violent squalls; his child was very sick, and

the father, though he had gone to bed, lay wakeful, hearkening to the

gale. All at once a fowl was violently dashed on the house wall.

Supposing he had forgot to put it in shelter with the rest, Donat arose,

found the bird (a cock) lying on the verandah, and put it in the

hen-house, the door of which he securely fastened. Fifteen minutes later

the business was repeated, only this time, as it was being dashed against

the wall, the bird crew. Again Donat replaced it, examining the

hen-house thoroughly and finding it quite perfect; as he was so engaged

the wind puffed out his light, and he must grope back to the door a good

deal shaken. Yet a third time the bird was dashed upon the wall; a third

time Donat set it, now near dead, beside its mates; and he was scarce

returned before there came a rush, like that of a furious strong man,

against the door, and a whistle as loud as that of a railway engine rang

about the house. The sceptical reader may here detect the finger of the

tempest; but the women gave up all for lost and clustered on the beds

lamenting. Nothing followed, and I must suppose the gale somewhat

abated, for presently after a chief came visiting. He was a bold man to

be abroad so late, but doubtless carried a bright lantern. And he was

certainly a man of counsel, for as soon as he heard the details of these

disturbances he was in a position to explain their nature. ‘Your child,’

said he, ‘must certainly die. This is the evil spirit of our island who

lies in wait to eat the spirits of the newly dead.’ And then he went on

to expatiate on the strangeness of the spirit’s conduct. He was not

usually, he explained, so open of assault, but sat silent on the

house-top waiting, in the guise of a bird, while within the people tended

the dying and bewailed the dead, and had no thought of peril. But when

the day came and the doors were opened, and men began to go abroad,

blood-stains on the wall betrayed the tragedy.

This is the quality I admire in Paumotuan legend. In Tahiti the

spirit-eater is said to assume a vesture which has much more of pomp, but

how much less of horror. It has been seen by all sorts and conditions,

native and foreign; only the last insist it is a meteor. My authority

was not so sure. He was riding with his wife about two in the morning;

both were near asleep, and the horses not much better. It was a

brilliant and still night, and the road wound over a mountain, near by a

deserted marae (old Tahitian temple). All at once the appearance passed

above them: a form of light; the head round and greenish; the body long,

red, and with a focus of yet redder brilliancy about the midst. A

buzzing hoot accompanied its passage; it flew direct out of one marae,

and direct for another down the mountain side. And this, as my informant

argued, is suggestive. For why should a mere meteor frequent the altars

of abominable gods? The horses, I should say, were equally dismayed with

their riders. Now I am not dismayed at all—not even agreeably. Give me

rather the bird upon the house-top and the morning blood-gouts on the

wall.

But the dead are not exclusive in their diet. They carry with them to

the grave, in particular, the Polynesian taste for fish, and enter at

times with the living into a partnership in fishery. Rua-a-mariterangi

is again my authority; I feel it diminishes the credit of the fact, but

how it builds up the image of this inveterate ghost-seer! He belongs to

the miserably poor island of Taenga, yet his father’s house was always

well supplied. As Rua grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with

this fortunate parent. They rowed the lagoon at dusk, to an unlikely

place, and the lay down in the stern, and the father began vainly to cast

his line over the bows. It is to be supposed that Rua slept; and when he

awoke there was the figure of another beside his father, and his father

was pulling in the fish hand over hand. ‘Who is that man, father?’ Rua

asked. ‘It is none of your business,’ said the father; and Rua supposed

the stranger had swum off to them from shore. Night after night they

fared into the lagoon, often to the most unlikely places; night after

night the stranger would suddenly be seen on board, and as suddenly be

missed; and morning after morning the canoe returned laden with fish.

‘My father is a very lucky man,’ thought Rua. At last, one fine day,

there came first one boat party and then another, who must be

entertained; father and son put off later than usual into the lagoon; and

before the canoe was landed it was four o’clock, and the morning star was

close on the horizon. Then the stranger appeared seized with some

distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which was

that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east, set the

tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a strange,

shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan—a thing to freeze the

blood; and, the day-star just rising from the sea, he suddenly was not.

Then Rua understood why his father prospered, why his fishes rotted early

in the day, and why some were always carried to the cemetery and laid

upon the graves. My informant is a man not certainly averse to

superstition, but he keeps his head, and takes a certain superior

interest, which I may be allowed to call scientific. The last point

reminding him of some parallel practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the

fish were left, or carried home again after a formal dedication. It

appears old Mariterangi practised both methods; sometimes treating his

shadowy partner to a mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish

to rot upon the grave.

It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the

Polynesian _varua ino_ or _aitu o le vao_ is clearly the near kinsman of

the Transylvanian vampire. Here is a tale in which the kinship appears

broadly marked. On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a

certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives. He died, he

was buried; and his late neighbours had scarce tasted the delights of

licence ere his ghost appeared about the village. Fear seized upon all;

a council was held of the chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval

of the Rarotongan missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in

the presence of several whites—my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one—the grave

was opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred face

down. The still recent staking of suicides in England and the

decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close parallels.

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late

war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought

back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why) was

insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death.

