Of the lost state of the dead, from the _In the South Seas Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises on the Yacht "Casco" (1888) and the Schooner "Equator" (1889)

infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the various

submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float idle, or resume

the occupations of their life on earth, it would be wearisome to tell.

One story I give, for it is singular in itself, is well-known in Tahiti,

and has this of interest, that it is post-Christian, dating indeed from

but a few years back. A princess of the reigning house died; was

transported to the neighbouring isle of Raiatea; fell there under the

empire of a spirit who condemned her to climb coco-palms all day and

bring him the nuts; was found after some time in this miserable servitude

by a second spirit, one of her own house; and by him, upon her

lamentations, reconveyed to Tahiti, where she found her body still waked,

but already swollen with the approaches of corruption. It is a lively

point in the tale that, on the sight of this dishonoured tabernacle, the

princess prayed she might continue to be numbered with the dead. But it

seems it was too late, her spirit was replaced by the least dignified of

entrances, and her startled family beheld the body move. The seemingly

purgatorial labours, the helpful kindred spirit, and the horror of the

princess at the sight of her tainted body, are all points to be remarked.

The truth is, the tales are not necessarily consistent in themselves; and

they are further darkened for the stranger by an ambiguity of language.

Ghosts, vampires, spirits, and gods are all confounded. And yet I seem

to perceive that (with exceptions) those whom we would count gods were

less maleficent. Permanent spirits haunt and do murder in corners of

Samoa; but those legitimate gods of Upolu and Savaii, whose wars and

cricketings of late convulsed society, I did not gather to be dreaded, or

not with a like fear. The spirit of Aana that ate souls is certainly a

fearsome inmate; but the high gods, even of the archipelago, seem

helpful. Mahinui—from whom our convict-catechist had been named—the

spirit of the sea, like a Proteus endowed with endless avatars, came to

the assistance of the shipwrecked and carried them ashore in the guise of

a ray fish. The same divinity bore priests from isle to isle about the

archipelago, and by his aid, within the century, persons have been seen

to fly. The tutelar deity of each isle is likewise helpful, and by a

particular form of wedge-shaped cloud on the horizon announces the coming

of a ship.

To one who conceives of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with

sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there

are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with

long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the

first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are

known to be healthy and harmless living people, dwellers of an

underworld; and the same fancy is current in Tahiti, where also they have

the hair red. _Tetea_ is the Tahitian name; the Paumotuan, _Mokurea_.

PART III: THE GILBERTS

CHAPTER I—BUTARITARI

At Honolulu we had said farewell to the _Casco_ and to Captain Otis, and

our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for

myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy

trading schooner, the _Equator_, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain

bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the

garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a fair wind for

Micronesia.

The whole extent of the South Seas is a desert of ships; more especially

that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in these islands;

communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one

thing, where you shall be able to arrive another. It was my hope, for

instance, to have reached the Carolines, and returned to the light of day

by way of Manila and the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were

destined to re-appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of

mountains. Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had

intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary

cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings upon

unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins; I had

learned to welcome shark’s flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion,

an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long lost to sense and dear to

aspiration.

The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near the

line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb ocean climate,

days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness.

Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava, measuring perhaps (at the widest)

a quarter of a mile from beach to beach. In both, a coarse kind of

_taro_ thrives; its culture is a chief business of the natives, and the

consequent mounds and ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye.

In all else they show the customary features of an atoll: the low

horizon, the expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the

sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and interest

of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points like life on

shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken for granted; and the

islanders, like the ship’s crew, become soon the centre of attention.

The isles are populous, independent, seats of kinglets, recently

civilised, little visited. In the last decade many changes have crept

in; women no longer go unclothed till marriage; the widow no longer

sleeps at night and goes abroad by day with the skull of her dead

husband; and, fire-arms being introduced, the spear and the shark-tooth

sword are sold for curiosities. Ten years ago all these things and

practices were to be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old society

will have entirely vanished. We came in a happy moment to see its

institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed.

Populous and independent—warrens of men, ruled over with some rustic

pomp—such was the first and still the recurring impression of these tiny

lands. As we stood across the lagoon for the town of Butaritari, a

stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with the brown roofs of

houses; those of the palace and king’s summer parlour (which are of

corrugated iron) glittered near one end conspicuously bright; the royal

colours flew hard by on a tall flagstaff; in front, on an artificial

islet, the gaol played the part of a martello. Even upon this first and

distant view, the place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a

village; rather of that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city

rustic and yet royal.

The lagoon is shoal. The tide being out, we waded for some quarter of a

mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a flagrant

stagnancy of sun and heat. The lee side of a line island after noon is

indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the trade will be still

blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon it will be blowing also,

speeding the canoes; but the screen of bush completely intercepts it from

the shore, and sleep and silence and companies of mosquitoes brood upon

the towns.

We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise. A few

inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed. As

we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to explore a

city of the dead. Only, between the posts of open houses, we could see

the townsfolk stretched in the siesta, sometimes a family together veiled

in a mosquito-net, sometimes a single sleeper on a platform like a corpse

on a bier.

The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of

churches. Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they could

scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when the toys are

mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds;

some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled and the walls

pierced with little windows. A few were perched on piles in the lagoon;

the rest stood at random on a green, through which the roadway made a

ribbon of sand, or along the embankments of a sheet of water like a

shallow dock. One and all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree

wood and palm-tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no

hammer sounded, in their building, and they were held together by

lashings of palm-tree sinnet.

In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island, a

lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of framing

sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the street shows in

a vista. The proportions of the place, in such surroundings, and built

of such materials, appeared august; and we threaded the nave with a

sentiment befitting visitors in a cathedral. Benches run along either

side. In the midst, on a crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king

and queen when they shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop,

apparently from a hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the

hoop (which hangs askew) is dressed with streamers of the same material,

red and white.

This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and presently we

stood before its seat and centre. The palace is built of imported wood

upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron, the yard enclosed with

walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of lych-house. It cannot be called

spacious; a labourer in the States is sometimes more commodiously lodged;

but when we had the chance to see it within, we found it was enriched

(beyond all island expectation) with coloured advertisements and cuts

from the illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the treasures

of the crown stand public: a bell of a good magnitude, two pieces of

cannon, and a single shell. The bell cannot be rung nor the guns fired;

they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade of the

royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square. A straight

gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace door; the containing

quay-walls excellently built of coral; over against the mouth, by what

seems an effect of landscape art, the martello-like islet of the gaol

breaks the lagoon. Vassal chiefs with tribute, neighbour monarchs come

a-roving, might here sail in, view with surprise these extensive public

works, and be awed by these mouths of silent cannon. It was impossible

to see the place and not to fancy it designed for pageantry. But the

elaborate theatre then stood empty; the royal house deserted, its doors

and windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence.

On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient

gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on the

lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing moving.

The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a parapet.

At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands into an oblong

peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and summer parlour of the

king. The midst is occupied by an open house or permanent marquee—called

here a maniapa, or, as the word is now pronounced, a maniap’—at the

lowest estimation forty feet by sixty. The iron roof, lofty but

exceedingly low-browed, so that a woman must stoop to enter, is supported

externally on pillars of coral, within by a frame of wood. The floor is

of broken coral, divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the

house far enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and

disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen to

glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.

It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when we

had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright shed, we

were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful people, some

twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of Butaritari. The court

ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled. Half a

dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the

armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed

house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved, upon

examination, to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon

some mats, lolled Tebureimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the

house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which

sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body

overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull: he seemed at

once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension: a pepper

rajah muddled with opium, and listening for the march of a Dutch army,

looks perhaps not otherwise. We were to grow better acquainted, and

first and last I had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet

always to hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is

no doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.

The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming. But the queen,

who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible; and there was

present an interpreter so willing that his volubility became at last the

cause of our departure. He had greeted us upon our entrance:—‘That is

the honourable King, and I am his interpreter,’ he had said, with more

stateliness than truth. For he held no appointment in the court, seemed

extremely ill-acquainted with the island language, and was present, like

ourselves, upon a visit of civility. Mr. Williams was his name: an

American darkey, runaway ship’s cook, and bar-keeper at _The Land we Live

in_ tavern, Butaritari. I never knew a man who had more words in his

command or less truth to communicate; neither the gloom of the monarch,

nor my own efforts to be distant, could in the least abash him; and when

the scene closed, the darkey was left talking.

The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch

itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence. So much the more vivid

was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the islet, the

Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his unmelodious David, Mr.

Williams, chattering through the drowsy hours.

CHAPTER II—THE FOUR BROTHERS

The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little Makin;

some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-independent

chieftains do him qualified homage. The importance of the office is

measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be absolute; and both

extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents.

On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa’s father, Nakaeia, the

eldest son, succeeded. He was a fellow of huge physical strength,

masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some intelligence

of men and business. Alone in his islands, it was he who dealt and

profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and his subjects toiled

for his behoof in servitude. When they wrought long and well their

taskmaster declared a holiday, and supplied and shared a general debauch.

The scale of his providing was at times magnificent; six hundred dollars’

worth of gin and brandy was set forth at once; the narrow land resounded

with the noise of revelry: and it was a common thing to see the subjects

(staggering themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the fore-hatch

of a wrecked vessel, king and commons howling and singing as they went.

At a word from Nakaeia’s mouth the revel ended; Makin became once more an

isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all the population

must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot

eye.

The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity of justice was

affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it seems

there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and midnight

murder were the forms of process. The king himself would play the

executioner: and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help and

countenance of none but his own wives. These were his oarswomen; one

that caught a crab, he slew incontinently with the tiller; thus

disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance,

which he would then execute alone and return well-pleased with his

connubial crew. The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to

conceive. Beasts of draught, and driven by the fear of death, they were

yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign’s life; they were still wives

and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold their faces.

They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those

boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of Nakaeia

the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which commanded the

enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper

with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing

palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same

moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the

involuntary criminal. But during the remainder of that reign he must

lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted

him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms, accessories

to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of wifely

purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise. And

yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia’s well-guarded harem. He was at

that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a pleasure-house,

lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one day he summoned a

new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him; that is to say (I

presume), that he was married to her sister, for the husband of an elder

sister has the call of the cadets. She would be arrayed for the

occasion; she would come scented, garlanded, decked with fine mats and

family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed; for death, as she

well knew. ‘Tell me the man’s name, and I will spare you,’ said Nakaeia.

But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover and the

queens strangled her between the mats.

Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds that

smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice;

his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the

firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed and

kept at arm’s-length, give him the name (in the canonical South Sea

phrase) of ‘a perfect gentleman when sober.’

When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his

next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and warned

him he was too weak to reign. The warning was taken to heart, and for

some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia’s. Nanteitei

dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a

leather mail-bag. To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence;

you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike

remained unanswered.

The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for the

royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief means of

buttressing the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself;

Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for instance, Messrs.

Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the town. The

masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and waded there

like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin

till they had finished, lest by chance he should look down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some time

already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari—Maka and

Kanoa, two brave childlike men. Nakaeia would none of their doctrine; he

was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some affection

for their persons. In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with

his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife

them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not only

spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled)

with some expressions of respect. Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more

completely under the spell. Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in his

own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the king

which soon grew paramount. Nanteitei, with the royal house, was publicly

converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries disavow, the

harem was at once reduced. It was a compendious act. The throne was

thus impoverished, its influence shaken, the queen’s relatives mortified,

and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions) cast in a body on the

market. I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was

successively married to two of these _impromptu_ widows, and successively

divorced by both for misconduct. That two great and rich ladies (for

both of these were rich) should have married ‘a man from another island’

marks the dissolution of society. The laws besides were wholly

remodelled, not always for the better. I love Maka as a man; as a

legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime, stern to

repress innocent pleasures.

War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei

died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne,

and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave in

body and feeble of character, that the storm burst. The rule of the high

chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain and perhaps alternated

with monarchy. The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit

with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king’s chief

superiority is a form of closure—‘The Speaking is over.’ After the long

monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were

doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question

jealous of the influence of Maka. Calumny, or rather caricature, was

called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to

have said in church that the king was the first man in the island and

himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront, the chiefs broke

into rebellion and armed gatherings. In the space of one forenoon the

throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the dust. The king sat in the maniap’

before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by his side, both

anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the north entry of

the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the succours as they came.

They came singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about

his neck. ‘Where are you going?’ asked the chief. ‘The king called us,’

they would reply. ‘Here is your place. Sit down,’ returned the chief.

With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient force being thus

got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was summoned and surrendered.

About this period, in almost every part of the group, the kings were

murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the last hangs to this day in

the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition. Nabakatokia was

more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he

was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public

speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons

had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the king, denied

the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell

not only in disconsideration but in debt.

He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one

regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This was by

repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers, he had issue,

a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in

the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help;

and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.

Nontemat’, _Mr. Corpse_, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned it

well. Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded

houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered

families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia _redux_. He came,

summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he

proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and

the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the

name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man’s character was much commented on in the island,

and variously explained by opium and Christianity. To my eyes, there

seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency. Mr. Corpse was

afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men. Terror

of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second

disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of

bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering

others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a

reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of

accumulated hatreds, and his memory charged with images of violence and

blood, he capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and

sits among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice that

put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre

of a king.

A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my observation,

depicts him in his two capacities. A chief in Little Makin asked, in an

hour of lightness, ‘Who is Kaeia?’ A bird carried the saying; and

Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three. Mr.

Corpse was chairman; the second commissioner died before my arrival; the

third was yet alive and green, and presented so venerable an appearance

that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem. Mr. Corpse was troubled

with a scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in

such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the blow

(which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse than

awkward. ‘I will strike the blow,’ said the venerable Abou; and Mr.

Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise. The quarry was

decoyed into the bush; he was set to carrying a log; and while his arms

were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow. Justice being thus done,

the commission, in a childish horror, turned to flee. But their victim

recalled them to his side. ‘You need not run away now,’ he said. ‘You

have done this thing to me. Stay.’ He was some twenty minutes dying,

and his murderers sat with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare. All

the stages of a violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the

decomposing features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of

Mr. Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he has

some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery. I was never

more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the king’s thoughts; and

yet I had but the one sight of him at unawares. I had once an errand for

his ear. It was once more the hour of the siesta; but there were

loiterers abroad, and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of

the canal where Tebureimoa lay unguarded. We entered without ceremony,

being in some haste. He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in

his Gilbert Island Bible with compunction. On our sudden entrance the

unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the

floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having recognised his

visitors, sank again upon the mats. So Eglon looked on Ehud.

The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just; Nakaeia, the author

of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings; his tool

suffers daily death for his enforced complicity. Not the nature, but the

congruity of men’s deeds and circumstances damn and save them; and

Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed. At home, in a

quiet bystreet of a village, the man had been a worthy carpenter, and,

even bedevilled as he is, he shows some private virtues. He has no

lands, only the use of such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot

enrich himself in the old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of

his future, and he knows and uses it. Eleven foreign traders pay him a

patent of a hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at

the rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a shilling

for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total of three hundred

pounds a year. He had been some nine months on the throne: had bought

his wife a silk dress and hat, figure unknown, and himself a uniform at

three hundred dollars; had sent his brother’s photograph to be enlarged

in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced

that brother’s legacy of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket. An

affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy carpenter,

and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace. It is not

wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues; that Tebureimoa should have a

diversion filled me with surprise.

CHAPTER III—AROUND OUR HOUSE

When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and within

the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six foreign houses of

Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by Maka, the Hawaiian

missionary. Two San Francisco firms are here established, Messrs.

Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the first hard by the palace of

the mid town, the second at the north entry; each with a store and

bar-room. Our house was in the Wightman compound, betwixt the store and

bar, within a fenced enclosure. Across the road a few native houses

nestled in the margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose

solid, shutting out the breeze. A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in

behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens’ hands. Here,

when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when the tide was

low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and an endless series

of natives descended the pier stair, tailed across the sand in strings

and clusters, waded to the waist with the bags of copra, and loitered

backward to renew their charge. The mystery of the copra trade tormented

me, as I sat and watched the profits drip on the stair and the sands.

In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at night, the

folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the road: families

going up the island to make copra on their lands; women bound for the

bush to gather flowers against the evening toilet; and, twice a day, the

toddy-cutters, each with his knife and shell. In the first grey of the

morning, and again late in the afternoon, these would straggle past about

their tree-top business, strike off here and there into the bush, and

vanish from the face of the earth. At about the same hour, if the tide

be low in the lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the

island for a bath, and may enter close at their heels alleys of the palm

wood. Right in front, although the sun is not yet risen, the east is

already lighted with preparatory fires, and the huge accumulations of the

trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the coming day. The breeze is

in your face; overhead in the tops of the palms, its playthings, it

maintains a lively bustle; look where you will, above or below, there is

no human presence, only the earth and shaken forest. And right overhead

the song of an invisible singer breaks from the thick leaves; from

farther on a second tree-top answers; and beyond again, in the bosom of

the woods, a still more distant minstrel perches and sways and sings.

So, all round the isle, the toddy-cutters sit on high, and are rocked by

the trade, and have a view far to seaward, where they keep watch for

sails, and like huge birds utter their songs in the morning. They sing

with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and the

articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we anticipate

the chattering of fowls. And yet in a sense these songs also are but

chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred; few comprehend

them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was understood the cutters ‘prayed

to have good toddy, and sang of their old wars.’ The prayer is at least

answered; and when the foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a

beverage well ‘worthy of a grace.’ All forenoon you may return and

taste; it only sparkles, and sharpens, and grows to be a new drink, not

less delicious; but with the progress of the day the fermentation

quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it will be yeast for bread, in

two days more a devilish intoxicant, the counsellor of crime.

The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and

mustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets, all

stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty lip. The

hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise in a frizzled

bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese a pointed stick (used for a

comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls. The women from this bush of

hair look forth enticingly: the race cannot be compared with the Tahitian

for female beauty; I doubt even if the average be high; but some of the

prettiest girls, and one of the handsomest women I ever saw, were

Gilbertines. Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group, is

Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common wear, the

latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with flowers, fruit, and

ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the characteristic female

dress of the Gilberts no longer universal. The _ridi_ is its name: a

cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not

unlike tarry string: the lower edge not reaching the mid-thigh, the upper

adjusted so low upon the haunches that it seems to cling by accident. A

sneeze, you think, and the lady must surely be left destitute. ‘The

perilous, hairbreadth ridi’ was our word for it; and in the conflict that

rages over women’s dress it has the misfortune to please neither side,

the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it

unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that

must be her costume. In that and naked otherwise, she moves with an

incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of

Micronesia. Bundle her in a gown, the charm is fled, and she wriggles

like an Englishwoman.

Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous. The men broke out in

all the colours of the rainbow—or at least of the trade-room,—and both

men and women began to be adorned and scented with new flowers. A small

white blossom is the favourite, sometimes sown singly in a woman’s hair

like little stars, now composed in a thick wreath. With the night, the

crowd sometimes thickened in the road, and the padding and brushing of

bare feet became continuous; the promenades mostly grave, the silence

only interrupted by some giggling and scampering of girls; even the

children quiet. At nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral,

and the life of the town ceased. At four the next morning the signal is

repeated in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for

seven hours all must lie—I was about to say within doors, of a place

where doors, and even walls, are an exception—housed, at least, under

their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-nets.

Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send

abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the

police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house

like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope

in the night for misdemeanants. I used to hate their treacherous

presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked

nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat

him. But the rogue was privileged.

Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain cast

anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out. This was

owing to our position between the store and the bar—the _Sans Souci_, as

the last was called. Mr. Rick was not only Messrs. Wightman’s manager,

but consular agent for the States; Mrs. Rick was the only white woman on

the island, and one of the only two in the archipelago; their house

besides, with its cool verandahs, its bookshelves, its comfortable

furniture, could not be rivalled nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu. Every

one called in consequence, save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea

quarrel, hingeing on the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a

difference about poultry. Even these, if they did not appear upon the

north, would be presently visible to the southward, the _Sans Souci_

drawing them as with cords. In an island with a total population of

twelve white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem

superfluous: but every bullet has its billet, and the double

accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient by the

captains and the crews of ships: _The Land we Live in_ being tacitly

resigned to the forecastle, the _Sans Souci_ tacitly reserved for the

afterguard. So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding was my fear of

Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first; but in the other,

which was the club or rather the casino of the island, I regularly passed

my evenings. It was small, but neatly fitted, and at night (when the

lamp was lit) sparkled with glass and glowed with coloured pictures like

a theatre at Christmas. The pictures were advertisements, the glass

coarse enough, the carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that incongruous

isle, was of unbridled luxury and inestimable expense. Here songs were

sung, tales told, tricks performed, games played. The Ricks, ourselves,

Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and

perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats or by

the road on foot, made up the usual company. The traders, all bred to

the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business; ‘South Sea

Merchants’ is the title they prefer. ‘We are all sailors

here’—‘Merchants, if you please’—‘_South Sea_ Merchants,’—was a piece of

conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed to lose in savour. We

found them at all times simple, genial, gay, gallant, and obliging; and,

across some interval of time, recall with pleasure the traders of

Butaritari. There was one black sheep indeed. I tell of him here where

he lived, against my rule; for in this case I have no measure to

preserve, and the man is typical of a class of ruffians that once

disgraced the whole field of the South Seas, and still linger in the

rarely visited isles of Micronesia. He had the name on the beach of ‘a

perfect gentleman when sober,’ but I never saw him otherwise than drunk.

