FAREWELL TO CANNIBAL-LAND.
As soon as the natives were well out of sight, I made my way to the
coast, accompanied by Lolóma. Reaching the beach in the rear of a narrow
headland, which shut out the town from view, we took possession of a
small canoe, which was lying unoccupied on the sand, and, launching the
frail skiff, we were soon on our way to the ship, which would be within
half a mile as soon as we rounded the headland referred to. When we
reached the point, a double canoe, with its huge mat sail, and full of
armed men, shot out from the river side, and gave chase. It seemed that
Bolatha had taken extraordinary precautions to prevent my escape. The
sea was smooth, with a light breeze blowing, and Lolóma and I, paddling
vigorously, were making good headway. Had the double canoe got the wind
on her quarter, she would have overhauled us in a very short time, but
fortunately she was obliged to make “boards,” and the tacking manœuvre
being slowly executed, we forged ahead. The light wind shifting a couple
of points, however, the double canoe gained a distinct advantage. Our
only chance now was to be observed by the barque, and to get within the
protection of her muskets. We strained every nerve. The prow of our
light skiff cut through the vari-coloured surface of the water like a
knife ripping up a piece of silk. The occupants of the large canoe were
within thirty yards, and I saw them stringing their bows. I also saw, to
my unspeakable satisfaction, that we were observed from the Sarah Jane.
Another three minutes, and her fire would send the miscreants to the
right-about. I rose in the little canoe, and shouted derisively at our
pursuers. They saw the situation, and saluted us with a flight of
arrows. At the same moment three musket-shots from the barque laid low
two of the cannibals, and the big canoe was put about.
The tension of the moment was so great that I had not noticed that
several of the arrows struck our canoe, though most of them fell short.
Turning my head (for in paddling I sat with my back to my companion) to
cheer Lolóma with the prospect of speedy safety, I saw that the paddle
had fallen from her hand, and that, with an expression of intense pain
in her usually merry face, she was endeavouring to pull from her bosom a
bone-headed arrow which had pierced her. I drew out the envenomed shaft,
and she fainted. The life stream flowed from her side, in spite of all
that I could do to stanch the wound, which was clearly mortal. Seeing
our distress, three of the sailors in the barque put off in a boat to
our assistance. Lolóma was tenderly lifted into it, and I followed,
hardly knowing what I did. The canoe was allowed to drift away.
Laid on a mattress on the deck of the barque, Lolóma revived for a few
minutes. Her eyelids opened, quivering with a sweet surprise, as of one
not knowing what had happened, and what was the meaning of the saddened
group around her. They closed again, and she lay dreaming soft and warm,
and smiling in her dream as I had so often seen her in happy days. Once
more she moved. The tear-drops gemmed her eyes dark fringes; her lips
parted, and, bending low, I heard the faintly whispered words which to
the Fijian mind convey a whole world of pathos which cannot be
reproduced in English: “Au sa lako! Dou sa tiko!” (Literally, “I go! You
remain!”) Her necklace of pink shells, fresh from the ebbing wave, burst
asunder with the last movement which shuddered through her frame, and
her little sea-born treasures rolled upon the deck. They would never be
strung together again. So also was the silver cord of her life for ever
broken. Her spirit had flown like that of a flower, whose existence is
all too short. I turned my face seaward, and looked out into the gray
moaning world of waters. The gulls were solemnly rocking on the heaving
billows of the barren, dreary, ever-restless main, and all the light
seemed to have gone out of the heavens.
Lolóma was buried next day in deep water, just inside the reef. The
ship’s carpenter made a coffin, which was heavily shotted, and her
remains were lovingly decorated with gay flowers which the maidens of
Ramáka had brought on board two days before. As her body was committed
to the deep, to find its resting place among the branching coral and
brilliant marine growths, the sky was draped in sables—its changing
splendours were gone; the monotonous lap of the water was a dirge, the
screech of the sea-bird was a knell. The cocoanut tufts on the beach
were waving dismally like funereal plumes, when an immense wave dashed
upon the barrier with the roar of a thunder-clap, sending a vast column
of foam into the air. The sun showed himself with sudden brightness
through the clouds, and the sifted spray was shot with all the prismatic
hues. Now I remembered the Fijian belief that when the reef roars louder
than usual it is a sign that the newly departed spirit has been borne to
the future world on a rainbow.
* * * * *
All our ammunition being exhausted, it was impossible to punish Bolatha
and his abettors for the murder of Jackson and the two sailors; but, by
threatening to take the ship close in shore and destroy the town, we
obtained possession of the bodies and buried them at sea. They were thus
saved from the cannibal oven, and from the disinterment and indignities
they would have suffered had we committed them to the earth.
