THE MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES
1
Not even the speed of the fastest steamer afloat can transport the white
man from his sky-scraper and subway civilization over the hump of the
earth and down into the South Seas without his undergoing a
psychological metamorphosis that is enchanting. He cannot take his
hard-and-fast materialistic illusions along with him. Were he a
passenger on the magic carpet itself, and both time and space
eliminated, the instant he found himself among the tawny ones he would
forget enough of square streets and square buildings, square meals and
square deals, to become another person. Upon that cool dewdrop of the
universe, the Pacific, the giant steamer chugs one rhythmically to rest
and one dreams as only one in a new life can dream, without being
disturbed by past or future.
One slumbers through this adolescent experience with the smile and the
conceit of youth. At last one arrives. The enormous ship, upon whose
deck have shuffled the games of children too busy to play, slips away
from the pier and is swallowed up in the evening twilight. Left thus
detached from iron and certainty, one wonders what would happen if there
never should be iron and certainty again in life. What if that ship
should never return, nor any other, and the months and years should lose
track of themselves, and memory become feeble as to facts and fumble
about in hyperbolic aspirations? What if the actualities that knotted
and gnarled one's emotions, or flattened them out in precise
conventions, should cease to affect one's daily doings? What if, for
you, never again were there to be factories and dimensions of purse, or
ambitions that ramble about in theories and ethics, but only the need of
filling one's being with food and converting it into energy for the
further procuring of food, and the satisfaction of impulses that lead
only to the further vent of impulse,--and in that way a thousand years
went by? What would the white man be when the lure of adventure and
discovery suddenly revealed him to a world phenomenally different from
the one he left behind in the bourn of his forgotten past?
As I let myself loose from such moorings as still held me in touch with
my world, the wonder grew by inversion. When the _Niagara_, wingless
dinosaur of the deep, slid out into the lagoon beyond, I felt overcome
with a sense of drooping loneliness, like one going off into a trance,
like one for whom amazement is too intoxicating.
It had not been that way in Hawaii, for there already the grip of the
girder has made rigid the life of nature and the people. But down
beneath the line one could still look over the corrugated iron roofs of
sheds and forget. Everywhere in the Fiji or the Samoan islands something
of antiquity cools one's senses with unheard questionings. Instantly one
wants to know how it happens that these people came to be here, what
accident or lure of paleolithic life led them into this isolation. One
cannot get away from the feeling--however far inland one may go--that
the outer casings of this little lump of solid earth beneath us is a
fluent sea, a sea endless to unaided longing. Homesickness never was
like that, for ordinary homesickness is too immediate, too personal. But
this longing for contact which comes over one in the mid-Pacific islands
is universal; it is a sudden consciousness of eternity, and of the atom.
One begins to conceive of days and events and conditions as absolutely
incompatible with former experience. One's mind is set aglow with
inquiry, and over and over again, as one looks into the face of some
shy native or some spoiled flapper, one wonders whence and how. And a
slight fear: what if I, too, were now unable ever to return, should I
soon revert to these customs, to the feeling of distance between men and
women, to the nakedness, not so much of body as of mind?
That was what happened to Tahiti, to Maoriland, to Hawaii, to the
popping peaks of illusive worlds which to ante-medieval isolated Europe
could not exist because it did not know of them. For thousands of years
these innumerable islands in the Pacific had been the habitation of
passionate men, of men who had come out in their vessels from over
_Kim's_ way with decks that carried a hundred or more persons; persons
who doubtless also entertained themselves with games because too busy to
play; persons with hopes and aspirations. A thousand and more years ago
the present inhabitants of Polynesia may have dreamed of rearing a new
India, a wider Caucasia, just as the Pilgrims and the persecuted of
Europe dreamed, or the ambitious Englanders of New Zealand. Welcomed
here and ejected there, they passed on and on and on, as far as Samoa
and Tahiti. And slowly the film of forgetfulness fixed their
experiences. The big ships and the giant canoes rotted in the harbors.
