MAEI, TONGOA, EPI AND MALEKULA
Maei is a small island whose natives have nearly all disappeared, as
is the case on most of its neighbours. There is one small plantation,
with the agent of which the Resident had business. After we had passed
the narrow inlet through the reef, we landed, to find the agent in a
peculiar, half-mad condition. He pretended to suffer from fever, but
it was evident that alcohol had a good deal to do with it, too. The
man made strange faces, could hardly talk and was quite unable to
write; he said the fever had deprived him of the power of using his
fingers. He was asked to dinner on board, and as he could not speak
French nor the Resident English, negotiations were carried on in biche
la mar, a language in which it is impossible to talk about anything
but the simplest matters of everyday life. Things got still worse when
the agent became more and more intoxicated, in spite of the small
quantities of liquor we allowed him. I had to act as interpreter, a
most ungrateful task, as the planter soon began to insult the Resident,
and I had to translate his remarks and the Resident's answers. At last,
funny as the whole affair was in a way, it became very tiresome;
happily, matters came to a sudden close by the planter's falling
under the table. He was then taken ashore by his native wife and the
police-boys, who enjoyed this duty immensely. We smoked a quiet pipe,
looked after the fish-hooks--empty, of course--and slept on deck in
the cool night air. Next morning the planter came aboard somewhat
sobered and more tractable. He brought with him his wife, and their
child whom he wished to adopt. As the native women do not as a rule
stay with their masters very long, the children are registered under
the formula: "Child of N. N., mother unknown," an expression which
sounds somewhat queer to those who do not know the reason for it.
After having finished this business, we weighed anchor and set sail
for Tongoa. This is one of the few islands whose native population
does not decrease. The Presbyterian missionary there gives the entire
credit for this pleasant fact to his exertions, as the natives are
all converted. But as in other completely Christianized districts
the natives die out rapidly, it is doubtful whether Christianity
alone has had this beneficial effect, and we must seek other causes,
though they are hard to find.
After a clear night we sailed along the coast of Epi. The bright
weather had changed to a dull, rainy day, and the aspect of the
landscape was entirely altered. The smiling islands had become sober,
lonely, even threatening. When the charm of a country consists so
entirely in its colouring, any modification of the atmosphere and
light cause such a change in its character that the same view may look
either like Paradise or entirely dull and inhospitable. What had been
thus far a pleasure trip, a holiday excursion, turned suddenly into
a business journey, and this change in our mood was increased by a
slight illness which had attacked the Resident, making the jovial
gentleman morose and irritable.
The stay in Epi was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French
colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become
quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French
planters and then sailed for Malekula, anchoring in Port Sandwich.
Port Sandwich is a long, narrow bay in the south of Malekula, and
after Port Vila the most frequented harbour of the group, as it is
very centrally located and absolutely safe. Many a vessel has found
protection there from storm or cyclone. The entrance to the bay is
narrow, and at the anchorage we were so completely landlocked that
we might have imagined ourselves on an inland lake, so quiet is the
water, surrounded on all sides by the dark green forest which falls
in heavy waves down from the hills to the silent, gloomy sea.
Immediately after our arrival my companions went pigeon-shooting as
usual; but I soon preferred to join the son of the French planter
at Port Sandwich in a visit to the neighbouring native village. This
was my first sight of the real, genuine aborigines.