Turner navigated the ship to Calcutta, where her owners gave him the
command, and he completed the voyage to China to dispose of the
sandalwood on board, Cobb and myself accompanying him as second and
third officers. Years elapsed before I again saw my old home in Sydney.
I wrote to my father from Calcutta, but the letter miscarried, and I had
long been mourned as dead. My youthful escapade had been forgotten, and
there was no more respected merchant in the city than Joe Whitley, whose
liberation from gaol I secured in so illegal a way.
Since the time of my two years residence in Fiji, great changes have
come over the country. The prophecy of Hot-Water in regard to the
acceptance of the new religion has been fully verified, and the islands
have been given up to the rule of the white man. That this beautiful
archipelago is destined to become a valuable British possession there
can be no doubt. It is equally true that the native race is doomed to
extinction, so that the words of the sable goddess of Vúya to her
successful lover may be taken prophetically as the piteous wail of a
people,
“Whose home at the dawn shall deserted be.”
The dawn for the new heroes is already falling on our eyes. For the
aboriginal heroes it is the twilight of evening. They will pass, to be
remembered only as an intelligent race of savages who wisely changed
their religion, but foolishly sold their country. They will soon be seen
paddling swiftly away in their own canoes, through the mists and shadows
of their closing history,
“To the islands of the blessed,
To the kingdom of Ponemah,
To the land of the hereafter.”
But it is not with such thoughts that I prefer to think of Fiji and its
people. Memory will always carry me back to the days when their many
virtues and vices were their own, and a dignity of character was theirs
which could not co-exist with the white settlements. I think of a land
bright with flowers, and gay with the bloom of perpetual spring; of a
little brown figure coquettishly braided with colored grasses, of her
merry ways and words, of the delight I took in her simple stories of
fairies and pixies, of the charm of her lithe form as she danced in the
moonlight with her handmaidens, the fireflies like diamonds in her hair,
while I was intoxicated with the beauty and wonder of the scene; of the
ripple of a low laugh, of the musical sound of words that died in a
caress; and of the fresh fragrance of sea and mountain wafted on cool
winds in the land of malua, where the people sat, “every man under his
vine and under his fig-tree,” and reaped the fruits of the earth almost
without toil.
THE END.
APPENDIX.
I.
THE RELIGION OF OLD FIJI.
Within the last 45 years more than 100,000 persons, or two-thirds of the
whole population of Fiji, have abandoned their old gods, in obedience to
new influences to which their country has been subjected during that
period. Some account of the now rapidly departing religious beliefs of
this people, supplementary to the information conveyed in the story,
will be interesting to those who are curious in such matters.
GODS AND THEIR SHRINES.
The history of the higher class gods of Cannibal-land is the history,
painted by poets and exaggerated by garrulous retailers of old
traditions, of kings and chieftains, heroes and heroines, who, no less
human than their worshippers, once walked this earth, fretting and
fuming away their lives in it, though not without leaving behind some
claim to be remembered by the generations of men, women, and children
who were to come after them.
The study of Fijian mythology suggests that in past ages one great
master-mind threw its influence over the untamed elements of destruction
then at work upon the human race in this country, and subjected them to
its will. Such a hero as the possessor of this power must have been,
would before his death glory in having reached a position which enabled
him to send out his sons and minions to represent him in all the
conquered districts and islands of his empire. These deputy governors or
chiefs in the course of time would grow as ambitious and heroic as their
great and now deified ancestor. What he had laboriously worked up into
one great whole, would at this point turn again towards disunion. The
breaking-up process would have to be perpetuated in order to satisfy and
satiate the wild and savage ambition of an ever-multiplying host of
ungovernable aspirants after dominion. The ever-remembered “Great
Father” would from the moment of his apotheosis continue to rise in the
minds of each succeeding generation from mere humanity to divinity,
until at last he would be found, as he has been by us, in the throne of
another but now unknown God, who preceded him. His sons and sons’ sons,
who had divided and subdivided every divisible part of the original
kingdom among them, would at death ascend to god-like ranks in the
spirit-world, and be regarded thereafter by the people they had governed
as among their chief deities. As this god-creating work proceeded
through each succeeding generation, the world of gods ere long came to
be an almost perfect copy of the world of men, and followed all the
vicissitudes of its fortune. So long as the nation continued to recede
from unity, so long did its gods continue to increase, until the tribes,
burning with an enthusiastic desire for divinities of every class and
name, at length started on a furious race to see which at last should be
able to boast the greatest number. The breaking-up of the nation
produced new gods for each province. The division of the provinces
called into the divine circles hosts who but just before, being only
human, were both little and unknown. New gods sprang up with every
slight addition to a tribe; a god was called into being with each
new-born child, and every death added a god to the long since countless
number.