They had come to stay. The sun was burning their bridges behind them.
What need for means of going farther? Eden had been found. And the soft,
sweet flesh of young maidens began, generation after generation, to be
covered with the tattooings of time, the records of the number of times
the race had been reborn. So, while the nakedness of youth was being
clothed, mind after mind stored up unforgettable tales of exploit and of
passion, till fancy sang with triumph over things transitory, and tawny
men felt that never would they have to wander more.
Is not this the history of every race on earth? Has not every nation
gloated over its antiquity and its security? Was not permanence a
surety, and pride the father of ease? And have not song and story been
handed down from generation to generation, or, with the more skilled and
the more proud races, been graved in stone or wax or wood? And have not
the more mighty and the more venturesome come over the pass, or over the
crest and invaded and conquered and changed?
So it was when Polynesia awoke to see that which could only be a god,
because fashioned in the form of its own imaginings, swept by its
gorgeous sails into view,--the ship of Captain Cook. Thus the racial
memories that had lain dormant in the Polynesians for centuries were
revived by Europeans. Narrative renders vividly their surprise and
wonder, especially on seeing the vessel girt in iron such as had drifted
in on fragments from the unknown wrecks and had become to these natives
more precious than gold.
It seems to me that in the hearts and minds of heliolithic man when he
ventured eastward across the chain of islands which links, or rather
separates, Polynesia and Melanesia from its home in Asia, he must have
felt just as Cook and Vancouver and Magellan felt. Bit by bit I picked
up those outer resemblances which give to men the world over their basic
brotherliness. They may hate one another justly, but they cannot get
away from that fraternity. And they generally reveal relationship when
they least expect it.
Thus, as we kicked our way up the smooth waters of the Rewa River, Fiji,
in a launch laden with black faces and proud shocks of curly hair, mixed
with sleek people of slightly lighter-hued India, a suggestion of the
origin of these people came to me. As these alien Indians, so must have
come these native negroids. I should have felt successful in my method
of inquiry, hopeful of feeling my way into a solution of this wondering,
had not an outrigger canoe dragged itself across our course with a
dilapidated sail of bark-cloth.
"Where did they learn to sail?" I asked the white skipper.
"They have always known it," he answered. "But you seldom see these
sails nowadays."
I wanted to take a snap-shot of it, but the lights of evening, as those
of tradition, were against me, and we were clipping along too rapidly.
The last example of an art which brought the whole race eastward was
being carelessly retained.
A few days later I caught another glimpse of a past that was working my
sun-baked brain too much. We were going up the river in a comfortable
launch, some missionaries and I, their unknown guest. We were about
twenty or thirty miles up the Rewa. With us was a young native who spoke
English rather well. I plied him with questions, but his shyness and
reticence, so characteristic of isolated human beings, inhibited him. At
last he spoke, with an eye to my reactions, of the methods of warfare
along the palisades of the river.
"In my boyhood days," he said, "nobody knew anything of his neighbor.
People lived just a mile apart, but you white people were not much
stranger to us than they were to one another. There was constant war. We
children were afraid to venture very far from our village."
"Has that always been the way?"
"I suppose so, but I don't know," and that was all I could get out of
him. Yet it has not always been so, for nothing is always so among
people, and the Melanesian-Fijians in many cases have welcomed and
received among them Samoans and Tongans, races distinctly different from
them. There is a definite separation, however, between ourselves and the
Fijians that is obvious even to the casual tourist, and affords no easy
solution of the whence and why.
Not so among the Polynesians as in Samoa, where one instantly feels at
home. That which attracted me to the Fijian was his incompatibility,
his unconscious aloofness, his detachment.
There is, however, not much greater difference between some of the races
in the Pacific and the white men than there is between any two of the
European peoples themselves. There is less difference between an
Hawaiian and a Maori, though they are separated by nearly four thousand
miles of unbroken sea, than there is between an Englishman and a
Frenchman with only a narrow channel between them. In the Pacific, the
chain of relationship between races from New Zealand to Hawaii is
somewhat similar to that running north and south in Europe. The
variation becomes similarly more pronounced in the latitudinal
direction. In other words, the diversity existing between European and
Turk is something akin to that between Samoan and Fijian,--from the
point of view of appearances.
