A visit to Hanavave; Père Olivier at home; the story of the last
battle between Hanahouua and Oi, told by the sole survivor; the
making of _tapa_ cloth, and the ancient garments of the Marquesans.
Grelet said that the conch I had heard at night sounding off Oomoa
must have been in a canoe or whale-boat bound for Hanavave, a valley
a dozen miles away over the mountains, but only an hour or so by sea.
It might have brought a message of interest, or perhaps would be a
conveyance to my own valley, so in mid-forenoon we launched Grelet's
whale-boat for a journey to Hanavave.
Eight men carried the large boat from its shelter to the water,
slung on two short thick poles by loops of rope through holes in
prow and stern. It was as graceful as a swan, floating in the edge
of the breakers. Driving it through the surf was cautious, skilful
work, at which Grelet was a master. Haupupuu, who built the boat, a
young man with the features of Bonaparte and a _blase_ expression,
was at the bow, and three other Marquesans, with the two Paumotan
boys, handled the oars. There was no wind and they rowed all the way,
spurting often for love of excitement.
We skirted a coast of almost vertical cliffs crowned by cocoas, the
faces of the rock black or covered above the waterline with vines
and plants, green and luxuriant. Long stretches of white curtains
and huge pictures in curious outlines were painted on the sable
cliffs by encrusted salt. The sea surged in leaping fountains
through a thousand blow-holes carved from the black basalt, and the
ceaseless wash of the waves had cut the base of the precipices into
_paniho_, or teeth, as the Marquesans say.
There were half a dozen indentations in the bleak and rugged coast,
each a little valley guarded by cliffs on both sides, the natural
obstacle to neighborliness that made enemies of the clans.
Inhabitants of plains are usually friendly. Mountains make feuds.
We passed the valley of Hana Ui, inhabited when Grelet came, and
full of rich cotton-fields, now a waste with never a soul in it. We
passed Eue, Utea, Tetio, Nanifapoto, Hana Puaea and Mata Utuoa, all
empty of the living; graveyards and deserted _paepaes_. Thousands
made merry in them when the missionaries first recorded their numbers.
Death hung like a cloud over the desolate wilderness of these valleys,
over the stern and gloomy cliffs, black and forbidding, carved into
monstrous shapes and rimmed with the fantastic patterns made by the
unresting sea.
Near Matu Utuoa was a great natural bridge, under which the ocean
rushed in swirling currents, foam, and spray. Turning a shoulder of
the cliff, we entered the Bay of Virgins and were confronted with
the titanic architecture of Hanavave, Alps in ruins, once coral
reefs and now thrust up ten thousand feet above the sea. Fantastic
headlands, massive towers, obelisks, pyramids, and needles were an
extravaganza in rock, monstrous and portentous. Towering structures
hewn by water and wind from the basalt mass of the island rose like
colossi along the entrance to the bay; beyond, a glimpse of great
black battlements framed a huge crater.
A dangerous bay in the lee wind with a bad holding-ground. We
manoeuvered for ten minutes to land, but the shelving beach of black
stone with no rim of sand proved a puzzle even to Grelet. We reached
the stones again and again, only to be torn away by the racing tide.
At last we all jumped into the surf and swam ashore, except one man
who anchored the whale-boat before following us.
The canoe that had sounded the conch off Oomoa was lying on the shale,
and those who had come in it were on the stones cooking breadfruit.
The village, half a dozen rude straw shacks, stretched along a rocky
stream. Beyond it, in a few acres enclosed by a fence, were a tiny
church, two wretched wooden cabins, a tumbling kiosk, five or six
old men and women squatting on the ground amid a flock of dogs and
cats. This was the Catholic mission, tumbledown and decayed,
unpainted for years, overgrown by weeds, marshy and muddy, passing
to oblivion like the race to which it ministered.
Grelet and I found Père Olivier sweeping out the church, cheerful,
humming a cradle-song of the French peasants. He was glad to see us,
though my companion was avowedly a pagan. Dwelling alone here with
his dying charges, the good priest could not but feel a common bond
with any white man, whoever he might be.