Such was the character of Fiji’s religion before the presence of the
white man began to turn the current another way. While, politically, the
nation was as a vessel shivered into a thousand pieces, religiously it
was like one that had been dashed into a million atoms, which, though
found without cohesion, were not without marks of having once cohered.
Polytheism then was, and in many places still is, the religion of
cannibal-land. But the term fails to express the thing to which by
general consent it is applied, so infinitely numerous are the deities
which have been crowded into the vast pantheon of the Fijian’s
imagination. Every nation, tribe, clan, and individual in Fiji vied one
with another in making the most of their gods, and in seeking to hold
them up as mighty and terrible facts. From a study of the attributes
assigned to them by priests and people, it soon became evident that
great and almost numberless differences existed. These, however, were
not of such a nature as to prevent a classification of the gods. As the
work of investigation proceeded these divinities arranged themselves in
three interminably long and deep columns. The first may be called
aristocratic gods, the second middle-class gods, and the third
democratic gods; not, however, meaning thereby that they are the gods of
the several orders of people which these terms represent, but that among
themselves they stand in these relative positions to each other.
Advancing to the phalanx of aristocratic gods, it is observable that it
is composed of different ranks. Standing apart from it, yet looking
towards it with dignified admiration, in serpent shrine, is the Great
Father of the host, whose title to deity of the highest degree is
universally acknowledged, and whose right to which no rival has ever
risen throughout the heathen era powerful enough to wrest from him. So
high above all others was this god, and so important were the many works
he did for his cannibal children, that it will be necessary to devote
some future space to him individually.
In the second but not much inferior rank of these nobles of the
god-world, standing by themselves, are the sons of this Great Father.
They are his own sons, who for unknown periods were his chief assistants
and the generals of his armies; but in the onward flow of ages they
climbed up, some by patient waiting and endurance, others by rebellious
ambition, to thrones of power equal in their own eyes in everything but
its extent to that of their grand-parent. Of this rank is the
“Scrutinizer,” variously know as the “Shiner,” “Lord One-tooth,” the
“Seer,” and the “Immovable.” Temples were reared to him in every tribe
for he was greatly to be feared. He was believed to be the cleverest of
his class in the manipulation of that metamorphosing power which more or
less distinguished these high divinities. At one time and place he would
be seen as an enormous giant, awing the people by the ponderousness of
his limbs and his heaven-towering head The cloud-capped mountains were
mole-hills to him, and the race of men who feared his nod, ants
scrambling awkwardly up their sides. At another place and time he would
be reported by his priests as an ugly dwarf, all head, aided in his
miserable attempts to crawl about by thin long hands and arms and
twisted trailing legs. To-day he would be met as a black man of the
ordinary height, and to-morrow as a red one. The next day he might be
seen with a head of hair black, crisp, and shiny, like that worn by a
great chief in the heyday of youth, and the day following with one
crowned with the snows of many years. Like the “enchanted horse,” he
could travel with wondrous swiftness, often transporting himself from
the Windward to the Leeward Islands and back again in a time and manner
utterly incomprehensible by the human mind. Were he only half as popular
now as he used to be, he would challenge for speed that modern and
infinitely more useful god of the white man—electricity. Great, however,
as was his power to assume any form he pleased, it was nothing to that
with which, as his first name implies, he looked into the minds of men,
and made himself acquainted with all their doings.
The third and last order of this divine aristocracy includes all gods
descended from the sons of the “great source” down to the third, fourth,
fifth, and last generation. As time swept by, these gods scattered
themselves like locusts over all the islands, eating up everything where
they or their priests, which is the same thing, alighted, leaving their
worshippers poor indeed. They insinuated themselves into every place
which had not yet named them with reverence.
In the first rank of “middle class” deities are gods of no parentage.
They have neither come down from the class above nor ascended from the
one below them, but are an entirely unique and original order sprung
from trees and from what the wise men of the land call their “mother
earth.” Numerically they are as formidable as any other army of gods
whose history the poets and priests have handed down to us. To give an
idea of the popular belief as to the origin of these powers, it will be
enough to name a single example.
One day a man went off to his garden to dig some yams. Yams are grown in
little cone-shaped hillocks from one to three feet high. On opening one
of these mounds, expecting to find therein three or four fine yams, the
man was struck dumb at seeing not yams, but a living being, who rose
straight up out of the ground, and stood before him. What could the poor
fellow do but at once adopt this genius as his God? and if he had an eye
to business, as most Fijians have, when the business affects their own
interests, what less would he be likely to do than to declare himself
henceforth this earth-sprung God’s duly appointed priest? All of which,
whether predetermined or not, was accordingly done. In this way
thousands of new Gods have come to light, and as many cunning priests
been self-ordained.
