Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the
death of a race.
On the _paepae_ of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia
and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a
few months earlier, the beauty of the island.
"She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the _pokoko_ has
taken her."
She was pitifully thin when I first saw her, lying all day on a heap
of mats, with Taipi beside her, both coughing, coughing. An epidemic
of colds had seized Atuona, brought, most probably, by the schooner
_Papeite_, for no other had arrived since the _Morning Star_.
Aumia coughed at night, her neighbor took it up, and then, like
laughter in a school, it became impossible to resist, and down to
the beach and up to the heights the valley echoed with the
distressing sounds. So, a breadfruit season ago, had Aumia coughed
for the first time, and the way she was going would be followed by
many of my neighbors.
I stopped every day to chat a moment with Aumia, and to bring her
the jam or marmalade she liked, and was too poor to buy from the
trader's store. She asked me this day if I had seen her grave. She
had heard I had visited the cemetery, and I must describe it to her.
It was the grave over which Le Moine and I had crouched from the
storm.
Aumia's husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved
it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig
for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of
Uranopolis. No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it
was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man
on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed. The
carcass had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried
underground with fire below and above him. When the meat was well
done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in
her black nun's habit to console Aumia with the promises of the
church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun's house.
"Aumia is able to eat pig, and yet they have made her grave," I said.
"Oh, _c'est ça!_" replied the nun, holding the haunch carefully.
"That is the custom. Always they used to dig them near the house, so
that the sick person might see the grave, and in its digging the
sick had much to say, and enjoyed it. Now, _grâce à dieu!_ if
Catholics, they are buried in consecrated ground where the body may
rest serene until the trumpet sounds the final judgment. Death is
terrible, but these Marquesans make no more of it than of a journey
to another island, and much less than of a voyage to Tahiti. They
die as peacefully as a good Catholic who is sure of his crown in
Heaven. And as they are children, only children, the wisest or the
worst of them, the Good God will know how to count their sins. It is
those who scandalize them who shall pay dear, those wicked whites
who have forsaken God, or who worship him in false temples."
The coffin of Aumia was then beside the house, turned over so that
rain might not make it unpresentable. She had asked for it weeks
before. To the Marquesan his coffin is as important as, to us, the
house the newly-married pair are to live in. These people know that
almost every foot of their land holds the bones or dust of a corpse,
and this remnant of a race, overwhelmed by tragedy, can look on
death only as a relief from the oppression of alien and
unsympathetic white men. They go to the land of the _tupapaus_ as
calmly as to sleep.
"I have never seen a Marquesan afraid to die," said Sister Serapoline.
"I have been at the side of many in their last moments. It is a
terrible thing to die, but they have no fear at all."
The husband of Aumia, a jolly fellow of thirty, was practising on a
drum for the entertainment of his wife. He said that the corpse of
his grandfather, a chief, had been oiled and kept about the house
until it became mummified. This, he said, had been quite the custom.
The body was washed very thoroughly, and rubbed with cocoanut-oil.
It was laid in the sun, and members of the family appointed to turn
it many times a day, so that all parts might be subjected to an even
heat. The anointing with oil was repeated several times daily. Weeks
or months of this process reduced the corpse to a mummified condition,
and if it were the body of a chief it was then put in his canoe and
kept for years in a ceremonial way. But no mark was ever placed to
show where the dead were buried, and there were no funeral ceremonies.
Better that none knew where the body was laid and that the chosen
friends who carried it to the sepulchre forgot the spot.
In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in
the night at the foot of great trees. Or they carried the bodies to
the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over
and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil.
The secret of the burial-place was kept inviolate. Aumia's husband
related an instance of a man who in the darkest night climbed a
supposedly inaccessible precipice carrying the body of his young
wife lashed to his back, to place it carefully on a lofty shelf and
descend safely.
These precautions came probably from a fear of profanation of the
dead, perhaps of their being eaten by a victorious enemy. To
devastate the cemeteries and temples of the foe was an aim of every
invading tribe. It was considered that mutilating a corpse injured
the soul that had fled from it.
Afraid of no living enemy nor of the sea, meeting the shark in his
own element and worsting him, fearlessly enduring the thrust of the
fatal spear when an accident of battle left him defenseless, the
Marquesan warrior, as much as the youngest child, had an unutterable
horror of their own dead and of burial-places, as of the demons who
hovered about them.
Christianity has made no change in this, for it, too, is encumbered
with such fears. Who of us but dreads to pass a graveyard at night,
though even to ourselves we deny the fear? Banshees, werwolves and
devils, the blessed candles lit to keep away the Evil One, or even
to guard against wandering souls on certain feasts of the dead, were
all part of my childhood. So to the Marquesan are the goblins that
cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and
often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a _pareu_ over his head,
in terror of the unknown.
But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to
sleep at the end of a sad day. Aumia, eating her burial meats and
looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built
by her husband's hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child. But the
melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the
House of the Golden Bed.