The kiosk, to which he took us, proved to be Père Olivier's
eating-place, dingy, tottering, and poverty-stricken, furnished with
a few cracked and broken dishes and rusty knives and forks, the
equipment of a miner or sheep-herder. Père Olivier apologized for the
meager fare, but we did well enough, with soup and a tin of boiled
beef, breadfruit, and _feis_. The soup was of a red vegetable, not
appetizing, and I could not make out the native name for it, _hue
arahi_, until Grelet cried, "Ah, _j'ai trouvé le mot anglais!_
Ponkeen, ponkeen!" It was a red pumpkin.
[Illustration: Removing the pig cooked in the _umu_, or native oven]
[Illustration: The _Koina Kai_ or feast in Oomoa]
"_La soupe maigre de missionaire_," murmured the priest.
I led the talk to the work of the mission.
"We have been here thirty-five years," said Père Olivier, "and I,
thirty. Our order first tried to establish a church at Oomoa, but
failed. You have seen there a stone foundation that supports the
wild vanilla vines? Frère Fesal built that, with a Raratonga
islander who was a good mason. The two cut the stones and shaped them.
The valley of Oomoa was drunk. Rum was everywhere, the palm _namu_
was being made all the time, and few people were ever sober. There
was a Hawaiian Protestant missionary there, and he was not good
friends with Frère Fesal. There was no French authority at Oomoa,
and the strongest man was the law. The whalers were worse than the
natives, and hated the missionaries. One day when the valley was
crazed, a native killed the Raratonga man. You will find the murderer
living on Tahuata now. Frère Fesal buried his assistant, and fled
here.
"That date was about the last Hanavave suffered from cannibalism and
extreme sorcery. The _taua_, the pagan priest, was still powerful,
however, and his gods demanded victims. The men here conspired with
the men of Hanahouua to descend on Oi, a little village by the sea
between here and Oomoa. They had guns of a sort, for the whalers had
brought old and rusty guns to trade with the Marquesans for wood,
fruit, and fish. Frère Fesal learned of the conspiracy, but the men
were drinking rum, and he was helpless. The warriors went stealthily
over the mountains and at night lowered themselves from the cliffs
with ropes made of the _fau_. There were only thirty people left in
Oi, and the enemy came upon them in the dark like the wolf. Only one
man escaped--There he is now, entering the mission. We will ask him
to tell the story."
He stood in the rickety doorway and called, "Tutaiei, come here!" An
old and withered man approached, one-eyed, the wrinkles of his face
and body abscuring the blue patterns of tattooing, a shrunken, but
hideous, scar making a hairless patch on one side of his head.
"I was on the beach pulling up my canoe and taking out the fish I
had speared," said this wreck of a man. "Half the night was spent,
and every one was asleep except me. We were a little company, for
they had killed and eaten most of us, and others had died of the
white man's curse. In the night I heard the cries of the Hanavave
and Hanahouua men who had lowered themselves down the precipice and
were using their war-clubs on the sleeping.
"I was one man. I could do nothing but die, and I was full of life.
In the darkness I smashed with a rock all the canoes on the beach
save mine. In my ears were the groans of the dying, and the war-cries.
I saw the torches coming. I put the fish back in my canoe, and
pushed out.
"They were but a moment late, for I have a hole in my head into
which they shot a nail, and I have this crack in my head upon which
they flung a stone. They could not follow me, for there were no
canoes left. I paddled to Oomoa after a day, during which I did what
I have no memory of."
"They had guns?" I asked him.
"They had a few guns, but they used in them nails or stones, having
no balls of metal. Their slings were worse. I could sling a stone as
big as a mango and kill a man, striking him fair on the head, at the
distance those guns would shoot. We made our slings of the bark of
the cocoanut-tree, and the stones, polished by rubbing against each
other, we carried in a net about the waist."