In the second rank of this “middle class” we have hero-gods. These are
the deified spirits of generally acknowledged heroes. They take up their
places of honour according to their earthly rank as chiefs and the deeds
of valour they are believed to have done. Besides these, but far back in
the shade behind them, are vast multitudes of human spirits, who, though
far from being heroes in the highest meaning of that title, were
nevertheless heroes in the limited circles in which they once moved, and
to their own kinsfolk, by whom they were raised to the ranks of
demigods, of no mean influence. These gods, while yet men in the world
we live in, were heads of families or guardians, and only attained to
the position they now adorn by complying with the condition which alone
entitles them to it. This condition is that, after death, they visit the
earth, and make such visit most unmistakably clear to their old friends.
In this middle class are also to be found goddesses. These do not appear
to be so numerous as deities of the sterner sex, nor are they so often
brought on the stage where cannibal divinities “have their exits and
their entrances.” Like their humbler sisters of human birth and mien,
they are made to follow on behind, never coming to the front, except
when placed there through the irresistible influence of surpassing
beauty, or that law which, in the-place-of-Everlasting-Standing, brings
a lady before the world in order to fix, by her own nobility, the
precise legal degree of that of some chief of whom she is the honoured
mother.
Coming now to the third and last great class, it may be noted that
democratic gods are by far the most numerous, and the most difficult to
arrange. These gods are everywhere and in everything. Each inhabits some
favourite shrine, from the human body in all its stages and conditions
before and after death down to the mosquito, which, by the way, is one
of the most annoying and sanguinary little gods in Fiji. With regard to
what the cannibal says about these gods there is a greater confusion of
ideas and contradictory statements than are to be found clinging to the
gods of the other classes. Our cannibal theologist tells us there is no
object, animate or inanimate, which has not a spirit of its own. But
this spirit, according to some, is not _the_ God, for, say they, “every
object is the shrine of something more than its own spirit, even that of
a genuine god.” Here we enter further into the sphere of confusion and
darkness, inasmuch as when we ask the old mythologies if every object
has two spirits, its own and a god, or whether its own spirit is the
god, their answers agree not. It may be either that the spirit of the
object is the god, or that the god, being independent of both the object
and its spirit, has only taken up his abode with them. This portion of
the cannibal’s creed leads to the conclusion that Fijian mythology
points to a kind of pantheistic doctrine of this peculiar type, which,
while it recognises god in everything, does not seem to recognise
everything as a “part or particle of god.”
Great respect was paid to shrines, which the people called the god’s
“covering.” Indeed, the respect shown to the “covering” or “shell” often
exceeded that given to the “covered,” or the god in possession. From the
chaos of opinions which the Fijian brain has cast up, it seems
impossible to discover where the priests and people drew the line of
demarcation, if they drew it at all, between the shrine and the
enshrined. Whenever one met with the shrine of one of his gods he would
offer it all the honours in his power, as if it were the actual god
himself. He would, moreover, call the object his god. The Fijian was not
a worshipper of idols of his own making, but of spirits which had taken
up their abode in natural objects. Such worship was not, therefore, of
the basest sort, seeing that while the apparent objects of it were
shrines for the purpose of bringing divinity near and making it
palpable, the real object was that divinity. Thus we see that, although
the cannibal may in some sense be said to have lived by faith, inasmuch
as he believed in the existence of spirit-gods, he did so through the
medium of what was tangible, and which could not deprive him of the
happiness of living by sight.
If, on the sudden appearance of his god, a devotee was not in a position
to make a proper offering, he would not fail as the next best thing to
make the “shout of respect” due to a great chief. Turbaned heads in
respectful acknowledgment of their gods, would quickly uncover, and all
ornaments would be removed from the person. Very pious men on finding a
shrine would take it up, and carefully carry it home. Here they would
deposit it in some part of the house, or in one of the village temples:
and, often stealing away to the spot where it lay, would address it in
these or like words—“Oh, Sirs, great is our joy that you two,” meaning
the god and his shrine, “have been of so good a mind as to make your
appearance in this gracious and unlooked for way to us, your unworthy
and useless servants.”