The few shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has singled out

with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of his original

baseness. He has been accused and acquitted of a treacherous murder; and

has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me to suppose him innocent.

His daughter is defaced by his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he

had intended to disfigure, and in the darkness of the night and the

frenzy of coco-brandy, fastened on the wrong victim. The wife has since

fled and harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands

from deaf ears her forcible restoration. The best of his business is to

make natives drink, and then advance the money for the fine upon a

lucrative mortgage. ‘Respect for whites’ is the man’s word: ‘What is the

matter with this island is the want of respect for whites.’ On his way

to Butaritari, while I was there, he spied his wife in the bush with

certain natives and made a dash to capture her; whereupon one of her

companions drew a knife and the husband retreated: ‘Do you call that

proper respect for whites?’ he cried. At an early stage of the

acquaintance we proved our respect for his kind of white by forbidding

him our enclosure under pain of death. Thenceforth he lingered often in

the neighbourhood with I knew not what sense of envy or design of

mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked

in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance,

he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite

inoffensive, on his English lips incredibly incongruous.

Our enclosure, round which this composite of degradations wandered, was

of some extent. In one corner was a trellis with a long table of rough

boards. Here the Fourth of July feast had been held not long before with

memorable consequences, yet to be set forth; here we took our meals; here

entertained to a dinner the king and notables of Makin. In the midst was

the house, with a verandah front and back, and three is rooms within. In

the verandah we slung our man-of-war hammocks, worked there by day, and

slept at night. Within were beds, chairs, a round table, a fine hanging

lamp, and portraits of the royal family of Hawaii. Queen Victoria proves

nothing; Kalakaua and Mrs. Bishop are diagnostic; and the truth is we

were the stealthy tenants of the parsonage. On the day of our arrival

Maka was away; faithless trustees unlocked his doors; and the dear

rigorous man, the sworn foe of liquor and tobacco, returned to find his

verandah littered with cigarettes and his parlour horrible with bottles.

He made but one condition—on the round table, which he used in the

celebration of the sacraments, he begged us to refrain from setting

liquor; in all else he bowed to the accomplished fact, refused rent,

retired across the way into a native house, and, plying in his boat, beat

the remotest quarters of the isle for provender. He found us pigs—I

could not fancy where—no other pigs were visible; he brought us fowls and

taro; when we gave our feast to the monarch and gentry, it was he who

supplied the wherewithal, he who superintended the cooking, he who asked

grace at table, and when the king’s health was proposed, he also started

the cheering with an English hip-hip-hip. There was never a more

fortunate conception; the heart of the fatted king exulted in his bosom

at the sound.

Take him for all in all, I have never known a more engaging creature than

this parson of Butaritari: his mirth, his kindness, his noble, friendly

feelings, brimmed from the man in speech and gesture. He loved to

exaggerate, to act and overact the momentary part, to exercise his lungs

and muscles, and to speak and laugh with his whole body. He had the

morning cheerfulness of birds and healthy children; and his humour was

infectious. We were next neighbours and met daily, yet our salutations

lasted minutes at a stretch—shaking hands, slapping shoulders, capering

like a pair of Merry-Andrews, laughing to split our sides upon some

pleasantry that would scarce raise a titter in an infant-school. It

might be five in the morning, the toddy-cutters just gone by, the road

empty, the shade of the island lying far on the lagoon: and the

ebullition cheered me for the day.

Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy—these jubilant

extremes could scarce be constantly maintained. He was besides long, and

lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and his Sabbath

countenance was even saturnine. On that day we made a procession to the

church, or (as I must always call it) the cathedral: Maka (a blot on the

hot landscape) in tall hat, black frock-coat, black trousers; under his

arm the hymn-book and the Bible; in his face, a reverent gravity:—beside

him Mary his wife, a quiet, wise, and handsome elderly lady, seriously

attired:—myself following with singular and moving thoughts. Long

before, to the sound of bells and streams and birds, through a green

Lothian glen, I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a minister in whose

house I lodged; and the likeness, and the difference, and the series of

years and deaths, profoundly touched me. In the great, dusky, palm-tree

cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty: the men on one side,

the women on the other, myself posted (for a privilege) amongst the

women, and the small missionary contingent gathered close around the

platform, we were lost in that round vault. The lessons were read

antiphonally, the flock was catechised, a blind youth repeated weekly a

long string of psalms, hymns were sung—I never heard worse singing,—and

the sermon followed. To say I understood nothing were untrue; there were

points that I learned to expect with certainty; the name of Honolulu,

that of Kalakaua, the word Cap’n-man-o’-wa’, the word ship, and a

description of a storm at sea, infallibly occurred; and I was not seldom

rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the bargain. The rest was

but sound to the ears, silence for the mind: a plain expanse of tedium,

rendered unbearable by heat, a hard chair, and the sight through the wide

doors of the more happy heathen on the green. Sleep breathed on my

joints and eyelids, sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim

cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they

groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear

a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom. In vain the

preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by name

particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant; and

at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my successful struggles

against sleep—and I hope they were successful—cheered the flight of time.

He, when he was not catching flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours,

gloated with a fixed, truculent eye upon the stages of my agony; and

once, when the service was drawing towards a close, he winked at me

across the church.

I write of the service with a smile; yet I was always there—always with

respect for Maka, always with admiration for his deep seriousness, his

burning energy, the fire of his roused eye, the sincere and various

accents of his voice. To see him weekly flogging a dead horse and

blowing a cold fire was a lesson in fortitude and constancy. It may be a

question whether if the mission were fully supported, and he was set free

from business avocations, more might not result; I think otherwise

myself; I think not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock, that rigour

which has once provoked a revolution, and which to-day, in a man so

lively and engaging, amazes the beholder. No song, no dance, no tobacco,

no liquor, no alleviative of life—only toil and church-going; so says a

voice from his face; and the face is the face of the Polynesian Esau, but

the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a different world. And a

Polynesian at the best makes a singular missionary in the Gilberts,

coming from a country recklessly unchaste to one conspicuously strict;

from a race hag-ridden with bogies to one comparatively bold against the

terrors of the dark. The thought was stamped one morning in my mind,

when I chanced to be abroad by moonlight, and saw all the town lightless,

but the lamp faithfully burning by the missionary’s bed. It requires no

law, no fire, and no scouting police, to withhold Maka and his countrymen

from wandering in the night unlighted.

CHAPTER IV—A TALE OF A TAPU

On the morrow of our arrival (Sunday, 14th July 1889) our photographers

were early stirring. Once more we traversed a silent town; many were yet

abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their open houses; there was no

sound of intercourse or business. In that hour before the shadows, the

quarter of the palace and canal seemed like a landing-place in the

_Arabian Nights_ or from the classic poets; here were the fit destination

of some ‘faery frigot,’ here some adventurous prince might step ashore

among new characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it

floated on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the

repository of the Grail. In such a scene, and at such an hour, the

impression received was not so much of foreign travel—rather of past

ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had crossed, as

centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by the same steps,

home and to-day. A few children followed us, mostly nude, all silent; in

the clear, weedy waters of the canal some silent damsels waded, baring

their brown thighs; and to one of the maniap’s before the palace gate we

were attracted by a low but stirring hum of speech.

The oval shed was full of men sitting cross-legged. The king was there

in striped pyjamas, his rear protected by four guards with Winchesters,

his air and bearing marked by unwonted spirit and decision; tumblers and

black bottles went the round; and the talk, throughout loud, was general

and animated. I was inclined at first to view this scene with suspicion.

But the hour appeared unsuitable for a carouse; drink was besides

forbidden equally by the law of the land and the canons of the church;

and while I was yet hesitating, the king’s rigorous attitude disposed of

my last doubt. We had come, thinking to photograph him surrounded by his

guards, and at the first word of the design his piety revolted. We were

reminded of the day—the Sabbath, in which thou shalt take no

photographs—and returned with a flea in our ear, bearing the rejected

camera.

At church, a little later, I was struck to find the throne unoccupied.

So nice a Sabbatarian might have found the means to be present; perhaps

my doubts revived; and before I got home they were transformed to

certainties. Tom, the bar-keeper of the _Sans Souci_, was in

conversation with two emissaries from the court. The ‘keen,’ they said,

wanted ‘din,’ failing which ‘perandi.’ {231} No din, was Tom’s reply,

and no perandi; but ‘pira’ if they pleased. It seems they had no use for

beer, and departed sorrowing.

‘Why, what is the meaning of all this?’ I asked. ‘Is the island on the

spree?’

Such was the fact. On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and the

king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu against

liquor. There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies to the

superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one can start

him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop. The tapu,

raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten days the town had

been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen it the afternoon before)

in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by the Old Men and his own

appetites, continued to maintain the liberty, to squander his savings on

liquor, and to join in and lead the debauch. The whites were the authors

of this crisis; it was upon their own proposal that the freedom had been

granted at the first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they

were doubtless pleased it should continue. That pleasure had now

sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded) unduly;

and it now began to be a question how it might conclude. Hence Tom’s

refusal. Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the moment, and it was

avowedly unavailing; the king’s foragers, denied by Tom at the _Sans

Souci_, would be supplied at _The Land we Live in_ by the gobbling Mr.

Williams.

The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I am

inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate. Yet the conduct of

drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our

populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers

and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole

townful—and I might rather say, by the whole polity—king, magistrates,

police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be

thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited,

lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable

number of whites have perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their own

misconduct; and the natives have displayed in at least one instance a

disposition to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing

but dumb bones. This last was the chief consideration against a sudden

closing of the bars; the bar-keepers stood in the immediate breach and

dealt direct with madmen; too surly a refusal might at any moment

precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for a massacre.