No one with any taste for nature will fail to feel the solemnity
of the moment when he stands face to face for the first time with
primitive man. As the traveller enters the depths of the virgin
forest for the first time with sacred awe, he feels that he stands
before a still higher revelation of nature when the first dark, naked
man suddenly appears. Silently he has crept through the thicket, has
parted the branches, and confronts us unexpectedly on a narrow path,
shy and silent, while we are struck with surprise. His figure is but
slightly relieved against the green of the bushes; he seems part of
the silent, luxuriant world around him, a being strange to us, a part
of those realms which we are used to imagine as void of feeling and
incapable of thought. But a word breaks the spell, intelligence gleams
in his face, and what, so far, has seemed a strange being, belonging
rather to the lower animals than to human-kind, shows himself a man,
and becomes equal to ourselves. Thus the endless, inhospitable jungle,
without open spaces or streets, without prairies and sun, that dense
tangle of lianas and tree-trunks, shelters men like ourselves. It
seems marvellous to think that in those depths, dull, dark and silent
as the fathomless ocean, men can live, and we can hardly blame former
generations for denying all kinship with these savages and counting
them as animals; especially as the native never seems more primitive
than when he is roaming the forest, naked but for a bark belt, with a
big curly wig and waving plumes, bow and arrow his only weapons. When
alarmed, he hides in the foliage, and once swallowed up in the green
depths which are his home and his protection, neither eye nor ear
can find any trace of him.
But our ideas change when we enter his village home, with its
dancing-grounds with the big drums, the sacred stone tables, idols and
carved tree-trunks, all in a frame of violently coloured bushes--red,
purple, brown and orange. Above us, across a blue sky, a tree with
scarlet flowers blows in the breeze, and long stamens fall slowly down
and cover the ground with a brilliant carpet. Dogs bark, roosters
crow and from a hut a man creeps out--others emerge from the bush
and from half-hidden houses which at first we had not noticed. At
some distance stand the women and children in timid amazement, and
then begins a chattering, or maybe a whispered consultation about
the arrival of the stranger. We are in the midst of human life, in
a busy little town, where the sun pours through the gaps in the dark
forest, and flowers give colour and brightness, and where, after all,
life is not so very much less human than in civilization.
Then the forest has lifted its veil, we have entered the sanctuary,
and the alarming sensation of nature's hostility is softened. We white
men like to talk about our mastery over nature, but is it not rather
true that we flee from nature, as its most intense manifestations are
oppressive to us? Is not the savage, living so very close to nature,
more its master, or at least its friend, than we are? We need space
and the sight of sun and sky to feel happy; the night of the forest,
the loneliness of the ocean are terrible to us, whilst to the native
they are his home and his element.
It is evident that under our first strong impression of the native's
life we overlook much--the filth, the sores, the brutality of social
life; but these are really only ripples on an otherwise smooth
existence, defects which are not less present in our civilization,
but are better concealed.
The next day we followed the coast of Malekula southward. There are
immense coral reefs attached to the coast, so that often the line of
breakers is one or two miles away from the shore. These reefs are a
solid mass of cleft coral stones constantly growing seaward. Their
surface is more or less flat, about on a level with the water at low
tide, so that it then lies nearly dry, and one can walk on the reefs,
jumping over the wide crevices in which the sea roars and gurgles
with the rise and fall of the breakers outside. These ever-growing
reefs would surround the whole coast were it not for the fresh water
that oozes out from the land and prevents the coral from growing at
certain points, thus keeping open narrow passages through the reef,
or wider stretches along the coast free from rocks. These basins form
good anchorages for small craft, as the swell of the open sea cannot
cross the reef; only the entrances are often crooked and hard to find.
Our captain brought us safely into a quiet lagoon, where the yacht
lay in deep green water, smooth as glass, while beyond the reef the
breakers dashed a silver line across the blue ocean.
Of course we immediately went shooting on the reef. I did not have
much sport, as I could see nothing worth shooting, but I was much
interested in wading in the warm water to observe the multiform animal
life of the reef. There was the "beche-de-mer," the sea-cucumber,
yellow or purplish-black, a shapeless mass lying in pools; this is
a delicacy highly valued by the Chinese and therefore a frequent
article of exportation. The animals are collected, cut open, dried
and shipped. There was the ugly muraena, which goes splashing and
winding like a snake between boulders, and threatens the intruder
with poisonous looks and snapping jaws. Innumerable bright-coloured
fish shot hither and thither in the flat pools, there were worms,
sea-stars, octopus, crabs. The wealth of animal life on the reef,
where each footstep stirs up a hundred creatures, is incredible,
and ever so many more are hidden in the rocks and crevices.
The plants that had taken root in the coral were mostly mangrove
bushes with great forked roots.