It is a crime to be visited with death for anyone to eat the shrine of
his god. He, whose god is enshrined in a shark, turtle, duck, or what
not, must for ever abstain, however pressed by hunger, from the
sacrilegious deed. This is the reason why, in every kingdom, there were
to be found persons to whom the eating of human flesh was an
abomination. The shrine of their god was human. Funeral honours were not
unfrequently paid to deceased shrines, which, whatever might be asserted
or proved of the divinity within them, were themselves far from being
immortal. The last remains of a divinely-honoured vase would be interred
with every formality. Festivals would be held and offerings made _in
memoriam_ of the shrine which death had conquered, perhaps through the
god deserting it, and sacred to the memory of the god himself, who,
whether by his own act or not, was now shrineless.
Not only do shrines cease to be shrines, but gods to be gods, for some
are said to be gods only so long as their popularity lasts. When this
goes, divinity goes with it, but not immortality. The Fijians’ belief in
the immortality of spirit, whether that of a man or of a god, is, with
some slight qualifications, a cardinal one. But “once a god, always a
god,” is not so, except as regards the “aristocratic gods,” who are not
easily thrown down from the pedestal of their divinity. All sorts of
demigods, however, cease to be gods whenever the tribes serving them
happen to be conquered in war and become the slaves of their conquerors.
The gods of the victor thereupon take the place of those whose names
were for ages “household words” ever on the lips of men, women, and
children, who had suffered so much and fought so long to keep their
independence, but who at last had helplessly failed.
Strange things are told of the way in which condign punishment overtakes
those who slight, injure, or kill the shrines of their gods. The cock is
the shrine of a god called by the natives who paid him homage
“Fire-face,” or “Fire-eye.” Should any worshipper of this god kill any
of these sacred fowls, the avenger will some day suddenly appear before
him in the shape of a real game bird, with awful spurs and wrathful eye,
the departed spirit of the veritable fire-eyed chanticleer against whom
the offence was committed. Flying full and furiously at his victim, he
will leap upon his head and leave him hairless. The culprit’s feet will
also become divided and twisted, so as to assume the appearance of
chicken’s feet, claws and all included. No wonder that, not so very long
ago, old priests might have been seen sitting at the low doorways of
every spirit-house in the country, cautioning all and sundry, saying,
“Oh ye chiefs and people, be sure you respect your gods, and never harm
their shrines.”
The patronage of all the gods was a thing most anxiously desired and
sought by the people, who believed that these superior beings encouraged
and governed their wars, made the yam crops good or bad, loaded the
trees with fruit or blighted them, brought fish to their nets and human
flesh to their ovens, and did a thousand and one other important things,
but always on the clearly advertised condition that every divine command
must be obeyed, the temples be kept in good repair, and the priests
revered, feared, and well-cared for. The last part of the contract was
by no means the least important, for between the gods and their priests
there was believed to be the closest connection—hence the necessity to
treat the priest with no less attention than that due to his god.
While it would seem to be quite true that certain of the lower-class
gods are continually passing away into oblivion, as their popularity
wanes or the people paying their homage die out, it is said to be no
less true that gods of the first-class neither pass away nor change,
but, strangers alike to the greenness of youth and the decay of age, are
ever hale and strong. If such is the case with the aristocratic gods
themselves, they certainly have not allowed it to be so with surrounding
nature, upon which, as it would appear from the oldest traditions, they
have played some most “fantastic tricks.” The legends are full of
exaggerated tales of great physical changes, which in the silent ages
came again and again, gradually or suddenly, over the face of the
country. At one period fields of pumice-stone are said to have been
swept by winds and ocean currents into the group from the south-east,
and, settling at the foot of the hills of Eastern Great Fiji, helped in
forming the foundation of the present extensive flats and deltas of rich
alluvial soil, which, after feeding many generations of cannibals with
yams and taro, are at last destined to put gold into the pockets of
industrious sugar-growing settlers.
All the geological changes alluded to in the country’s legends are
attributed to the miraculous power of the old gods. Here some mighty
divinity, influenced by the spirit of revenge, has dug down the tops of
cone-shaped hills that were carrying their heads too high. In the
laborious undertaking he conveyed away the earth in enormous baskets
slung at the ends of a long pole resting on his Herculean shoulders, as
the manner of bearing heavy burdens sometimes is in Fiji. Dropping
portions of this earth as he passed along the shores of the larger
islands, he caused to grow up therefrom many of those lovely islets
which add charm to charm, and give to scenery in the South Seas such
enchantment. In this and that place, reefs and portions of reefs that
were in the way, roaring too loud, or offering too many advantages to an
enemy, have been kicked further off, broken down, had gaps knocked in
them where gaps were dreaded, or stopped up where they were most prized,
while rocks and points of land have been altogether submerged; and all
by the passionate, capricious, miracle-working gods of this people, who,
more perhaps than any other savage race on the earth’s face, were “in
all things eminently religious.”