_Monday_, 15th.—At the same hour we returned to the same muniap’. Kümmel

(of all drinks) was served in tumblers; in the midst sat the crown

prince, a fatted youth, surrounded by fresh bottles and busily plying the

corkscrew; and king, chief, and commons showed the loose mouth, the

uncertain joints, and the blurred and animated eye of the early drinker.

It was plain we were impatiently expected; the king retired with alacrity

to dress, the guards were despatched after their uniforms; and we were

left to await the issue of these preparations with a shedful of tipsy

natives. The orgie had proceeded further than on Sunday. The day

promised to be of great heat; it was already sultry, the courtiers were

already fuddled; and still the kümmel continued to go round, and the

crown prince to play butler. Flemish freedom followed upon Flemish

excess; and a funny dog, a handsome fellow, gaily dressed, and with a

full turban of frizzed hair, delighted the company with a humorous

courtship of a lady in a manner not to be described. It was our

diversion, in this time of waiting, to observe the gathering of the

guards. They have European arms, European uniforms, and (to their

sorrow) European shoes. We saw one warrior (like Mars) in the article of

being armed; two men and a stalwart woman were scarce strong enough to

boot him; and after a single appearance on parade the army is crippled

for a week.

At last, the gates under the king’s house opened; the army issued, one

behind another, with guns and epaulettes; the colours stooped under the

gateway; majesty followed in his uniform bedizened with gold lace;

majesty’s wife came next in a hat and feathers, and an ample trained silk

gown; the royal imps succeeded; there stood the pageantry of Makin

marshalled on its chosen theatre. Dickens might have told how serious

they were; how tipsy; how the king melted and streamed under his cocked

hat; how he took station by the larger of his two cannons—austere,

majestic, but not truly vertical; how the troops huddled, and were

straightened out, and clubbed again; how they and their firelocks raked

at various inclinations like the masts of ships; and how an amateur

photographer reviewed, arrayed, and adjusted them, to see his

dispositions change before he reached the camera.

The business was funny to see; I do not know that it is graceful to laugh

at; and our report of these transactions was received on our return with

the shaking of grave heads.

The day had begun ill; eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at any

moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin. The

Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded on three

sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to contain over a

thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to the ships, in the

case of an alert, was a recourse not to be thought of. Our talk that

morning must have closely reproduced the talk in English garrisons before

the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt that any mischief was in prospect, the

sure belief that (should any come) there was nothing left but to go down

fighting, the half-amused, half-anxious attitude of mind in which we were

awaiting fresh developments.

The kümmel soon ran out; we were scarce returned before the king had

followed us in quest of more. Mr. Corpse was now divested of his more

awful attitude, the lawless bulk of him again encased in striped pyjamas;

a guardsman brought up the rear with his rifle at the trail: and his

majesty was further accompanied by a Rarotongan whalerman and the playful

courtier with the turban of frizzed hair. There was never a more lively

deputation. The whalerman was gapingly, tearfully tipsy: the courtier

walked on air; the king himself was even sportive. Seated in a chair in

the Ricks’ sitting-room, he bore the brunt of our prayers and menaces

unmoved. He was even rated, plied with historic instances, threatened

with the men-of-war, ordered to restore the tapu on the spot—and nothing

in the least affected him. It should be done to-morrow, he said; to-day

it was beyond his power, to-day he durst not. ‘Is that royal?’ cried

indignant Mr. Rick. No, it was not royal; had the king been of a royal

character we should ourselves have held a different language; and royal

or not, he had the best of the dispute. The terms indeed were hardly

equal; for the king was the only man who could restore the tapu, but the

Ricks were not the only people who sold drink. He had but to hold his

ground on the first question, and they were sure to weaken on the second.

A little struggle they still made for the fashion’s sake; and then one

exceedingly tipsy deputation departed, greatly rejoicing, a case of

brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow. The Rarotongan (whom I had

never seen before) wrung me by the hand like a man bound on a far voyage.

‘My dear frien’!’ he cried, ‘good-bye, my dear frien’!’—tears of kümmel

standing in his eyes; the king lurched as he went, the courtier ambled,—a

strange party of intoxicated children to be entrusted with that barrowful

of madness.

You could never say the town was quiet; all morning there was a ferment

in the air, an aimless movement and congregation of natives in the

street. But it was not before half-past one that a sudden hubbub of

voices called us from the house, to find the whole white colony already

gathered on the spot as by concerted signal. The _Sans Souci_ was

overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah thronged. From all these

throats an inarticulate babbling cry went up incessantly; it sounded like

the bleating of young lambs, but angrier. In the road his royal highness

(whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom;

on the top step, tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting to the

prince. Yet a while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous. Then

came a brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned, and was rejected;

the stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view, through the

disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their midst a fourth.

By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his knees, his face

concealed, he was wrenched from the verandah and whisked along the road

into the village, howling as he disappeared. Had his face been raised,

we should have seen it bloodied, and the blood was not his own. The

courtier with the turban of frizzed hair had paid the costs of this

disturbance with the lower part of one ear.

So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the

inhumane. Yet we looked round on serious faces and—a fact that spoke

volumes—Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar. Custom might go

elsewhere, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased, but Tom had had

enough of bar-keeping for that day. Indeed the event had hung on a hair.

A man had sought to draw a revolver—on what quarrel I could never learn,

and perhaps he himself could not have told; one shot, when the room was

so crowded, could scarce have failed to take effect; where many were

armed and all tipsy, it could scarce have failed to draw others; and the

woman who spied the weapon and the man who seized it may very well have

saved the white community.

The mob insensibly melted from the scene; and for the rest of the day our

neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in solitude. But the

tranquillity was only local; _din_ and_ perandi_ still flowed in other

quarters: and we had one more sight of Gilbert Island violence. In the

church, where we had wandered photographing, we were startled by a sudden

piercing outcry. The scene, looking forth from the doors of that great

hall of shadow, was unforgettable. The palms, the quaint and scattered

houses, the flag of the island streaming from its tall staff, glowed with

intolerable sunshine. In the midst two women rolled fighting on the

grass. The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished, because

the one was stripped to the _ridi_ and the other wore a holoku (sacque)

of some lively colour. The first was uppermost, her teeth locked in her

adversary’s face, shaking her like a dog; the other impotently fought and

scratched. So for a moment we saw them wallow and grapple there like

vermin; then the mob closed and shut them in.

It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore. But we

were travellers, folk that had come far in quest of the adventurous; on

the first sign of an adventure it would have been a singular

inconsistency to have withdrawn; and we sent on board instead for our

revolvers. Mindful of Taahauku, Mr. Rick, Mr. Osbourne, and Mrs.

Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public highway, and fired at

bottles to the admiration of the natives. Captain Reid of the _Equator_

stayed on shore with us to be at hand in case of trouble, and we retired

to bed at the accustomed hour, agreeably excited by the day’s events.

The night was exquisite, the silence enchanting; yet as I lay in my

hammock looking on the strong moonshine and the quiescent palms, one ugly

picture haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in

that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could

have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these

primeval weapons, the vision of man’s beastliness, of his ferality,

shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of

battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a

pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell

on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day’s work; the imagination

readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects, on the contrary,

whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms, as

the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling pell-mell and

hugger-mugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet

to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens

of our cities; I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through

Soho, and seen that which cured me of my dinner.

CHAPTER V—A TALE OF A TAPU—_continued_

_Tuesday_, _July_ 16.—It rained in the night, sudden and loud, in Gilbert

Island fashion. Before the day, the crowing of a cock aroused me and I

wandered in the compound and along the street. The squall was blown by,

the moon shone with incomparable lustre, the air lay dead as in a room,

and yet all the isle sounded as under a strong shower, the eaves thickly

pattering, the lofty palms dripping at larger intervals and with a louder

note. In this bold nocturnal light the interior of the houses lay

inscrutable, one lump of blackness, save when the moon glinted under the

roof, and made a belt of silver, and drew the slanting shadows of the

pillars on the floor. Nowhere in all the town was any lamp or ember; not

a creature stirred; I thought I was alone to be awake; but the police

were faithful to their duty; secretly vigilant, keeping account of time;

and a little later, the watchman struck slowly and repeatedly on the

cathedral bell; four o’clock, the warning signal. It seemed strange

that, in a town resigned to drunkenness and tumult, curfew and réveille

should still be sounded and still obeyed.

The day came, and brought little change. The place still lay silent; the

people slept, the town slept. Even the few who were awake, mostly women

and children, held their peace and kept within under the strong shadow of

the thatch, where you must stop and peer to see them. Through the

deserted streets, and past the sleeping houses, a deputation took its way

at an early hour to the palace; the king was suddenly awakened, and must

listen (probably with a headache) to unpalatable truths. Mrs. Rick,

being a sufficient mistress of that difficult tongue, was spokeswoman;

she explained to the sick monarch that I was an intimate personal friend

of Queen Victoria’s; that immediately on my return I should make her a

report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again

invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make reprisals.

It was scarce the fact—rather a just and necessary parable of the fact,

corrected for latitude; and it certainly told upon the king. He was much

affected; he had conceived the notion (he said) that I was a man of some

importance, but not dreamed it was as bad as this; and the missionary

house was tapu’d under a fine of fifty dollars.

So much was announced on the return of the deputation; not any more; and

I gathered subsequently that much more had passed. The protection gained

was welcome. It had been the most annoying and not the least alarming

feature of the day before, that our house was periodically filled with

tipsy natives, twenty or thirty at a time, begging drink, fingering our

goods, hard to be dislodged, awkward to quarrel with. Queen Victoria’s

friend (who was soon promoted to be her son) was free from these

intrusions. Not only my house, but my neighbourhood as well, was left in

peace; even on our walks abroad we were guarded and prepared for; and,

like great persons visiting a hospital, saw only the fair side. For the

matter of a week we were thus suffered to go out and in and live in a

fool’s paradise, supposing the king to have kept his word, the tapu to be

revived and the island once more sober.

_Tuesday_, _July_ 23.—We dined under a bare trellis erected for the

Fourth of July; and here we used to linger by lamplight over coffee and

tobacco. In that climate evening approaches without sensible chill; the

wind dies out before sunset; heaven glows a while and fades, and darkens

into the blueness of the tropical night; swiftly and insensibly the

shadows thicken, the stars multiply their number; you look around you and

the day is gone. It was then that we would see our Chinaman draw near

across the compound in a lurching sphere of light, divided by his

shadows; and with the coming of the lamp the night closed about the

table. The faces of the company, the spars of the trellis, stood out

suddenly bright on a ground of blue and silver, faintly designed with

palm-tops and the peaked roofs of houses. Here and there the gloss upon

a leaf, or the fracture of a stone, returned an isolated sparkle. All

else had vanished. We hung there, illuminated like a galaxy of stars _in

vacuo_; we sat, manifest and blind, amid the general ambush of the

darkness; and the islanders, passing with light footfalls and low voices

in the sand of the road, lingered to observe us, unseen.