Something of the kinship of peoples scattered over the millions of
square miles of Pacific seas becomes evident, not so much in their own
features and customs as in the way in which they lend themselves to
fusion with the modern incoming nomads of the West. Something of the
possible migrations said to have taken place in that unromantic age of
man somewhere back in Pleistocene days may be grasped from the streams
that now flow in and become part of the life of the South Pacific.
Scientists detect in the Melanesian-Fijian slight traces of Aryan blood
without being definite as to how it got there. When I ran into a little
fruit shop in Suva, just before sailing, to taste for the last time the
joys of mummy-apple, I glimpsed for a second the how. For the proprietor
was a stout, gray-haired, dark-complexioned individual from the island
of St. Helena. In a vivid way he described to me the tomb of Napoleon,
spicing his account with a few incidents of the emperor's life on the
island. Should no great flood of Europeans come to dilute the present
slight infusions, the centuries that lie in waiting will perhaps
augment this accidental European strain into some romantic story. In a
thousand years it would not at all be impossible for this story of
Napoleon to become part of Fijian legend, and for children to refer to
that unknown god of war as their god and the father of their ideals.
This genial islander from St. Helena will puzzle anthropologists and
afford them opportunities for conjecture, fully as much as the evidence
of Aryan and Iberian races in Asia and the islands east of it does
to-day.
[Illustration: DIAMOND HEAD, NEAR HONOLULU
Once a volcano, now a fortress]
[Illustration: THE HULK OF THE GERMAN MAN-OF-WAR, THE _ADLER_
Wrecked in the hurricane of 1889 at Samoa]
[Illustration: AFTER SEVEN DAYS OF SEA--THIS EMERGED]
[Illustration: HILO, HAWAII
An oasis in the desert of the Pacific]
Or the wail of the Indian, into whose shop I strayed to get out of the
sun, at the downfall of "his" empire, may be the little seed of thought
out of which the aspirations of a Fiji reborn will spring.
2
According to the traditions of almost every race on earth, the place of
its nativity is the cradle of mankind. Nor does mere accident satisfy.
In nearly every instance not only is the belief extant among natives
that their race was born there, but that, be the birthplace island or
continent, it came into existence by some form of special creation as an
abiding-place for a chosen people. The Japanese _kami_, Izanagi and
Izanami, were commissioned by the other gods to "make, consolidate, and
give birth to the drifting land." "According to the Samoan cosmogony,
first there was Leai, nothing; thence sprung Nanamu, fragrance; then
Efuefu, dust; then Iloa, perceivable; then Maua, obtainable; then
Eleele, earth; then Papatu, high rocks; then Maataanoa, small stones;
then Maunga, mountains. Then Maunga married Malaeliua, or changeable
meeting-place, and had a daughter called Fasiefu, piece of dust." The
more primitive Melanesians, the Fijians, and the Australoids are less
definite in their conceptions of whence they came, having in many cases
no traditions or myths to offer.
With all our scientific inquiry, we are to-day still lost in the maze of
probable origins of various races. The birthplace of man is as much of a
mystery as it ever was. Ninety years ago, Darwin said of the South
Pacific: "Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat
near to that great fact--that mystery of mysteries--the first appearance
of new beings on this earth." And in 1921 Roy Chapman Andrews set out
upon a third expedition to Mongolia in search of relics and fossils of
the oldest man. He writes:
With the exception of the Java specimen, all fossil human fragments
have been discovered in Europe or England. Nevertheless, the
leading scientists of the day believe that Asia was the early home
of the human race and that whatever light may be thrown upon the
origin of man will come from the great central Asian plateau north
of the Himalaya Mountains.