Tortuous and dark as all this of necessity is, it helps us to increase
our knowledge of the cannibal and his religion; while the fractions of
scientific truth, though conveyed in broken echoes from dark and
unexplorable caverns, tell us of changes which the forces of nature have
made in this southern world—changes so stupendous that the
unphilosophising brain of the cannibal could not allow them to be
forgotten, but must needs report them in the history of every god,
interlace them with the inventions of every legend, and embalm them in
the wild effusions of every poet.
II.
CHIEF OF GODS AND MEN.
Dengeh (spelt Degei in Fijian) is chief of gods and men.
The tops of the “Screw-pine Hills” on the north side of Viti Levu are
his abode, and a serpent is his shrine. Two of the most sacred and
prominent objects in cannibal mythology are the screw-pine or pandanus
tree and the snake. The best emblems of the old religion of the country
would be a fine screw-pine with red, ripe fruit at its top, a large
snake coiled up asleep under its supporting roots, and a fine
bright-feathered cock, its legs decorated with pure white cowrie shells,
close by, crowing away with all his might to wake the dreaded sleeper.
Fiji adds another to the already long list of countries in which the
serpent was either worshipped or regarded in various degrees with
reverential awe.
Dengeh was the acknowledged father of all gods next in rank to himself,
and, through these, of other ranks. He was likewise the creator of men.
We are told in some of the legends that although he was the generally
admitted father of all, yet he himself had an ancestor. But this seems
very much like an afterthought of some of our cannibal historians, who
can never rest till they succeed in tracing the precise ancestral line
of everybody worthy of notice. While the priests of inferior and more
modern deities told the people that the fathers of their gods were such
and such great heroes, the priests of Dengeh made reply on his behalf by
pointing triumphantly to a rock which lay in the bed of a stream in the
immediate neighborhood of the god’s mountain. “That stone,” said they,
“is his father.” This, doubtless, was symbolical, and the symbols, a
snake and a rock (in their interpretation) are one and the same. If the
serpent is the universal emblem of eternity, not less so of
uninterrupted duration is the rock. The name Dengeh has been defined to
mean immortal. The Fijians have been heard to say of an old man
distinguished for his extreme age and undiminished strength, “He is as
immortal as Dengeh.” Others have maintained that the original meaning of
the word is “to shake,” as when an eggshell is shaken. This is backed up
by the statement that whenever the god turns about or trembles in his
cave the earth shakes and quakes exceedingly. His priests imitated him
in this habit of shaking. The Fiji world was, no doubt, very “shaky” at
one time—so much so that Dengeh, in all likelihood, never turned or
shook without causing an earthquake. There are slight shocks even now,
especially on the western end of what is called the “great land,” but
their force is not what it was when Fiji was less of an island country
than it is to-day, and Dengeh was without a rival. The Fijian believed
that the shaking of his serpent-enshrined god was as much a fact as the
shaking of the ground under his feet, and he believed that the latter
was but one of the many natural effects of the former. To him,
therefore, Dengeh was inferior in nothing to a god of greater
pretensions and far greater race, the
“Mighty Poseidon ...
Who shakes the world with his earthquakes.”
There was a periodical shaking of the god which was anything but
calamitous, for a whole train of blessings followed it, and its
non-occurrence, while always deprecated, had sometimes to be most deeply
deplored. The cannibal was sure that when Dengeh shook the earth by
shaking himself, the rains descended in their season; when he shook it
again the fruit trees became laden with luscious fruit; and yet again,
behold the yam crops grew to be the finest ever seen. When, unhappily,
Dengeh stopped shaking there came a change over the face of the earth
and its people began to fade and perish. By these teachings we are able
to enter the cannibal mind, and to read therein his recognition of the
kindly revolution of the seasons, and of the wakeful presence of some
hidden but competent power to keep those seasons ever moving round.
But there is a nearer approach to the true signification of this
god’s name in a word found in one of the older and now almost
obsolete dialects, the dialect of the land of poetry, where most of
the songs and other compositions were produced, and whence they were
issued from a Fijian Grub-street or Paternoster-row, though in oral
publications instead of printed volumes. The discovered word is—as
pronounced—Dengehah. This word is a verb, meaning “to plant, to
stick firmly in the ground.” The god’s name, Dengeh, is the passive
participle of the verb, and signifies “planted,” &c. After hearing
all that the priests had to declare about the attributes of their
ancient deity, we see at once the clear appropriateness of this
hitherto unexplained name—“The Planted One,” “He That is Set Up,”
“The Established.” On this point there is more agreement than is
usually discoverable in the legends of savage races.