On Tuesday the dusk had fallen, the lamp had just been brought, when a

missile struck the table with a rattling smack and rebounded past my ear.

Three inches to one side and this page had never been written; for the

thing travelled like a cannon ball. It was supposed at the time to be a

nut, though even at the time I thought it seemed a small one and fell

strangely.

_Wednesday_, _July_ 24.—The dusk had fallen once more, and the lamp been

just brought out, when the same business was repeated. And again the

missile whistled past my ear. One nut I had been willing to accept; a

second, I rejected utterly. A cocoa-nut does not come slinging along on

a windless evening, making an angle of about fifteen degrees with the

horizon; cocoa-nuts do not fall on successive nights at the same hour and

spot; in both cases, besides, a specific moment seemed to have been

chosen, that when the lamp was just carried out, a specific person

threatened, and that the head of the family. I may have been right or

wrong, but I believed I was the mark of some intimidation; believed the

missile was a stone, aimed not to hit, but to frighten.

No idea makes a man more angry. I ran into the road, where the natives

were as usual promenading in the dark; Maka joined me with a lantern; and

I ran from one to another, glared in quite innocent faces, put useless

questions, and proffered idle threats. Thence I carried my wrath (which

was worthy the son of any queen in history) to the Ricks. They heard me

with depression, assured me this trick of throwing a stone into a family

dinner was not new; that it meant mischief, and was of a piece with the

alarming disposition of the natives. And then the truth, so long

concealed from us, came out. The king had broken his promise, he had

defied the deputation; the tapu was still dormant, _The Land we Live in_

still selling drink, and that quarter of the town disturbed and menaced

by perpetual broils. But there was worse ahead: a feast was now

preparing for the birthday of the little princess; and the tributary

chiefs of Kuma and Little Makin were expected daily. Strong in a

following of numerous and somewhat savage clansmen, each of these was

believed, like a Douglas of old, to be of doubtful loyalty. Kuma (a

little pot-bellied fellow) never visited the palace, never entered the

town, but sat on the beach on a mat, his gun across his knees, parading

his mistrust and scorn; Karaiti of Makin, although he was more bold, was

not supposed to be more friendly; and not only were these vassals jealous

of the throne, but the followers on either side shared in the animosity.

Brawls had already taken place; blows had passed which might at any

moment be repaid in blood. Some of the strangers were already here and

already drinking; if the debauch continued after the bulk of them had

come, a collision, perhaps a revolution, was to be expected.

The sale of drink is in this group a measure of the jealousy of traders;

one begins, the others are constrained to follow; and to him who has the

most gin, and sells it the most recklessly, the lion’s share of copra is

assured. It is felt by all to be an extreme expedient, neither safe,

decent, nor dignified. A trader on Tarawa, heated by an eager rivalry,

brought many cases of gin. He told me he sat afterwards day and night in

his house till it was finished, not daring to arrest the sale, not

venturing to go forth, the bush all round him filled with howling

drunkards. At night, above all, when he was afraid to sleep, and heard

shots and voices about him in the darkness, his remorse was black.

‘My God!’ he reflected, ‘if I was to lose my life on such a wretched

business!’ Often and often, in the story of the Gilberts, this scene has

been repeated; and the remorseful trader sat beside his lamp, longing for

the day, listening with agony for the sound of murder, registering

resolutions for the future. For the business is easy to begin, but

hazardous to stop. The natives are in their way a just and law-abiding

people, mindful of their debts, docile to the voice of their own

institutions; when the tapu is re-enforced they will cease drinking; but

the white who seeks to antedate the movement by refusing liquor does so

at his peril.

Hence, in some degree, the anxiety and helplessness of Mr. Rick. He and

Tom, alarmed by the rabblement of the _Sans Souci_, had stopped the sale;

they had done so without danger, because _The Land we Live in_ still

continued selling; it was claimed, besides, that they had been the first

to begin. What step could be taken? Could Mr. Rick visit Mr. Muller

(with whom he was not on terms) and address him thus: ‘I was getting

ahead of you, now you are getting ahead of me, and I ask you to forego

your profit. I got my place closed in safety, thanks to your continuing;

but now I think you have continued long enough. I begin to be alarmed;

and because I am afraid I ask you to confront a certain danger’? It was

not to be thought of. Something else had to be found; and there was one

person at one end of the town who was at least not interested in copra.

There was little else to be said in favour of myself as an ambassador. I

had arrived in the Wightman schooner, I was living in the Wightman

compound, I was the daily associate of the Wightman coterie. It was

egregious enough that I should now intrude unasked in the private affairs

of Crawford’s agent, and press upon him the sacrifice of his interests

and the venture of his life. But bad as I might be, there was none

better; since the affair of the stone I was, besides, sharp-set to be

doing, the idea of a delicate interview attracted me, and I thought it

policy to show myself abroad.

The night was very dark. There was service in the church, and the

building glimmered through all its crevices like a dim Kirk Allowa’. I

saw few other lights, but was indistinctly aware of many people stirring

in the darkness, and a hum and sputter of low talk that sounded stealthy.

I believe (in the old phrase) my beard was sometimes on my shoulder as I

went. Muller’s was but partly lighted, and quite silent, and the gate

was fastened. I could by no means manage to undo the latch. No wonder,

since I found it afterwards to be four or five feet long—a fortification

in itself. As I still fumbled, a dog came on the inside and sniffed

suspiciously at my hands, so that I was reduced to calling ‘House ahoy!’

Mr. Muller came down and put his chin across the paling in the dark.

‘Who is that?’ said he, like one who has no mind to welcome strangers.

‘My name is Stevenson,’ said I.

‘O, Mr. Stevens! I didn’t know you. Come inside.’ We stepped into the

dark store, when I leaned upon the counter and he against the wall. All

the light came from the sleeping-room, where I saw his family being put

to bed; it struck full in my face, but Mr. Muller stood in shadow. No

doubt he expected what was Coming, and sought the advantage of position;

but for a man who wished to persuade and had nothing to conceal, mine was

the preferable.

‘Look here,’ I began, ‘I hear you are selling to the natives.’

‘Others have done that before me,’ he returned pointedly.

‘No doubt,’ said I, ‘and I have nothing to do with the past, but the

future. I want you to promise you will handle these spirits carefully.’

‘Now what is your motive in this?’ he asked, and then, with a sneer, ‘Are

you afraid of your life?’

‘That is nothing to the purpose,’ I replied. ‘I know, and you know,

these spirits ought not to be used at all.’

‘Tom and Mr. Rick have sold them before.’

‘I have nothing to do with Tom and Mr. Rick. All I know is I have heard

them both refuse.’

‘No, I suppose you have nothing to do with them. Then you are just

afraid of your life.’

‘Come now,’ I cried, being perhaps a little stung, ‘you know in your

heart I am asking a reasonable thing. I don’t ask you to lose your

profit—though I would prefer to see no spirits brought here, as you

would—’

‘I don’t say I wouldn’t. I didn’t begin this,’ he interjected.

‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ said I. ‘And I don’t ask you to lose; I

ask you to give me your word, man to man, that you will make no native

drunk.’

Up to now Mr. Muller had maintained an attitude very trying to my temper;

but he had maintained it with difficulty, his sentiment being all upon my

side; and here he changed ground for the worse. ‘It isn’t me that

sells,’ said he.

‘No, it’s that nigger,’ I agreed. ‘But he’s yours to buy and sell; you

have your hand on the nape of his neck; and I ask you—I have my wife

here—to use the authority you have.’

He hastily returned to his old ward. ‘I don’t deny I could if I wanted,’

said he. ‘But there’s no danger, the natives are all quiet. You’re just

afraid of your life.’

I do not like to be called a coward, even by implication; and here I lost

my temper and propounded an untimely ultimatum. ‘You had better put it

plain,’ I cried. ‘Do you mean to refuse me what I ask?’

‘I don’t want either to refuse it or grant it,’ he replied.

‘You’ll find you have to do the one thing or the other, and right now!’ I

cried, and then, striking into a happier vein, ‘Come,’ said I, ‘you’re a

better sort than that. I see what’s wrong with you—you think I came from

the opposite camp. I see the sort of man you are, and you know that what

I ask is right.’

Again he changed ground. ‘If the natives get any drink, it isn’t safe to

stop them,’ he objected.

‘I’ll be answerable for the bar,’ I said. ‘We are three men and four

revolvers; we’ll come at a word, and hold the place against the village.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about; it’s too dangerous!’ he cried.

‘Look here,’ said I, ‘I don’t mind much about losing that life you talk

so much of; but I mean to lose it the way I want to, and that is, putting

a stop to all this beastliness.’

He talked a while about his duty to the firm; I minded not at all, I was

secure of victory. He was but waiting to capitulate, and looked about

for any potent to relieve the strain. In the gush of light from the

bedroom door I spied a cigar-holder on the desk. ‘That is well

coloured,’ said I.

‘Will you take a cigar?’ said he.

I took it and held it up unlighted. ‘Now,’ said I, ‘you promise me.’

‘I promise you you won’t have any trouble from natives that have drunk at

my place,’ he replied.

‘That is all I ask,’ said I, and showed it was not by immediately

offering to try his stock.

So far as it was anyway critical our interview here ended. Mr. Muller

had thenceforth ceased to regard me as an emissary from his rivals,

dropped his defensive attitude, and spoke as he believed. I could make

out that he would already, had he dared, have stopped the sale himself.

Not quite daring, it may be imagined how he resented the idea of

interference from those who had (by his own statement) first led him on,

then deserted him in the breach, and now (sitting themselves in safety)

egged him on to a new peril, which was all gain to them, all loss to him!

I asked him what he thought of the danger from the feast.

‘I think worse of it than any of you,’ he answered. ‘They were shooting

around here last night, and I heard the balls too. I said to myself,

“That’s bad.” What gets me is why you should be making this row up at

your end. I should be the first to go.’

It was a thoughtless wonder. The consolation of being second is not

great; the fact, not the order of going—there was our concern.