Thus his antiquity will doubtless interest man to his dying day. Slogans
epitomizing the spirit of races fan the flames of human conflict.
Conflict wears down the differences between them, or shatters them and
scatters them to the whirling winds. Doubtless the records which seem to
us so lucid and so permanent will vanish from the earth in the next
half-million years, and our descendants will mumble in terms of vague
tradition expressions of their beginning. Or perhaps their linguistics
will make ours vulgar and primitive by comparison. Possibly, if our
progress and development are not impeded, the hundreds of tongues now
spoken on this globe will seem childishly incomplete, and in their stead
will be one extremely simple but flexible language spoken in every islet
in the seas.
What our present world will seem to the man of the future, the world of
the Pacific, wreathed in races of every hue--Asia, Australasia, the
Americas--seems to us now. In the wide spaces of the Pacific we have
several thousands of islands, anchored at various distances from one
another in about seventy million square miles of sea. Grouped with a
healthy regard for the freedom of individual needs there are enough
separate races, speaking separate languages and abiding by separate
customs, to make the many-colored map of Europe seem one primary hue by
comparison. Yet all the romance which brightens the pages of European
history and its intake of Asiatic culture is ordinary beside the
mysterious silence that steeps the origin and age of the cultures of the
Pacific. There, beneath the heavy curtain of unknown antiquity, dwell
innumerable people who, if they are not the Adams and Eves of creation,
have wandered very little from the birthplace of the human race. It
seems as though the overflow of living creatures from the heart of Asia
had found an underground channel back into the Garden of Eden, like some
streamlet lost in the sands of the seashore, but worming its way into
the very depths below. Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, are the names
by which we know them. The drawer of water, as he lets his bucket down
to the farthest reaches of the wells of antiquity, finds in his vessel
evidence of kinship with races now covering the whole of Europe. Romance
has it that the Amerindians are descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel
and Mormon missionaries are carrying that charm among the Polynesians.
They are very successful in New Zealand among the Maories. Like a great
current of warm water in the sea, the Polynesian races have run from
Hawaii to Samoa, the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Maoriland. How they got
there is still part of conjecture.
To most of us, the South Seas mean simply cannibals and naked girls.
Dark skins and giant bodies are synonymous with Polynesians. The
grouping of these peoples into Poly-Mela-Micronesian has some scientific
meaning which, if not esoteric and awe-inspiring, slips by our
consciousness as altogether too highbrow to deserve consideration. Or we
are satisfied with pictures such as Melville and O'Brien have given us,
pictures that as long as the world is young will thrill us as do those
of Kinglake and Marco Polo. But, those of us who have gone beyond our
boyhood rhymes of "Wild man from Borneo just come to town" and have been
White Shadows ourselves, are keenly interested in the whence and the why
of these people. Can it be that Darwin was right? Have we approached the
spot whereon man made his first appearance on the earth? Or are others
right whose soundings divulge a hidden course that gives these people a
birthplace ten thousand miles away, in central Asia? Is it that all the
people of the world were first made men on land that is now beneath the
waters of the Pacific,--men who, because of geological changes, fell
back across Asia, leaving scattered remnants in the numerous island
peaks now standing alone in that sun-baked world? "There is ground for
the belief," says Griffith Taylor,[1] "that the Pacific Ocean was
smaller in the Pleistocene period, being reduced by a belt of land
varying in width from 100 to 700 miles." Or are the further calculations
more accurate,--that there have been constant migrations of people from
Asia?
[1] Griffith Taylor: _Geographical Review_, January, 1912, p. 61.
Slowly scientists are groping their way through legend. No one who has
been among the South Sea people, and those of the western Pacific
islands, can help being impressed with certain remarkable likenesses
between them and European people. Present-day anthropologists are at
variance with the old evolutionary school which believed in "a general,
uniform evolution of culture in which all parts of mankind
participated." "At present," according to Franz Boas, "at least among
certain groups of investigators in England and also in Germany,
ethnological research is based on the concept of migration and
dissemination rather than upon that of evolution." In connection with
Polynesia and the Pacific peoples, it seems to be fairly well known that
they drifted from island to island in giant canoes. They had no sails
nor compass, but, guided by stars and directed by the will of the winds,
they roved the high seas and landed wherever the shores were hospitable.