One explanation teaches us to regard Dengeh as the great shaker, shaking
the earth to cause certain natural and periodical results. A second
explanation connects this shaking with the god’s serpentine shrine, in
which we see the emblem of eternity. A third requires us to believe that
the god had a great father, whom we are directed to see in a rock, the
symbol of that which is everlasting; while a fourth leads us to gaze on
what is immovably set up. Such consistency in the mythology of a savage
race is somewhat remarkable. It forces us to the admission that the
cannibal mind had a pretty fair notion, considering how absolutely that
mind was shut up within itself, of what the work and attributes of a god
ought to be.
Dengeh was not always what he now is. He has undergone a change of form
and abode. The reason given in the biographical legends for the first
change is that in very ancient times, when living on the beach as a
great chief, in human shrine, of course, another god made war upon him;
whereupon, in order to teach his enemy a lesson he should never forget,
he let in the ocean from the north over all the lower lands, and,
Dutchman-like, swamped the impudent invader, he himself taking refuge in
the hills that form the immediate background to that part of the
country, and which became his permanent dwelling-place. It was at this
time that he changed his appearance. “Once upon a time,” so goes the
tale, “when viewing himself in Nature’s own looking-glass, clear water,
he was unfortunate enough to discover for the first time, and much to
his disgust, that he was repulsively ugly.” Talking to himself, he said,
“Lest I be hated by all men for my ugliness I will retire to the hollow
places on the mountain tops.” He did so, and thenceforward lived in a
serpent shrine; “For,” added he, continuing the soliloquy, “if I remain
in the form of a man I shall be despised, but if I assume that of a
snake, everybody will fear and obey me.” The inundation from the sea
named in this legend may be the grain of truth which at the time was
thought to be worth preserving. The other parts of the story suggest
that the cannibals’ ideal of a superior deity was once far higher and
nearer perfection than it has since grown to be. At one time it was a
purer hero-worship, which, instead of gradually ascending to something
still higher, began at some undiscoverable turning-point to take a
downward course, deteriorating from its great ideal—a glorious
conqueror—first to an invaded and retreating warrior, then to a
miserable craven, and last of all to a crawling reptile, seeking to do
by the terror which his outward shape inspired what in better days he
had accomplished by heroic wisdom and courage. In pointing out the
changes said to have come over the people’s god, it is difficult to
escape the conclusion that these changes were rather in the people
themselves than in their god. Hence, much that is attributed to him,
while purely fabulous, will, if interpreted as concerning them, be
simply historical.
Dengeh is a god of wrath. His ire burns at times with dire effect. He
often punishes his offending people, one year by blighting their crops,
another by floods that carry everything before them, and a third by
hurricanes, which not only strip the trees of their fruits, but utterly
destroy the trees themselves, and blow away houses and temples and
everything else capable of being blown away. Such a god would surely
find it an easy thing to destroy man from off the face of the earth. The
legends tell us that he actually attempted something of the sort on a
small scale when his two mischievous sons once so successfully tried
their eye and hand on their father’s sacred bird, which every morning
was in the habit of waking the god by its crowing. For the
never-forgiven crime of shooting this pet-bird, the old god visited the
country with a flood, which washed away every place where the refugees
sought shelter. The criminal twin-brothers drifted at last into the Rewa
district, where they became the patron deities of that most important
branch of industry in Fiji, canoe-building, which, from the date of the
catastrophe that brought it such high patronage, has flourished
amazingly, and outstripped every other industry for which the country is
noted.
Some have regarded this legend as a traditionary account of Noah’s
flood, but there is nothing to support that view. The tradition itself
is not one of the oldest productions of the Fijian brain. The flood was
a local one, and many places not more than 60ft. above the usual river
level remained untouched by it. The Bau kingdom was already a power in
Fiji, yet it is well-known that this power did not begin to rise in
importance till towards the end of the last century. Floods in some
districts are also almost of yearly occurrence, and they form the
subject of a torrent of legends. The nature of the sacred bird to
revenge whose death the flood was sent has been wrapped in a good deal
of mystery. In the old legends the bird has what is clearly an
onomatopoetic name. It is spelt “Turukawa,” and pronounced
“Toorookawwah.” Now let anyone pronounce it thus in a somewhat drawling
manner, and see if he cannot recognise in the tones a resemblance to the
voice of the bird that wakes the village before the dawn. It is plain
from other legends that the bird was a bright-colored cock. His legs are
represented as being covered with large white cowrie shells, and his
feathers as being so abundant that when one wing only was plucked they
rose up and covered the mountain tops like a dense fog. In times of
drought and famine Dengeh was supplicated with costly offerings. The
priests would beseech him to send forth his greatest ambassador and
foreman of works, Breadfruit by name, to mass up the clouds for rain, or
cause the yam plantations to flourish, or ripen the fruits, or do any
other good work to meet the most widely-pressing want of the times.
