If you draw a line from the tip of New Zealand to the top of the
Hawaiian Islands, you will be able to indicate the true Polynesian
area. On the islands towards the Malay Peninsula there is a mixed
people who show the Papuan strain that is in them. They are the
Melanesians. On the American side of the line there is a singularly
homogeneous people who are of a type like to our own. They are the
Polynesians. We have been able to pay ourselves the compliment of
admiring them ever since the chronicler of Mendaña’s voyages looked
upon the men and women of the Marquesas and found that “they had
beautiful faces and the most promising animation of countenance; and
were in all things so becoming that the pilot-mayor Quiros affirmed
nothing in his life caused him so much regret as leaving such fine
creatures to be lost in that country.” [1]
And yet the Polynesians, so like us physically, have in their romances
none of the familiar veins that one can discover in, let us say, the
folk-tales of the darker peoples in the lands around India. I take up
Studies in Religion, Folk-lore, and Custom in North Borneo and the
Malay Peninsula, [2] and I strike at once into:
Now the Raja had given it out that whoever could remove the
dragon’s head should marry his daughter, who was shut up in an
inner room and enclosed by a seven-fold fence of ivory; but nobody
could do it, for the dragon’s head was as big as a mountain.
This is from a folk-tale told amongst the aboriginal tribes of the
Malay Peninsula. And when I read the opening of another tale I am in an
imaginative land so familiar that I know every turn and track in it.—
“Oh,” said Serunggal, “it is no use my stopping here. I had better
go and marry a Raja’s daughter.”
The tale goes on, and we have the Raja setting the adventurous youth
three tasks, just as the King or the Enchanter sets the youth three
tasks in a story that has been told in every village in Ireland and
Serbia, in Spain and Sweden, in Russia and Italy; in a story that was
given literary form in classic Greece in Jason and Medea, and in
mediæval Wales in Kulhwch and Olwen. And this tale of Serunggal and the
Raja’s daughter belongs to one of the dark tribes of Borneo.
There are animal helpers in this particular tale, just as there are
animal helpers in the ancient Greek folk-tale of Cupid and Psyche.
Indeed, the stories belonging to Borneo and the Malay Peninsula are
well filled with animals—turtles and deer, elephants and ant-eaters;
they might be the material out of which Rudyard Kipling made his
unforgettable Jungle Book and his Just-So Stories.
In Polynesia we find no romance that is based on formulæ familiar to
us. Only occasionally does a helping creature appear. There are
practically no animal stories, for the sufficient reason that the
Polynesian did not have opportunities for forming a wide animal
acquaintanceship. He brought the pig and the dog to the Islands with
him; and the shark and the turtle, the owl and the plover, were the
only creatures that aroused an interest in him. Even the way of
counting things is changed when we get into Polynesian romance: instead
of three, seven, and nine, we have four, eight, and sixteen for the
cabalistic numbers.
And yet, as all human desire is the same, and as human mentality
compels a certain sequence of incident, and there seem to be patterns
in incident that all human beings find it delightful to work out, the
Polynesian stories have the elements and the combination of elements
that make fine narrative. Often the Polynesian story-teller rediscovers
a formula that we have used to make a memorable tale. Thus, in the
present collection, the daughter of the King of Ku-ai-he-lani will
recall Cinderella, and the story of Au-ke-le will recall the story of
the Irish hero Oisin and all the other stories of men who travelled far
and returned to their own land; it will remind us of Odysseus and Rip
Van Winkle.
In the folk-romance and in the mythological stories of Europe there are
places that may not be entered, and there are women whom a man must not
approach. There is Blue Beard’s Chamber; there is Danaë, and there is
the Eithlinn of Celtic mythology. Polynesian romance has places that
may not be entered, and women who must not be approached by men. And it
has these instances in almost every story. Indeed, without the guarded
maiden and the forbidden place a Polynesian story-teller would find it
difficult to carry on. And one knows that when he was dealing with one
or the other he was dealing with the life around him: the place was
tapu, [3] the maiden was tapu. And the place or the maiden was tapu
simply because a king or a chief with the privilege of declaring tapu
had so declared it. When we read the story of Ka-we-lu in The Arrow and
the Swing, or of Kama in The Story of Ha-le-ma-no and the Princess
Kama, we can easily see how, as the simplicity of tapu was forgotten,
the maiden would be given a fantastic security like that of Danaë in
her brazen tower, or like that of Eithlinn in her inaccessible island,
and we can see how motives would be invented for keeping her apart:
Danaë’s son and Eithlinn’s son are destined to slay their grandfathers.