During ages when Europe dreaded the sea and hugged the land, when the
European universe consisted of a flat table-like earth and a dome-like
heaven of stars,--even before the vikings ventured on their wild
marauding excursions, the Polynesians made of the length and breadth of
the Pacific a highway for their canoes. "Somewhat before this (450
A. D.) one bold Polynesian had reached polar ice in his huge war
canoe."[1] Our Amerindians dared the swiftest rapids in their frail bark
canoes; but what was that compared with the courage and love of freedom
which sent this lone Polynesian out upon the endless waters of the
Pacific? Some day a poet will give him his deserving place among the
great heroes.
[1] Griffith Taylor: _Geographical Review_, January, 1912, p. 61.
Dr. Macmillan Brown tells us that the Easter Islands were once the
center of a great Pacific empire. Here men came from far and wide to pay
tribute to one ruling monarch. He builded himself a Venice amid the
coral reefs, with canals walled in by thirty feet of stone. Fear of the
control over the winds which this monarch was said to possess, and
superstitious dread of his ire brought the vassal islanders to him with
their choicest possessions, though he had no military means of
compelling respect. This monarch, like the Pharaohs who built the
pyramids, must have had thousands of laborers to have been able to cut,
shape, and build the giant platforms of stone or the great canals which
are referred to as the Venice of the Pacific. It must have taken no
little engineering skill so to adjust them to one another as to require
no mortar to keep them together. In the Caroline Islands, now under
Japanese mandate, there still stand remains of stone buildings of a
forgotten day's requirements.
These relics of unknown days make it reasonably certain that after
having been "shot" out from the mainland, the early people of the
Pacific reached all the way across to the island of Savaii, in the
Samoan group, and later as far as Tahiti. Why they did not go on to the
Americas is hard to say. Perhaps the virginity of the islands and the
congenial climate offered these artless savages all they desired. Beyond
were cold and drudgery. Here, though labor and war were not wanting,
still there was balmy weather. Probably they were the tail-end of the
great migration of the Wurm ice age. More venturesome than most, and
having arrived at lands roomy enough for their small numbers, they must
have called themselves blessed in that much good luck and decided to
take no further chances with the generosity of the gods.
Linguistic and ethnological data link the Polynesians with the
Koreans, Japanese, Formosans, Indonesians, and Javanese. Legends
and genealogies show that about the dawn of our era the early
Polynesians were among the Malay Islands. By 450 A. D. they had
reached Samoa and by 850 A. D., Tahiti.... In 1175 A. D. the
primitive Maoriori were driven out of New Zealand to the Chatham
Isles. No doubt New Zealand was first reached several hundred years
before this. Tahiti seems to have been a center of dispersal, as
Percy Smith has pointed out in his interesting book "Hawaiki." We
must, however, remember that Melanesians preceded the Polynesians
to many of these islands at a much earlier date.[1]
[1] Griffith Taylor: _Geographical Review,_ January, 1921.
However, mutation is the law of life. Even these small groups split into
smaller factions. Some went south to the islands of the Antipodes and
called themselves Maories; others went north of the equator and called
themselves Hawaiians. The physical distribution of all the races in the
Pacific, rooting, as we have seen, in Asia, represents a virile plant
the stem of which runs eastward and is known as Micronesia and
Melanesia, with the flowers, in all their diversified loveliness,
Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Maoriland.
What made them what they are? How is it that being, as it seems, people
of extraction similar to that of Europeans, they have remained in such a
state of arrested development? How is it that they became cannibals,
eaters of men's flesh? Again the answer is not far to seek. Just like
the Europeans, they followed the line of least resistance, having as yet
developed no artificial or brain-designed weapons against the stress of
nature. Europeans, in time of great famine, have not themselves been
above cannibalism. In our Southern States we have isolated mountaineers
to show us what men can revert to. And in northern China to-day,
essentially Buddhist and non-flesh-eating, cannibalism was reported
during the famine last year.