The demigods were the offspring of later and corrupter ages. How corrupt
may be imagined from legends which tell us that men were not wanting
who, dissatisfied with the god or gods that were, would start on
god-hunting expeditions, hoping to find something nearer their notions
of what a god should be—a being more worthy of their homage, and more
likely to bestow upon them his favors. There was a chief named King of
the Little Water. One day, after due thought on the subject, this chief
became convinced that the gods his fathers had told him about were not
only too few, but they were not the kind of gods he needed and must
have. Moreover, he had a selfish object in view in seeking an additional
master. Impelled by these motives, he one day made a rush to the hills,
on reaching which he began to run hither and thither, shouting wildly as
he ran, “Who will be my god? Who will be my god? Ho! ho! Who lives here?
Who will be my god? Ho!” But no voice answered. The king of the Little
Water rushed down again to the beach, where, repeating the cries, he was
at last answered by a snake. Uncoiling from sleep, this snake replied,
“Why are you calling me? I will be thy god. I! I! I will be thy god!”
Whereupon the indefatigable god-hunter ceased his ravings, adopted the
common snake as his god, and, which was the chief object he had in view,
was in his turn appointed priest.
In Dengeh’s most flourishing days his priests were a numerous and
wealthy body. Pilgrims from all parts of the group were in the habit of
visiting them during important crises, in order to consult the greatest
known oracle in Cannibal-land. The canoes of these pilgrims were
generally well laden with every kind of Fijian property, such as clubs,
spears, sacred shells, kava-root, native cloth, and, in later times,
whales’ teeth, and other riches from the ships of the white man. It was
the custom for the priests to throw many of these offerings into
Dengeh’s caves on the Screw-pine Hills, some to remain there for ever,
and others to be taken out again no doubt as soon as possible after the
visitors were fairly out of sight. Whether this was done in every case
or not it is certain that the greater portion of the gifts were never
taken up to the hills at all, being the undisputed fees and perquisites
of the priestly office. Those articles that were thrown to the god and
not subsequently abstracted from the sacred treasury, were left either
to rot or to remain in undisturbed quiet till the foot of the white man
crashed in upon the tall reed-grass, and his native guides brought them
once more into the light in various stages of decay.
In some of the sayings reported by poets and priests as Dengeh’s own,
resurrection gleams appear here and there, but only very dimly, as in
this one:—“In far back times when a certain corpse had lain a long
period in the grave, Dengeh gave orders for it to be disinterred, but
the people refused to obey. He commanded again and again, but only to be
disobeyed. Whereupon he said, “Very well; do it not. Had you done what I
desired, the dead body would have been restored to life, and all flesh
should thereafter have taken part in a resurrection. But since you have
refused to disinter this one body, all your bodies shall die once and
for ever.”” In this death of the body the cannibal philosopher firmly
believes.
From all that is discoverable to the contrary in the mythical accounts
of Dengeh, it would seem that this god, in whose existence the Fijian
had such strong faith, did at some unknown period of that existence
become enshrined in the person of a great and powerful chief, probably
the most wonderful man and greatest hero ever known in cannibal-land.
From the time of this enshrinement till the kingdom began to decline,
the interests of god and chief were one; but afterwards, when men began
to regard this union as less powerful than formerly, and something which
they might even venture to disregard, Dengeh left the human for the
serpent form, in order to retain his influence over them and, if
possible, stay the work of ruin. Of course these changes are the
inventions of the priests, and not the result of any action or
revelation on the part of the god himself. The lowering of the god to a
hero and the raising of the hero to be one with the god, are acts
perfectly consistent with cannibal mythology, in which we discover a
religion that, if on its upward path of improvement, compels us to
wonder greatly at its progress, seeing it has climbed to where the
object of the people’s best thoughts and worship is seen clothed in
god-like attributes and widely spoken of as the “Model Inventor,” the
“Creator and True Appreciator of Beauty,” the “Giver of Good Things for
Man’s Good and Evil Things for his Correction,” the “Great Earth-shaker”
for the earth’s special benefit, and the “Rock” that knows no decay. But
if, as is more probable, this religion when found by us, was on its road
to ruin, our astonishment need be none the less, for then we see the
soul of it struggling hard against ever-growing corruption to hold fast
its first possession, or at least the next best representative of it as
developed in the highest models among the worshippers themselves—the
worship of Genius and Power.
[Illustration]
Cameron, Laing & Co., Printers, 112 Flinders Lane East, Melbourne.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers.
4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.