When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and

chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long

centred and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came

carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place

of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground;

and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If

any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third

coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried

home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The rite was

practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its

object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed

all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied

were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country

of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion

doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my

Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of the ignorant.

This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps explains

a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our

European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the first they made their

cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves;

and the watchers of royal sepulchres dwelt with their children among the

bones of generations. The mummy, even in the making, was as little

feared. In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the

household with continual unction and exposure to the sun; in the

Carolines, upon the farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the

family hearth. Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in

Samoa. And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter,

cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night, the

head of her dead husband. In all these cases we may suppose the process,

whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully exorcised the aitu.

But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure. Here the man is duly buried,

and he has to be watched. He is duly watched, and the spirit goes abroad

in spite of watches. Indeed, it is not the purpose of the vigils to

prevent these wanderings; only to mollify by polite attention the

inveterate malignity of the dead. Neglect (it is supposed) may irritate

and thus invite his visits, and the aged and weakly sometimes balance

risks and stay at home. Observe, it is the dead man’s kindred and next

friends who thus deprecate his fury with nocturnal watchings. Even the

placatory vigil is held perilous, except in company, and a boy was

pointed out to me in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own

father. Not the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect

the issue. A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was

beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the less his

spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the neighbourhood

of Government House was still avoided after dark. We may sum up the

cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires, and the vampire spares

none. And here we come face to face with a tempting inconsistency. For

the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I understood them to wait

upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that the medium was always of

the race of the communicating spirit. Here, then, we have the bonds of

the family, on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other,

helpfully persisting.

The child’s soul in the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves. It is the

spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty. When they are slain, the

house is stained with blood. Rua’s dead fisherman was decomposed; so—and

horribly—was his arboreal demon. The spirit, then, is a thing material;

and it is by the material ensigns of corruption that he is distinguished

from the living man. This opinion is widespread, adds a gross terror to

the more ugly Polynesian tales, and sometimes defaces the more engaging

with a painful and incongruous touch. I will give two examples

sufficiently wide apart, one from Tahiti, one from Samoa.

And first from Tahiti. A man went to visit the husband of his sister,

then some time dead. In her life the sister had been dainty in the

island fashion, and went always adorned with a coronet of flowers. In

the midst of the night the brother awoke and was aware of a heavenly

fragrance going to and fro in the dark house. The lamp I must suppose to

have burned out; no Tahitian would have lain down without one lighted. A

while he lay wondering and delighted; then called upon the rest. ‘Do

none of you smell flowers?’ he asked. ‘O,’ said his brother-in-law, ‘we

are used to that here.’ The next morning these two men went walking, and

the widower confessed that his dead wife came about the house

continually, and that he had even seen her. She was shaped and dressed

and crowned with flowers as in her lifetime; only she moved a few inches

above the earth with a very easy progress, and flitted dryshod above the

surface of the river. And now comes my point: It was always in a back

view that she appeared; and these brothers-in-law, debating the affair,

agreed that this was to conceal the inroads of corruption.

Now for the Samoan story. I owe it to the kindness of Dr. F. Otto

Sierich, whose collection of folk-tales I expect with a high degree of

interest. A man in Manu’a was married to two wives and had no issue. He

went to Savaii, married there a third, and was more fortunate. When his

wife was near her time he remembered he was in a strange island, like a

poor man; and when his child was born he must be shamed for lack of

gifts. It was in vain his wife dissuaded him. He returned to his father

in Manu’a seeking help; and with what he could get he set off in the

night to re-embark. Now his wives heard of his coming; they were

incensed that he did not stay to visit them; and on the beach, by his

canoe, intercepted and slew him. Now the third wife lay asleep in

Savaii;—her babe was born and slept by her side; and she was awakened by

the spirit of her husband. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘my father is sick in

Manu’a and we must go to visit him.’ ‘It is well,’ said she; ‘take you

the child, while I carry its mats.’ ‘I cannot carry the child,’ said the

spirit; ‘I am too cold from the sea.’ When they were got on board the

canoe the wife smelt carrion. ‘How is this?’ she said. ‘What have you

in the canoe that I should smell carrion?’ ‘It is nothing in the canoe,’

said the spirit. ‘It is the land-wind blowing down the mountains, where

some beast lies dead.’ It appears it was still night when they reached

Manu’a—the swiftest passage on record—and as they entered the reef the

bale-fires burned in the village. Again she asked him to carry the

child; but now he need no more dissemble. ‘I cannot carry your child,’

said he, ‘for I am dead, and the fires you see are burning for my

funeral.’

The curious may learn in Dr. Sierich’s book the unexpected sequel of the

tale. Here is enough for my purpose. Though the man was but new dead,

the ghost was already putrefied, as though putrefaction were the mark and

of the essence of a spirit. The vigil on the Paumotuan grave does not

extend beyond two weeks, and they told me this period was thought to

coincide with that of the resolution of the body. The ghost always

marked with decay—the danger seemingly ending with the process of

dissolution—here is tempting matter for the theorist. But it will not

do. The lady of the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still

supposed to bear the brand of perishability. The Resident had been more

than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still supposed to go the

rounds.