But Europe had what Polynesia did not have. Driven by the force of
necessity out of continental Asia, Polynesia hid itself away in the
cracks and crannies of the Pacific; Europeans spread over a small
continent and broke up into innumerable warring and learning tribes.
Backward and forward along peninsular Europe, men communicated to one
another their emotional and objective experiences. The result has been a
culture amazing only in its diversity,--amazing because, with contact
and interchange of racial experiences, the coursing and recoursing of
the same blood, stirred and dissolved, it is amazing that such diversity
should persist.
But in Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia,--in all the distant land-specks
of the Pacific,--contact was impossible in the larger sense. Though
canoes did slide into strange harbors or drift or row in and about the
atolls, they afforded at most romantic stimuli to these isolated groups.
Infusion of culture was very difficult. At most, these causal meetings
added to or confused the stories of their origin. And in a little time
the different island groups forgot their beginnings.
Presently, the pressure upon their small areas with the limited food
supply began to make itself felt. Some method had to be devised for the
limitation of population and to keep in food what few numbers there
were. There seem to have been no indigenous animals anywhere in the
islands. Darwin found only a mouse, and of this he was uncertain as to
whether it really was indigenous. Except for a few birds, and the giant
Moa which roamed the islands of New Zealand, animal life was everywhere
insufficient to the needs of so vital a people as were these. But much
less is heard to-day of the cannibalism said to have run rampant among
them. It is even disputed. The fruits of the tropics, doubtless rich in
vitamines, are peculiarly suited to the sustenance of so spirited a
race.
3
The Polynesians found in the various islands they approached, during
that slow, age-long migration eastward, tribes and islanders inferior to
themselves. So did the Europeans in their movement westward. The
primitive Caucasians remained and mixed slightly along the way, leaving
here and there traces of their contact. And their ancestors in Asia
forgot their exiled offspring.
With the landing of Cook at Tahiti, at Poverty Bay, at Hawaii, the
counter invasion of the Pacific began. For over a hundred years now the
European has been injecting his culture, his vices, his iron exactitude
into the so-called primitive races. These hundred years make the second
phase of civilization in the Pacific. It might have been the last. It
might have meant the reunion of Caucasic peoples, their blending and
their amalgamation, and the world would have lived happily ever after.
But the eternal triangle plays its part in politics no less than in
love, and the third period, the period of rivalry and jealousy, of
suspicion and scandal, of still-born accomplishment in many fields has
set in. And tragedy, which men love because it is closest to truth, is
on the stage.
[Illustration: EVEN FIJIANS ARE LOATH TO FORGET THE ARTS OF THEIR
FOREFATHERS
F. W. Caine, Photo]
[Illustration: IN GIANT CANOES HELIOLITHIC IMMIGRANTS ROAMED THE
SOUTH SEAS
Photo, H. Winkelmann]
The third period dates largely from the discovery and the awakening
of Japan. It is the blocking of the European invasion of the Pacific,
and the institution of a counter move,--that of the expansion of Asia
into the Pacific,--which will be treated in the last section of this
book.
To-day, Polynesia is barely holding its own. Its sons have studied
"abroad," they have been in our schools and universities, they have
fought in "our" war. Rapidly they are putting aside the uncultured
simplicity of adolescence. For long they treasured drifts of iron-girded
flotsam which the waves in their impartiality cast upon their shores;
to-day iron is supplanting thatch, and a belated iron age is reviving
their imaginations, just as iron guns and leaden bullets shattered them
a century ago. In the light of their astonishment, _Rip Van Winkle_ is a
crude conception; Wells has had to revise and enlarge "When the Sleeper
Wakes" into "The Outline of History." No man knows what is pregnant in
the Pacific; nor will the next nine eons reveal the possibilities.