Every race has had tapu. But the Polynesians held to it and made it
their single discipline. In these Polynesian stories we are at the very
beginning of a romance that for Europeans has grown to be fraught with
magic and mystery.
I spent the months of January, February, March, and April of 1923 in
the Hawaiian Islands. I went there under the following circumstances:
The Hawaiian Legislature had formed a Commission on Myth and Folk-lore;
the function of the Commission was to have a survey made of the stories
that had been collected and that belonged to myth and folk-lore of the
Islands, and to have them made over into stories for children—primarily
for the children of the Hawaiian Islands. By an arrangement made
between the Commission and the Yale University Press, I was invited to
make the survey and to reshape the stories.
I learned something of the language; I sought out those who still had
the tradition of Hawaiian romance and who could recite it in the
traditional way; I made a study of all the material that had been
collected; I placed myself in the hands of the very distinguished group
of Polynesian scholars that is in Honolulu. Quite early in my
researches I came to the conclusion that my work should be based on the
Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, published
by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural
History, in Honolulu, and I made it my main task to understand the
background of the stories given in that collection, and to hear as many
of them as possible from the lips of the surviving custodians of the
Polynesian tradition in Hawaii.
I found in the Hawaiian Islands conditions that are lamentably like the
conditions in certain European countries where separate and interesting
cultures are being pushed aside by this or that culture that is
politically and commercially important. In Hawaii there is a great
breach in the native tradition: I have been in houses where a
grandmother or grandfather knew traditional Hawaiian poems (mele) and
could chant them in the traditional way, while a son or daughter would
be able to translate them, but not able to chant them, and a grandchild
would be able neither to chant the poems nor translate them. Once, I
remember, in such a house, I went to see what a little girl, the
granddaughter of a lady who had chanted mele to me for about an hour,
was studying. This child had not allowed herself to be interrupted
either by the chanting of her grandmother or by the translating that
her father did for me; she was bent on mastering a lesson in a book
that she kept before her—an American school geography. “Stockholm is
the capital of Sweden, Vienna is the capital of Austria,” was one of
the items that had kept her absorbed.
I discovered that of the stories which I knew from the Fornander
Collection, few lived in the memory of the generations at present in
the Islands. On the Island of Maui I met a distinguished Hawaiian lady
who had been at the court of King Kalakaua, and who, in her youth, had
been a trained story-teller. She tried to give me some of the stories
that belonged to her repertoire. But no sooner had she begun than she
declared that she was no longer familiar with the language in which the
stories were told—they were in the idiom of the Alii or the Chiefs, an
idiom that she had not used since her days at court.
I heard many stories told, some by men, some by women. One of the best
story-tellers that I came across was a young man whom I met on the
Island of Molokai. His father was Chinese, and he had learnt the
stories from his grandmother. He told me several stories; one of them
was the story of the rescue of Hina by her son Kana, a story given in
Fornander, and evidently belonging to the folk.
What impressed me most in these recitals was the gesture of the
story-teller. Every feature, every finger of the man or woman becomes
alive, becomes dramatic, as the recital is entered on. The gesture of
the Hawaiian makes the telling of a story a dramatic entertainment.
Scholars have written of the long and monotonous stories told in the
old days in Hawaii. The stories were long, but the gesture of the
story-teller must have saved them from an unrelieved monotony. I was
made to recall again and again Melville’s description of an
entertainment given him by a genial Marquesan youth; it is a
description that gives the spirit in which the unspoiled Polynesian
dramatizes his moods and his reactions. Says Melville: “Upon my
signifying my desire that he should pluck me the young fruit of some
particular tree, the handsome savage, throwing himself into a sudden
attitude of surprise, feigns astonishment at the apparent absurdity of
the request. Maintaining this position for a moment, the strange
emotions depicted on his countenance soften down into one of humorous
resignation to my will, and then looking wistfully up to the tufted top
of the tree, he stands on tip-toe, straining his neck and elevating his
arm, as though endeavoring to reach the fruit from the ground where he
stands. As if defeated in this childish attempt, he now sinks to the
earth despondingly, beating his breast in well-acted despair; and then,
starting to his feet all at once, and throwing back his head, raises
both hands, like a school boy about to catch a falling ball. And
continuing this for a moment or two, as if in expectation that the
fruit was going to be tossed down to him by some good spirit on the
tree-top, he turns wildly round in another fit of despair, and scampers
off to a distance of thirty or forty yards. Here he remains a while,
eyeing the tree, the very picture of misery; but the next moment,
receiving, as it were, a flash of inspiration, he rushes again towards
it, and clasping both arms about the trunk, with one elevated a little
above the other, he presses the soles of his feet close together
against the tree, extending his legs from it until they are nearly
horizontal, and his body becomes doubled into an arch; then, hand over
hand and foot after foot he rises from the earth with steady rapidity,
and almost before you are aware of it, has gained the cradled and
embowered nest of nuts, and with boisterous glee flings the fruit to
the ground.” Imagine this spontaneous gesture applied to the telling of
a story, every incident of which gives rise to gesture. But the gesture
in the story-recital was not merely spontaneous; it was trained, as was
the gesture in the hula or Polynesian ballet. Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has
a chapter on gesture in his Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, and he
gives this instance amongst others: “To indicate death, the death of a
person, the finger-tips, placed in apposition, are drawn away from each
other with a sweeping gesture and at the same time lowered till the
palms face the ground. In this case also we find diversity. One old
man, well acquainted with hula matters, being asked to signify in
pantomimic fashion ‘The king is sick,’ went through the following
motions: He first pointed upward, to indicate the heaven-born one, the
king; then he brought his hands to his body and threw his face into a
painful grimace. To indicate the death of the king he threw his hands
upward towards the sky, as if to signify a removal by flight.”