It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious
air stirring the breadfruit leaves. I plunged into the river, and
returning to my house was about to dress--that is, to put on my
_pareu_--when a shriek arose from the forest. It was sudden, sharp,
and agonizing.
"_Aumia mate i havaii_" said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build
the fire. Literally he said, "Aumia is dead and gone below," for the
Marquesans locate the spirit world below the earth's surface, as
they do the soul below the belt.
The wailing was accompanied shortly by a sound of hammering on boards.
"The corpse goes into the coffin," said Exploding Eggs. The first
nail had been driven but a moment after Aumia's last breath.
All day the neighborhood was melancholy with the cries from the house.
All the lamentations were in a certain tone, as if struck from the
same instrument by the hand of sorrow. Each visitor to the house
shrieked in the same manner, and all present accompanied her, so
that for ten minutes after each new mourner arrived a chorus of loud
wails and moans assailed my ears. I had never known such a
heart-rending exhibition of grief.
But the sorrow of these friends of Aumia was not genuine. It could
not be; it was too dramatic. When they left the house the mourners
laughed and lit cigarettes and pipes. If no new visitor came they
fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed
person started them off again in their mechanical, though
nerve-racking, cry.
I had known Aumia well, and at noon, desiring to observe the
proprieties, I stepped upon the _paepae_ of her home.
"She loved the _Menike!_" shouted the old women in chorus, and they
threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one
of the dead's husbands. The followed me up the trail to my cabin and
sat on my _paepae_ wailing and shrieking. It was some time before I
realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me.
There was not a moan as the rum went round.
I had puzzled at the exact repetition of their plaint. Harrowing as
it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A
woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the
"_Ue haaneinei_" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side."
The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was
memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it
over her shell of consolation, thus:
"Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke!
A a a a a a a a a a a a a a!
E e e e e e e e e e e e e e e!
I i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i!
O o o o o o o o o o o o o o o!
U u u u u u u u u u u u u u u!"
To omit a vowel, to say too many, or to mix their order, would be
disrespect to the spirit of the dead, and a reflection on the mourner.
Nine times the "ke," fourteen "a's," fifteen "e's," eighteen
"i's" and fifteen "o's" and "u's."
Aumia was carried to Calvary in the afternoon and put in the grave
for which the pig had been paid. So strongly did the old feeling
still prevail that only three or four of her friends could be
persuaded by the nuns to accompany the coffin up the trail.
Exploding Egg's consignment of Aumia to Havaii, the underworld,
spoke strongly of the clinging of his people to their old beliefs in
the destiny of the spirit after death. They share with the Ainos of
Japan--a people to which they have many likenesses, being of the
same division of man--a faith in a subterranean future.
Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of
"going to the world below," where he hopes to find real wisdom?
Havaii or Havaiki is, of course, the fabled place whence came the
Polynesians, as it is also the name of that underworld to which
their spirits return after death. One might read into this fact a
dim groping of the Marquesan mind toward "From dust he came, to dust
returneth," or, more likely, a longing of the exiled people for the
old home they had abandoned. Ethnologists believe that the name
refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of
Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to
Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed.
Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan
mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no
suffering, either for good or bad souls. It is simply the place
where the dead go. It is ruled by Po, the Darkness.
There is, however, a paradise in an island in the clouds, where
beautiful girls and great bowls of _kava_, with pigs roasted to a
turn, await the good and brave. The old priests claimed to be able
to help one from Po to this happy abode, but the living relatives of
the departed spirit had to pay a heavy price for their services. The
Christianized Marquesan fancies that he finds these old beliefs
revived when Père David tells him of purgatory, from which prayers
and certain good acts help one's friends, or may be laid up in
advance against the day when one must himself descend to that middle
state of souls.
All Marquesans live in the shadow of that day. They see it without
fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it
is indescribable.
"I have seen many go as Aumia has gone," said Father David to me.
"All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is passing. Some
day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations
and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of
the dead."
A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand
Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four
thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one
hundred.
A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand
fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where
three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults. I
visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago
hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me.
Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva. One
of the tribe of merciless American whaling captains having sent
ashore a sailor dying of tuberculosis, the tattooed cannibals
received him in a Christ-like manner, soothed his last hours, and
breathed the germs that have carried off more than four-fifths of
their race, and to-day are killing the remnant.
The white man brought the Chinese, and with them leprosy. The
Chinese were imported to aid the white in stealing the native land
of the Marquesan, and to keep the Chinese contented, opium was
brought with him. Finding it eagerly craved by the ignorant native,
the foolish white fastened this vice also upon his other desired
slave. The French Government, for forty thousand francs, licensed an
opium farmer to sell the drug still faster, and not until alarmed by
the results and shamed by the outcry in Europe, did it forbid the
devastating narcotic. Too late!
Smallpox came with a Peruvian slave-ship that stole thousands of the
islanders and carried them off to work out their lives for the white
in his own country. This ship left another more dread disease, which
raged in the islands as a virulent epidemic, instead of running the
slow chronic course it does nowadays when all the world has been
poisoned by it.