Scott talks moderately of looking forward to a time of fighting ‘with a

feeling that resembled pleasure.’ The resemblance seems rather an

identity. In modern life, contact is ended; man grows impatient of

endless manœuvres; and to approach the fact, to find ourselves where we

can push an advantage home, and stand a fair risk, and see at last what

we are made of, stirs the blood. It was so at least with all my family,

who bubbled with delight at the approach of trouble; and we sat deep into

the night like a pack of schoolboys, preparing the revolvers and

arranging plans against the morrow. It promised certainly to be a busy

and eventful day. The Old Men were to be summoned to confront me on the

question of the tapu; Muller might call us at any moment to garrison his

bar; and suppose Muller to fail, we decided in a family council to take

that matter into our own hands, _The Land we Live in_ at the pistol’s

mouth, and with the polysyllabic Williams, dance to a new tune. As I

recall our humour I think it would have gone hard with the mulatto.

_Wednesday_, _July_ 24.—It was as well, and yet it was disappointing that

these thunder-clouds rolled off in silence. Whether the Old Men recoiled

from an interview with Queen Victoria’s son, whether Muller had secretly

intervened, or whether the step flowed naturally from the fears of the

king and the nearness of the feast, the tapu was early that morning

re-enforced; not a day too soon, from the manner the boats began to

arrive thickly, and the town was filled with the big rowdy vassals of

Karaiti.

The effect lingered for some time on the minds of the traders; it was

with the approval of all present that I helped to draw up a petition to

the United States, praying for a law against the liquor trade in the

Gilberts; and it was at this request that I added, under my own name, a

brief testimony of what had passed;—useless pains; since the whole

reposes, probably unread and possibly unopened, in a pigeon-hole at

Washington.

_Sunday_, _July_ 28.—This day we had the afterpiece of the debauch. The

king and queen, in European clothes, and followed by armed guards,

attended church for the first time, and sat perched aloft in a precarious

dignity under the barrel-hoops. Before sermon his majesty clambered from

the dais, stood lopsidedly upon the gravel floor, and in a few words

abjured drinking. The queen followed suit with a yet briefer allocution.

All the men in church were next addressed in turn; each held up his right

hand, and the affair was over—throne and church were reconciled.

CHAPTER VI—THE FIVE DAYS’ FESTIVAL

_Thursday_, _July_ 25.—The street was this day much enlivened by the

presence of the men from Little Makin; they average taller than

Butaritarians, and being on a holiday, went wreathed with yellow leaves

and gorgeous in vivid colours. They are said to be more savage, and to

be proud of the distinction. Indeed, it seemed to us they swaggered in

the town, like plaided Highlanders upon the streets of Inverness,

conscious of barbaric virtues.

In the afternoon the summer parlour was observed to be packed with

people; others standing outside and stooping to peer under the eaves,

like children at home about a circus. It was the Makin company,

rehearsing for the day of competition. Karaiti sat in the front row

close to the singers, where we were summoned (I suppose in honour of

Queen Victoria) to join him. A strong breathless heat reigned under the

iron roof, and the air was heavy with the scent of wreaths. The singers,

with fine mats about their loins, cocoa-nut feathers set in rings upon

their fingers, and their heads crowned with yellow leaves, sat on the

floor by companies. A varying number of soloists stood up for different

songs; and these bore the chief part in the music. But the full force of

the companies, even when not singing, contributed continuously to the

effect, and marked the ictus of the measure, mimicking, grimacing,

casting up their heads and eyes, fluttering the feathers on their

fingers, clapping hands, or beating (loud as a kettledrum) on the left

breast; the time was exquisite, the music barbarous, but full of

conscious art. I noted some devices constantly employed. A sudden

change would be introduced (I think of key) with no break of the measure,

but emphasised by a sudden dramatic heightening of the voice and a

swinging, general gesticulation. The voices of the soloists would begin

far apart in a rude discord, and gradually draw together to a unison;

which, when, they had reached, they were joined and drowned by the full

chorus. The ordinary, hurried, barking unmelodious movement of the

voices would at times be broken and glorified by a psalm-like strain of

melody, often well constructed, or seeming so by contrast. There was

much variety of measure, and towards the end of each piece, when the fun

became fast and furious, a recourse to this figure—

[Picture: Music. It means two/four time with quaver, quaver, crotchet

repeated for three bars]

It is difficult to conceive what fire and devilry they get into these

hammering finales; all go together, voices, hands, eyes, leaves, and

fluttering finger-rings; the chorus swings to the eye, the song throbs on

the ear; the faces are convulsed with enthusiasm and effort.

Presently the troop stood up in a body, the drums forming a half-circle

for the soloists, who were sometimes five or even more in number. The

songs that followed were highly dramatic; though I had none to give me

any explanation, I would at times make out some shadowy but decisive

outline of a plot; and I was continually reminded of certain quarrelsome

concerted scenes in grand operas at home; just so the single voices issue

from and fall again into the general volume; just so do the performers

separate and crowd together, brandish the raised hand, and roll the eye

to heaven—or the gallery. Already this is beyond the Thespian model; the

art of this people is already past the embryo: song, dance, drums,

quartette and solo—it is the drama full developed although still in

miniature. Of all so-called dancing in the South Seas, that which I saw

in Butaritari stands easily the first. The _hula_, as it may be viewed

by the speedy globe-trotter in Honolulu, is surely the most dull of man’s

inventions, and the spectator yawns under its length as at a college

lecture or a parliamentary debate. But the Gilbert Island dance leads on

the mind; it thrills, rouses, subjugates; it has the essence of all art,

an unexplored imminent significance. Where so many are engaged, and

where all must make (at a given moment) the same swift, elaborate, and

often arbitrary movement, the toil of rehearsal is of course extreme.

But they begin as children. A child and a man may often be seen together

in a maniap’: the man sings and gesticulates, the child stands before him

with streaming tears and tremulously copies him in act and sound; it is

the Gilbert Island artist learning (as all artists must) his art in

sorrow.

I may seem to praise too much; here is a passage from my wife’s diary,

which proves that I was not alone in being moved, and completes the

picture:—‘The conductor gave the cue, and all the dancers, waving their

arms, swaying their bodies, and clapping their breasts in perfect time,

opened with an introductory. The performers remained seated, except two,

and once three, and twice a single soloist. These stood in the group,

making a slight movement with the feet and rhythmical quiver of the body

as they sang. There was a pause after the introductory, and then the

real business of the opera—for it was no less—began; an opera where every

singer was an accomplished actor. The leading man, in an impassioned

ecstasy which possessed him from head to foot, seemed transfigured; once

it was as though a strong wind had swept over the stage—their arms, their

feathered fingers thrilling with an emotion that shook my nerves as well:

heads and bodies followed like a field of grain before a gust. My blood

came hot and cold, tears pricked my eyes, my head whirled, I felt an

almost irresistible impulse to join the dancers. One drama, I think, I

very nearly understood. A fierce and savage old man took the solo part.

He sang of the birth of a prince, and how he was tenderly rocked in his

mother’s arms; of his boyhood, when he excelled his fellows in swimming,

climbing, and all athletic sports; of his youth, when he went out to sea

with his boat and fished; of his manhood, when he married a wife who

cradled a son of his own in her arms. Then came the alarm of war, and a

great battle, of which for a time the issue was doubtful; but the hero

conquered, as he always does, and with a tremendous burst of the victors

the piece closed. There were also comic pieces, which caused great

amusement. During one, an old man behind me clutched me by the arm,

shook his finger in my face with a roguish smile, and said something with

a chuckle, which I took to be the equivalent of “O, you women, you women;

it is true of you all!” I fear it was not complimentary. At no time was

there the least sign of the ugly indecency of the eastern islands. All

was poetry pure and simple. The music itself was as complex as our own,

though constructed on an entirely different basis; once or twice I was

startled by a bit of something very like the best English sacred music,

but it was only for an instant. At last there was a longer pause, and

this time the dancers were all on their feet. As the drama went on, the

interest grew. The performers appealed to each other, to the audience,

to the heaven above; they took counsel with each other, the conspirators

drew together in a knot; it was just an opera, the drums coming in at

proper intervals, the tenor, baritone, and bass all where they should

be—except that the voices were all of the same calibre. A woman once

sang from the back row with a very fine contralto voice spoilt by being

made artificially nasal; I notice all the women affect that

unpleasantness. At one time a boy of angelic beauty was the soloist; and

at another, a child of six or eight, doubtless an infant phenomenon being

trained, was placed in the centre. The little fellow was desperately

frightened and embarrassed at first, but towards the close warmed up to

his work and showed much dramatic talent. The changing expressions on

the faces of the dancers were so speaking, that it seemed a great

stupidity not to understand them.’

Our neighbour at this performance, Karaiti, somewhat favours his

Butaritarian majesty in shape and feature, being, like him, portly,

bearded, and Oriental. In character he seems the reverse: alert,

smiling, jovial, jocular, industrious. At home in his own island, he

labours himself like a slave, and makes his people labour like a

slave-driver. He takes an interest in ideas. George the trader told him

about flying-machines. ‘Is that true, George?’ he asked. ‘It is in the

papers,’ replied George. ‘Well,’ said Karaiti, ‘if that man can do it

with machinery, I can do it without’; and he designed and made a pair of

wings, strapped them on his shoulders, went to the end of a pier,

launched himself into space, and fell bulkily into the sea. His wives

fished him out, for his wings hindered him in swimming. ‘George,’ said

he, pausing as he went up to change, ‘George, you lie.’ He had eight

wives, for his small realm still follows ancient customs; but he showed

embarrassment when this was mentioned to my wife. ‘Tell her I have only

brought one here,’ he said anxiously. Altogether the Black Douglas

pleased us much; and as we heard fresh details of the king’s uneasiness,

and saw for ourselves that all the weapons in the summer parlour had been

hid, we watched with the more admiration the cause of all this anxiety

rolling on his big legs, with his big smiling face, apparently unarmed,

and certainly unattended, through the hostile town. The Red Douglas,

pot-bellied Kuma, having perhaps heard word of the debauch, remained upon

his fief; his vassals thus came uncommanded to the feast, and swelled the

following of Karaiti.

_Friday_, _July_ 26.—At night in the dark, the singers of Makin paraded

in the road before our house and sang the song of the princess. ‘This is

the day; she was born to-day; Nei Kamaunave was born to-day—a beautiful

princess, Queen of Butaritari.’ So I was told it went in endless

iteration. The song was of course out of season, and the performance

only a rehearsal. But it was a serenade besides; a delicate attention to

ourselves from our new friend, Karaiti.