"But if that stone broke your head, why did you not die?"
"A _tatihi_ fixed my head. The nail in my leg he took out with a
loop of hair, and cured the wound."
"Did you not lie in wait for those murderers?"
Tutaiei hemmed and cast down his eye.
"The French came then with soldiers and made it so that if I killed
any one, they killed me; the law, they call it. They did nothing to
those warriors because the deed was done before the French came. I
waited and thought. I bought a gun from a whaler. But the time never
came.
"All my people had died at their hands. Six heads they carried back
to feast on the brains. They ate the brains of my wife. I kept the
names of those that I should kill. There was Kiihakia, who slew
Moariniu, the blind man; Nakahania, who killed Hakaie, husband of
Tepeiu; Niana, who cut off the head of Tahukea, who was their
daughter and my woman; Veatetau should die for Tahiahokaani, who was
young and beautiful, who was the sister of my woman. I waited too
long, for time took them all, and I alone survive of the people of Oi,
or of those who killed them."
"The vendetta between valleys--called _umuhuke_, or the Vengeance of
the Oven,--thus wiped out the people of Oi," commented Père Olivier.
"The skulls were kept in banian-trees, or in the houses. Frère Fesal
started the mission here and built that little church. There were
plenty of people to work among. But now, after thirty years I have
been here, they are nearly finished. They have no courage to go on,
that is all. _C'est un pays sans l'avenir._ The family of the dying
never weep. They gather to eat the feast of the dead, and the crying
is a rite, no more. These people are tired of life."
It was Stevenson who though that "the ending of the most healthful,
if not the most humane, of field sports--hedge warfare--" had much
to do with depopulation. Either horn of the dilemma is dangerous to
touch. It is unthinkable, perhaps, that white conquerors should have
allowed the Marquesans to follow their own customs of warfare. But
changes in the customs of every race must come from within that race
or they will destroy it. The essence of life is freedom.
Any one who has read their past and knows them now must admit that
the Marquesans have not been improved in morality by their contact
with the whites. Alien customs have been forced upon them. And they
are dying for lack of expression, nationally and individually.
Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its
victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death
half way, the grave a haven.
[Illustration: Beach at Oomoa]
[Illustration: Putting the canoe in the water]
In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the
Marquesas. The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone,
makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the
archipelago for centuries. Now it is one of the few places where
even a feeble survival of those industries give the newcomers a
glimpse of their methods and ideals now sinking, like their
originators, in the mire of wretchedness.
Outside the mission gates, in the edge of the jungle, Père Olivier
and I came upon two old women making _tapa_ cloth. Shrunken with age,
toothless, decrepit, their only covering the ragged and faded
_pareus_ that spoke of poverty, they sat in the shade of a
banian-tree, beating the fibrous inner bark of the breadfruit-tree.
Over the hollow log that resounded with the blows of their wooden
mallets the cloth moved slowly, doubling on the ground into a heap
of silken texture, firm, thin, and soft.
This paper-cloth was once made throughout all the South Sea Islands.
Breadfruit, banian, mulberry, and other barks furnished the fiber.
The outer rough bark was scraped off with a shell, and the inner
rind slightly beaten and allowed to ferment. It was then beaten over
a tree-trunk with mallets of iron-wood about eighteen inches long,
grooved coarsely on one side and more finely on the other. The
fibers were so closely interwoven by this beating that in the
finished cloth one could not guess the process of making. When
finished, the fabric was bleached in the sun to a dazzling white,
and from it the Marquesans of old wrought wondrous garments.
For their caps they made remarkably fine textures, open-meshed,
filmy as gauze, which confined their abundant black hair, and to
which were added flowers, either natural or beautifully preserved in
wax. Their principal garment, the _cahu_, was a long and flowing
piece of the paper-cloth, of firmer texture, dyed in brilliant colors,
or of white adorned with tasteful patterns. This hung from the
shoulders, where it was knotted on one shoulder, leaving one arm and
part of the breast exposed. Much individual taste was expressed in
the wearing of this garment; sometimes the knot was on one shoulder,
sometimes on the other, or it might be brought low on the chest,
leaving the shoulders and arms bare, or thrown behind to expose the
charms of a well-formed back or a slender waist. Beneath it they
wore a _pareu_, which passed twice around the waist and hung to the
calves of the legs.