The healthy Marquesans had no anti-toxins in their pure blood to
overcome the diseases which with us, hardened Europeans and
descendants of Europeans, are not deadly. Here they raged and
destroyed hundreds in a few days or weeks.
The survivors of these pestilences, seeing their homes and villages
desolated, their friends dying, their people perishing, supposed
that these curses were inflicted upon them by the God of the
foreigners and by the missionaries, who said that they were his
servant. In their misery, they not only refused to listen to the
gospels, but accused the missionaries in prayer before their own god,
begging to be saved from them. Often when the missionaries appeared
to speak to the people, the deformed and dying were brought out and
laid in rows before them, as evidences of the evilness and cruelty of
their white god.
But after one has advanced all tangible reasons and causes for the
depopulation of the Marquesas, there remains another, mysterious,
intangible, but it may be, more potent than the others. The coming
of the white has been deadly to all copper-colored races everywhere
in the world. The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the
negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the red races of
America perished or are going fast. The numbers of those dead from
war and epidemics leave still lacking the full explanation of the
fearful facts. Seek as far as you will, pile up figures and causes
and prove them correct; there still remains to take into account the
shadow of the white on the red.
Prescott says:
The American Indian has something peculiarly sensitive in
his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a
foreign hand. Even when this foreign influence comes in the
form of civilization, he seems to sink and pine under it. It has
been so with the Mexicans. Under the Spanish domination
their numbers have silently melted away. Their energies are
broken. They live under a better system of laws, a more
assured tranquillity, a purer faith. But all does not avail.
Their civilization was of the hardy character that belongs to
the wilderness. Their hardy virtues were all their own. They
refused to submit to European culture--to be engrafted on a
foreign stock.
Free! Understand that well, it is the deep commandment,
dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is
the one purpose, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's
struggles, toilings, and sufferings, in this earth.
I am persuaded that the Polynesians, from Hawaii to Tahiti, are
dying because of the suppression of the play-instinct, an instinct
that had its expression in most of their customs and occupations.
Their dancing, their tattooing, their chanting, their religious rites,
and even their warfare, had very visible elements of humor and
joyousness. They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic
feeling, emotional, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. The
rule of the trader crushed all these native feelings.
To this restraint was added the burden of the effort to live. With
the entire Marquesan economic and social system disrupted, food was
not so easily procurable, and they were driven to work by commands,
taxes, fines, and the novel and killing incentives of rum and opium.
The whites taught the men to sell their lives, and the women to sell
their charms.
Happiness and health were destroyed because the white man came here
only to gratify his cupidity. The priests could bring no inspiration
sufficient to overcome the degradation caused by the traders. The
Marquesan saw that Jesus had small influence over their rulers.
Civilization lost its opportunity because it gave precept, but no
example.
Even to-day, one white man in a valley sets the standard of sobriety,
of kindness, and honor. Jensen, the frank and handsome Dane who
works for the Germans at Taka-Uka who was in the breadline in New
York and swears he will never return to civilization, told me that
when he kept a store in Hanamenu, near Atuona, to serve the bare
handful of unexterminated tribesmen there, the people imitated him
in everything, his clothes, his gestures, his least-studied actions.
"I was the only white. I planted a fern in a box. Every one came to
my store and, feigning other reasons, asked for boxes. Soon every
_paepae_ had its box of ferns. I asked a man to snare four or five
goats for me in the hills. They were the first goats tethered or
enclosed in the valley. Within a week the mountains were harried for
goats, and the village was noisy with their bleating. I ate my goats;
they ate theirs. Not one was left. When I forsook Hanamenu, the
whole population moved with me. Sure, I was decent to them, that was
all.
"I never want to see the white man's country again. I have starved
in the big cities, and worked like a dog for the banana trust in the
West Indies. I have begged a cup of coffee in San Francisco, and
been fanned by a cop's club. Here I make almost nothing, I have many
friends and no superiors, and I am happy."
Had these lovable savages had a few fine souls to lead them, to
shield them from the dregs of civilization heaped on them for a
century, they might have developed into a wonder race to set a pace
in beauty, courage, and natural power that would have surprised and
helped Europe.
They needed no physical regeneration. They were better born into
health and purity--bloody as were some of their customs--than most
of us. Their bodies had not become a burden on the soul, but, light
and strong and unrestrained, were a part of it. They did not know
that they had bodies; they only leaped, danced, flung themselves in
and out of the sea, part of a large, happy, and harmonious universe.
If to that superb, almost perfect, physical base that nature had
given these Marquesans, to that sweetness simplicity, generosity,
and trust acknowledged by all who know them, there could have been
added a knowledge of the things we have learned; if by example and
kindness they could have been given rounded and informed intelligence,
what living there would have been in these islands!
All they needed was a brother who walked in the sunlight and showed
the way.