_Saturday_, _July_ 27.—We had announced a performance of the magic

lantern to-night in church; and this brought the king to visit us. In

honour of the Black Douglas (I suppose) his usual two guardsmen were now

increased to four; and the squad made an outlandish figure as they

straggled after him, in straw hats, kilts and jackets. Three carried

their arms reversed, the butts over their shoulders, the muzzles menacing

the king’s plump back; the fourth had passed his weapon behind his neck,

and held it there with arms extended like a backboard. The visit was

extraordinarily long. The king, no longer galvanised with gin, said and

did nothing. He sat collapsed in a chair and let a cigar go out. It was

hot, it was sleepy, it was cruel dull; there was no resource but to spy

in the countenance of Tebureimoa for some remaining trait of _Mr. Corpse_

the butcher. His hawk nose, crudely depressed and flattened at the

point, did truly seem to us to smell of midnight murder. When he took

his leave, Maka bade me observe him going down the stair (or rather

ladder) from the verandah. ‘Old man,’ said Maka. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and

yet I suppose not old man.’ ‘Young man,’ returned Maka, ‘perhaps fo’ty.’

And I have heard since he is most likely younger.

While the magic lantern was showing, I skulked without in the dark. The

voice of Maka, excitedly explaining the Scripture slides, seemed to fill

not the church only, but the neighbourhood. All else was silent.

Presently a distant sound of singing arose and approached; and a

procession drew near along the road, the hot clean smell of the men and

women striking in my face delightfully. At the corner, arrested by the

voice of Maka and the lightening and darkening of the church, they

paused. They had no mind to go nearer, that was plain. They were Makin

people, I believe, probably staunch heathens, contemners of the

missionary and his works. Of a sudden, however, a man broke from their

company, took to his heels, and fled into the church; next moment three

had followed him; the next it was a covey of near upon a score, all

pelting for their lives. So the little band of the heathen paused

irresolute at the corner, and melted before the attractions of a magic

lantern, like a glacier in spring. The more staunch vainly taunted the

deserters; three fled in a guilty silence, but still fled; and when at

length the leader found the wit or the authority to get his troop in

motion and revive the singing, it was with much diminished forces that

they passed musically on up the dark road.

Meanwhile inside the luminous pictures brightened and faded. I stood for

some while unobserved in the rear of the spectators, when I could hear

just in front of me a pair of lovers following the show with interest,

the male playing the part of interpreter and (like Adam) mingling

caresses with his lecture. The wild animals, a tiger in particular, and

that old school-treat favourite, the sleeper and the mouse, were hailed

with joy; but the chief marvel and delight was in the gospel series.

Maka, in the opinion of his aggrieved wife, did not properly rise to the

occasion. ‘What is the matter with the man? Why can’t he talk?’ she

cried. The matter with the man, I think, was the greatness of the

opportunity; he reeled under his good fortune; and whether he did ill or

well, the exposure of these pious ‘phantoms’ did as a matter of fact

silence in all that part of the island the voice of the scoffer. ‘Why

then,’ the word went round, ‘why then, the Bible is true!’ And on our

return afterwards we were told the impression was yet lively, and those

who had seen might be heard telling those who had not, ‘O yes, it is all

true; these things all happened, we have seen the pictures.’ The

argument is not so childish as it seems; for I doubt if these islanders

are acquainted with any other mode of representation but photography; so

that the picture of an event (on the old melodrama principle that ‘the

camera cannot lie, Joseph,’) would appear strong proof of its occurrence.

The fact amused us the more because our slides were some of them

ludicrously silly, and one (Christ before Pilate) was received with

shouts of merriment, in which even Maka was constrained to join.

_Sunday_, _July_ 28.—Karaiti came to ask for a repetition of the

‘phantoms’—this was the accepted word—and, having received a promise,

turned and left my humble roof without the shadow of a salutation. I

felt it impolite to have the least appearance of pocketing a slight; the

times had been too difficult, and were still too doubtful; and Queen

Victoria’s son was bound to maintain the honour of his house. Karaiti

was accordingly summoned that evening to the Ricks, where Mrs. Rick fell

foul of him in words, and Queen Victoria’s son assailed him with

indignant looks. I was the ass with the lion’s skin; I could not roar in

the language of the Gilbert Islands; but I could stare. Karaiti declared

he had meant no offence; apologised in a sound, hearty, gentlemanly

manner; and became at once at his ease. He had in a dagger to examine,

and announced he would come to price it on the morrow, to-day being

Sunday; this nicety in a heathen with eight wives surprised me. The

dagger was ‘good for killing fish,’ he said roguishly; and was supposed

to have his eye upon fish upon two legs. It is at least odd that in

Eastern Polynesia fish was the accepted euphemism for the human

sacrifice. Asked as to the population of his island, Karaiti called out

to his vassals who sat waiting him outside the door, and they put it at

four hundred and fifty; but (added Karaiti jovially) there will soon be

plenty more, for all the women are in the family way. Long before we

separated I had quite forgotten his offence. He, however, still bore it

in mind; and with a very courteous inspiration returned early on the next

day, paid us a long visit, and punctiliously said farewell when he

departed.

_Monday_, _July_ 29.—The great day came round at last. In the first

hours the night was startled by the sound of clapping hands and the chant

of Nei Kamaunava; its melancholy, slow, and somewhat menacing measures

broken at intervals by a formidable shout. The little morsel of humanity

thus celebrated in the dark hours was observed at midday playing on the

green entirely naked, and equally unobserved and unconcerned.

The summer parlour on its artificial islet, relieved against the

shimmering lagoon, and shimmering itself with sun and tinned iron, was

all day crowded about by eager men and women. Within, it was boxed full

of islanders, of any age and size, and in every degree of nudity and

finery. So close we squatted, that at one time I had a mighty handsome

woman on my knees, two little naked urchins having their feet against my

back. There might be a dame in full attire of _holoku_ and hat and

flowers; and her next neighbour might the next moment strip some little

rag of a shift from her fat shoulders and come out a monument of flesh,

painted rather than covered by the hairbreadth _ridi_. Little ladies who

thought themselves too great to appear undraped upon so high a festival

were seen to pause outside in the bright sunshine, their miniature ridis

in their hand; a moment more and they were full-dressed and entered the

concert-room.

At either end stood up to sing, or sat down to rest, the alternate

companies of singers; Kuma and Little Makin on the north, Butaritari and

its conjunct hamlets on the south; both groups conspicuous in barbaric

bravery. In the midst, between these rival camps of troubadours, a bench

was placed; and here the king and queen throned it, some two or three

feet above the crowded audience on the floor—Tebureimoa as usual in his

striped pyjamas with a satchel strapped across one shoulder, doubtless

(in the island fashion) to contain his pistols; the queen in a purple

_holoku_, her abundant hair let down, a fan in her hand. The bench was

turned facing to the strangers, a piece of well-considered civility; and

when it was the turn of Butaritari to sing, the pair must twist round on

the bench, lean their elbows on the rail, and turn to us the spectacle of

their broad backs. The royal couple occasionally solaced themselves with

a clay pipe; and the pomp of state was further heightened by the rifles

of a picket of the guard.

With this kingly countenance, and ourselves squatted on the ground, we

heard several songs from one side or the other. Then royalty and its

guards withdrew, and Queen Victoria’s son and daughter-in-law were

summoned by acclamation to the vacant throne. Our pride was perhaps a

little modified when we were joined on our high places by a certain

thriftless loafer of a white; and yet I was glad too, for the man had a

smattering of native, and could give me some idea of the subject of the

songs. One was patriotic, and dared Tembinok’ of Apemama, the terror of

the group, to an invasion. One mixed the planting of taro and the

harvest-home. Some were historical, and commemorated kings and the

illustrious chances of their time, such as a bout of drinking or a war.

One, at least, was a drama of domestic interest, excellently played by

the troop from Makin. It told the story of a man who has lost his wife,

at first bewails her loss, then seeks another: the earlier strains (or

acts) are played exclusively by men; but towards the end a woman appears,

who has just lost her husband; and I suppose the pair console each other,

for the finale seemed of happy omen. Of some of the songs my informant

told me briefly they were ‘like about the _weemen_’; this I could have

guessed myself. Each side (I should have said) was strengthened by one

or two women. They were all soloists, did not very often join in the

performance, but stood disengaged at the back part of the stage, and

looked (in _ridi_, necklace, and dressed hair) for all the world like

European ballet-dancers. When the song was anyway broad these ladies

came particularly to the front; and it was singular to see that, after

each entry, the _première danseuse_ pretended to be overcome by shame, as

though led on beyond what she had meant, and her male assistants made a

feint of driving her away like one who had disgraced herself. Similar

affectations accompany certain truly obscene dances of Samoa, where they

are very well in place. Here it was different. The words, perhaps, in

this free-spoken world, were gross enough to make a carter blush; and the

most suggestive feature was this feint of shame. For such parts the

women showed some disposition; they were pert, they were neat, they were

acrobatic, they were at times really amusing, and some of them were

pretty. But this is not the artist’s field; there is the whole width of

heaven between such capering and ogling, and the strange rhythmic

gestures, and strange, rapturous, frenzied faces with which the best of

the male dancers held us spellbound through a Gilbert Island ballet.

Almost from the first it was apparent that the people of the city were

defeated. I might have thought them even good, only I had the other

troop before my eyes to correct my standard, and remind me continually of

‘the little more, and how much it is.’ Perceiving themselves worsted,

the choir of Butaritari grew confused, blundered, and broke down; amid

this hubbub of unfamiliar intervals I should not myself have recognised

the slip, but the audience were quick to catch it, and to jeer. To crown

all, the Makin company began a dance of truly superlative merit. I know

not what it was about, I was too much absorbed to ask. In one act a part

of the chorus, squealing in some strange falsetto, produced very much the

effect of our orchestra; in another, the dancers, leaping like

jumping-jacks, with arms extended, passed through and through each

other’s ranks with extraordinary speed, neatness, and humour. A more

laughable effect I never saw; in any European theatre it would have

brought the house down, and the island audience roared with laughter and

applause. This filled up the measure for the rival company, and they

forgot themselves and decency. After each act or figure of the ballet,

the performers pause a moment standing, and the next is introduced by the

clapping of hands in triplets. Not until the end of the whole ballet do

they sit down, which is the signal for the rivals to stand up. But now

all rules were to be broken. During the interval following on this great

applause, the company of Butaritari leaped suddenly to their feet and

most unhandsomely began a performance of their own. It was strange to

see the men of Makin staring; I have seen a tenor in Europe stare with

the same blank dignity into a hissing theatre; but presently, to my

surprise, they sobered down, gave up the unsung remainder of their

ballet, resumed their seats, and suffered their ungallant adversaries to

go on and finish. Nothing would suffice. Again, at the first interval,

Butaritari unhandsomely cut in; Makin, irritated in turn, followed the

example; and the two companies of dancers remained permanently standing,

continuously clapping hands, and regularly cutting across each other at

each pause. I expected blows to begin with any moment; and our position

in the midst was highly unstrategical. But the Makin people had a better

thought; and upon a fresh interruption turned and trooped out of the

house. We followed them, first because these were the artists, second

because they were guests and had been scurvily ill-used. A large

population of our neighbours did the same, so that the causeway was

filled from end to end by the procession of deserters; and the Butaritari

choir was left to sing for its own pleasure in an empty house, having

gained the point and lost the audience. It was surely fortunate that

there was no one drunk; but, drunk or sober, where else would a scene so

irritating have concluded without blows?