Clean and neat as these garments always were, shining in the sun,
leaving the body free to know the joys of sun and air and swift,
easy motion, it would be difficult to imagine a more graceful,
beautiful, modest, and comfortable manner of dressing.
For dyeing these garments in all the hues that fancy dictated, the
women used the juices of herb and tree. Candlenut-bark gave a rich
chocolate hue; scarlet was obtained from the _mati_-berries mixed
with the leaves of the _tou_. Yellow came from the inner bark of the
root of the _morinda citrifolia_. Hibiscus flowers or delicate ferns
were dipped in these colors and impressed on the _tapas_ in elegant
designs.
The garments were virtually indestructible. Did a dress need
repairing, the edges of the rent were moistened and beaten together,
or a handful of fiber was beaten in as a patch. Often for fishermen
the _tapas_ were made water-proof by added thicknesses and the
employment of gums, and waterproof cloth for wrappings was made
thick and impervious to rain as the oilcloth it resembled.
Hardly one of these garments survives in the Marquesas to-day. They
have been driven out by the gaudy prints of Germany and England
brought by the traders, and by the ideas of dress which the
missionaries imported together with the barrels of hideous
night-gown garments contributed by worthy ladies of American villages.
The disappearance of these native garments brought two things,
idleness and the rapid spread of tuberculosis. The _tapa_ cloth
could not be worn in the water or the rain, as it disintegrated.
Marquesans therefore left their robes in the house when they went
abroad in stormy weather or bathed in the sea. But in their new
calicos and ginghams they walked in the rain, bathed in the rivers,
and returned to sleep huddled in the wet folds, ignorant of the
danger.
As the _tapa_ disappeared, so did the beautiful carvings of canoes
and paddles and clubs, superseded by the cheaper, machine-made
articles of the whites. Little was left to occupy the hands or minds
of the islanders, who, their old merrymakings stopped, their wars
forbidden, their industry taken from them, could only sit on their
_paepaes_ yawning like children in jail and waiting for the death
that soon came.
The Marquesans never made a pot. They had clay in their soil, as
Gauguin proved by using it for his modeling, but they had no need of
pottery, using exclusively the gourds from the vines, wooden vessels
hollowed out, and temporary cups of leaves.
This absence of pottery is another proof of the lengthy isolation of
the islands. The Tongans had earthen ware which they learned to
make from the Fijians, but the Polynesians had left the mainland
before the beginning of this art. Thus they remained a people who
were, despite their startling advances in many lines, the least
encumbered by useful inventions of any race in the world.
Until hardly more than a hundred years ago the natives were like our
forefathers who lived millenniums ago in Europe. But being in a
gentler climate, they were gentler, happier, merrier, and far cleaner.
One can hardly dwell in a spirit of filial devotion upon the relation
of our forefathers to soap and water, but these Marquesans bathed
several times daily in dulcet streams and found soap and emollients
to hand.
It was curious to me to reflect, while Père Olivier and I stood
watching the two aged crones beating out the _tapa_ cloth, upon what
slender chance hung the difference between us. Far in the remote
mists of time, when a tribe set out upon its wanderings from the
home land, one man, perhaps, hesitated, dimly felt the dangers and
uncertainties before it, weighed the advantages of remaining behind,
and did not go. Had he gone, I or any one of Caucasian blood in the
world to-day, might have been a Marquesan.
It would be interesting, I thought, to consider what the hundred
thousand years that have passed since that day have given us of joy,
of wealth of mind and soul and body, of real value in customs and
manners and attitude toward life, compared to what would have been
our portion in the islands of the South Seas before his white cousin
fell upon the Marquesan.