The last stage and glory of this auspicious day was of our own

providing—the second and positively the last appearance of the phantoms.

All round the church, groups sat outside, in the night, where they could

see nothing; perhaps ashamed to enter, certainly finding some shadowy

pleasure in the mere proximity. Within, about one-half of the great shed

was densely packed with people. In the midst, on the royal dais, the

lantern luminously smoked; chance rays of light struck out the earnest

countenance of our Chinaman grinding the hand-organ; a fainter glimmer

showed off the rafters and their shadows in the hollow of the roof; the

pictures shone and vanished on the screen; and as each appeared, there

would run a hush, a whisper, a strong shuddering rustle, and a chorus of

small cries among the crowd. There sat by me the mate of a wrecked

schooner. ‘They would think this a strange sight in Europe or the

States,’ said he, ‘going on in a building like this, all tied with bits

of string.’

CHAPTER VII—HUSBAND AND WIFE

The trader accustomed to the manners of Eastern Polynesia has a lesson to

learn among the Gilberts. The _ridi_ is but a spare attire; as late as

thirty years back the women went naked until marriage; within ten years

the custom lingered; and these facts, above all when heard in

description, conveyed a very false idea of the manners of the group. A

very intelligent missionary described it (in its former state) as a

‘Paradise of naked women’ for the resident whites. It was at least a

platonic Paradise, where Lothario ventured at his peril. Since 1860,

fourteen whites have perished on a single island, all for the same cause,

all found where they had no business, and speared by some indignant

father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their

contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived. The strange

persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or

a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key. The poor

buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their

brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance; and

the dart went through their liver. In place of a Paradise the trader

found an archipelago of fierce husbands and of virtuous women. ‘Of

course if you wish to make love to them, it’s the same as anywhere else,’

observed a trader innocently; but he and his companions rarely so choose.

The trader must be credited with a virtue: he often makes a kind and

loyal husband. Some of the worst beachcombers in the Pacific, some of

the last of the old school, have fallen in my path, and some of them were

admirable to their native wives, and one made a despairing widower. The

position of a trader’s wife in the Gilberts is, besides, unusually

enviable. She shares the immunities of her husband. Curfew in

Butaritari sounds for her in vain. Long after the bell is rung and the

great island ladies are confined for the night to their own roof, this

chartered libertine may scamper and giggle through the deserted streets

or go down to bathe in the dark. The resources of the store are at her

hand; she goes arrayed like a queen, and feasts delicately everyday upon

tinned meats. And she who was perhaps of no regard or station among

natives sits with captains, and is entertained on board of schooners.

Five of these privileged dames were some time our neighbours. Four were

handsome skittish lasses, gamesome like children, and like children

liable to fits of pouting. They wore dresses by day, but there was a

tendency after dark to strip these lendings and to career and squall

about the compound in the aboriginal _ridi_. Games of cards were

continually played, with shells for counters; their course was much

marred by cheating; and the end of a round (above all if a man was of the

party) resolved itself into a scrimmage for the counters. The fifth was

a matron. It was a picture to see her sail to church on a Sunday, a

parasol in hand, a nursemaid following, and the baby buried in a trade

hat and armed with a patent feeding-bottle. The service was enlivened by

her continual supervision and correction of the maid. It was impossible

not to fancy the baby was a doll, and the church some European playroom.

All these women were legitimately married. It is true that the

certificate of one, when she proudly showed it, proved to run thus, that

she was ‘married for one night,’ and her gracious partner was at liberty

to ‘send her to hell’ the next morning; but she was none the wiser or the

worse for the dastardly trick. Another, I heard, was married on a work

of mine in a pirated edition; it answered the purpose as well as a Hall

Bible. Notwithstanding all these allurements of social distinction, rare

food and raiment, a comparative vacation from toil, and legitimate

marriage contracted on a pirated edition, the trader must sometimes seek

long before he can be mated. While I was in the group one had been eight

months on the quest, and he was still a bachelor.

Within strictly native society the old laws and practices were harsh, but

not without a certain stamp of high-mindedness. Stealthy adultery was

punished with death; open elopement was properly considered virtue in

comparison, and compounded for a fine in land. The male adulterer alone

seems to have been punished. It is correct manners for a jealous man to

hang himself; a jealous woman has a different remedy—she bites her rival.

Ten or twenty years ago it was a capital offence to raise a woman’s

_ridi_; to this day it is still punished with a heavy fine; and the

garment itself is still symbolically sacred. Suppose a piece of land to

be disputed in Butaritari, the claimant who shall first hang a _ridi_ on

the tapu-post has gained his cause, since no one can remove or touch it

but himself.

The _ridi_ was the badge not of the woman but the wife, the mark not of

her sex but of her station. It was the collar on the slave’s neck, the

brand on merchandise. The adulterous woman seems to have been spared;

were the husband offended, it would be a poor consolation to send his

draught cattle to the shambles. Karaiti, to this day, calls his eight

wives ‘his horses,’ some trader having explained to him the employment of

these animals on farms; and Nanteitei hired out his wives to do

mason-work. Husbands, at least when of high rank, had the power of life

and death; even whites seem to have possessed it; and their wives, when

they had transgressed beyond forgiveness, made haste to pronounce the

formula of deprecation—_I Kana Kim_. This form of words had so much

virtue that a condemned criminal repeating it on a particular day to the

king who had condemned him, must be instantly released. It is an offer

of abasement, and, strangely enough, the reverse—the imitation—is a

common vulgar insult in Great Britain to this day. I give a scene

between a trader and his Gilbert Island wife, as it was told me by the

husband, now one of the oldest residents, but then a freshman in the

group.

‘Go and light a fire,’ said the trader, ‘and when I have brought this oil

I will cook some fish.’ The woman grunted at him, island fashion. ‘I am

not a pig that you should grunt at me,’ said he.

‘I know you are not a pig,’ said the woman, ‘neither am I your slave.’

‘To be sure you are not my slave, and if you do not care to stop with me,

you had better go home to your people,’ said he. ‘But in the mean time

go and light the fire; and when I have brought this oil I will cook some

fish.’

She went as if to obey; and presently when the trader looked she had

built a fire so big that the cook-house was catching in flames.

‘_I Kana Kim_!’ she cried, as she saw him coming; but he recked not, and

hit her with a cooking-pot. The leg pierced her skull, blood spouted, it

was thought she was a dead woman, and the natives surrounded the house in

a menacing expectation. Another white was present, a man of older

experience. ‘You will have us both killed if you go on like this,’ he

cried. ‘She had said _I Kana Kim_!’ If she had not said _I Kana Kim_ he

might have struck her with a caldron. It was not the blow that made the

crime, but the disregard of an accepted formula.

Polygamy, the particular sacredness of wives, their semi-servile state,

their seclusion in kings’ harems, even their privilege of biting, all

would seem to indicate a Mohammedan society and the opinion of the

soullessness of woman. And not so in the least. It is a mere

appearance. After you have studied these extremes in one house, you may

go to the next and find all reversed, the woman the mistress, the man

only the first of her thralls. The authority is not with the husband as

such, nor the wife as such. It resides in the chief or the chief-woman;

in him or her who has inherited the lands of the clan, and stands to the

clansman in the place of parent, exacting their service, answerable for

their fines. There is but the one source of power and the one ground of

dignity—rank. The king married a chief-woman; she became his menial, and

must work with her hands on Messrs. Wightman’s pier. The king divorced

her; she regained at once her former state and power. She married the

Hawaiian sailor, and behold the man is her flunkey and can be shown the

door at pleasure. Nay, and such low-born lords are even corrected

physically, and, like grown but dutiful children, must endure the

discipline.

We were intimate in one such household, that of Nei Takauti and Nan Tok’;

I put the lady first of necessity. During one week of fool’s paradise,

Mrs. Stevenson had gone alone to the sea-side of the island after shells.

I am very sure the proceeding was unsafe; and she soon perceived a man

and woman watching her. Do what she would, her guardians held her

steadily in view; and when the afternoon began to fall, and they thought

she had stayed long enough, took her in charge, and by signs and broken

English ordered her home. On the way the lady drew from her earring-hole

a clay pipe, the husband lighted it, and it was handed to my unfortunate

wife, who knew not how to refuse the incommodious favour; and when they

were all come to our house, the pair sat down beside her on the floor,

and improved the occasion with prayer. From that day they were our

family friends; bringing thrice a day the beautiful island garlands of

white flowers, visiting us any evening, and frequently carrying us down

to their own maniap’ in return, the woman leading Mrs. Stevenson by the

hand like one child with another.

Nan Tok’, the husband, was young, extremely handsome, of the most

approved good humour, and suffering in his precarious station from

suppressed high spirits. Nei Takauti, the wife, was getting old; her

grown son by a former marriage had just hanged himself before his

mother’s eyes in despair at a well-merited rebuke. Perhaps she had never

been beautiful, but her face was full of character, her eye of sombre

fire. She was a high chief-woman, but by a strange exception for a

person of her rank, was small, spare, and sinewy, with lean small hands

and corded neck. Her full dress of an evening was invariably a white

chemise—and for adornment, green leaves (or sometimes white blossoms)

stuck in her hair and thrust through her huge earring-holes. The husband

on the contrary changed to view like a kaleidoscope. Whatever pretty

thing my wife might have given to Nei Takauti—a string of beads, a

ribbon, a piece of bright fabric—appeared the next evening on the person

of Nan Tok’. It was plain he was a clothes-horse; that he wore livery;

that, in a word, he was his wife’s wife. They reversed the parts indeed,

down to the least particular; it was the husband who showed himself the

ministering angel in the hour of pain, while the wife displayed the

apathy and heartlessness of the proverbial man.

In the South Seas Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises on the Yacht "Casco" (1888) and the Schooner "Equator" (1889) · 第 16 / 17 章

Of the lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in which