This unconstrained, dramatic gesture is being lost. There is no longer
a school for gesture in the hula. And the Hawaiian is checking his
movements towards gesture. It used to be said: “Tie an Hawaiian’s hands
and he can’t talk.” The older men and women still have that wonderful
command of their features and their hands—a command that made them the
greatest ballet-performers that the world, I believe, has ever had—but
the younger generation feel that to use gesture is to be rustic, to be
“Kanaka.”.
There is still, amongst the Hawaiians who live in the old Polynesian
way, in villages along the beaches, with the taro patches near, a great
treasury of poetry and native lore. But the newspaper and the victrola
are taking up the time and the interest that used to be devoted to
poetry, traditional games, riddles, and the like. I have been in
cottages where the people still sit or lie on their mats on the floor,
ignoring tables, chairs, and beds, and where they eat with their
fingers, lifting the poi out of the common bowl. In such houses I have
found a real scholarship, a delight in poetry, and the possession of
such a quantity of it as would put to shame a cultivated American,
Englishman, or Frenchman. But even in such houses I was aware that the
tradition was passing. Sitting on the floor in one such house, around a
petroleum lamp also on the floor, I have spelled out news items in an
Hawaiian newspaper that told of the French in the Ruhr and preparations
for elections in Ireland.
The world surges in on the Hawaiian Islands. And the Hawaiian can no
longer give himself solely to the tradition that bound him to the
valleys and the mountains, and that knit him to Wakea and Papa, who
begat and brought forth the islands and the men and women upon them.
That separate tradition, which for thousands of years he lived by, is
being broken up, as the surge breaks up the lava on his coast. The
Hawaiian who, at the time when the Americans were making their
declaration of independence, was still working with tools of stone,
knowing nothing of metals, of pottery, of the loom, and knowing of no
animal larger than a dog or a pig, has now to take some account of the
continents.
With one exception the titles in this collection cover stories that are
Hawaiian in the sense that they were given their shape upon the
Hawaiian Islands. That exception is The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui.
Although the scene of the demi-god’s adventures is Hawaiian, I have
used incidents related of him in other Polynesian islands—in New
Zealand, Samoa, and the lesser islands. I have treated Ma-ui, not as an
Hawaiian, but as the Pan-Polynesian hero that he is. With this
exception the stories are all out of the Hawaiian tradition, or rather
out of the Polynesian tradition as it has been shaped in Hawaii.
And the stories are mainly taken from that treasure house of Hawaiian
lore, the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore,
which form Volumes IV–VI of the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop
Museum of Honolulu, published 1916–1919. I have gone outside the
Fornander Collection in several instances. The Seven Great Deeds of
Ma-ui comes out of Mr. Westervelt’s valuable book, Ma-ui the Demi-God;
the stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne come out of Mr. Thrum’s Stories of the
Menehunes and Mr. Rice’s Hawaiian Legends; and I have drawn the story
about Hina, the Woman of Lalo-hana, from David Malo’s Hawaiian
Antiquities, and the story about the Shark-god from an old publication
of the Islands, The Maile Quarterly. But it is the Fornander Collection
that has given a cast to this book, and I must now give a brief account
of it.
Abraham Fornander, the author of The Polynesian Race, lived on the
Islands for over forty years. He edited a journal called The
Polynesian, and he was Superintendent of Public Instruction on the
Islands in 1865–1866. He had married an Hawaiian lady, and he was a
strong partisan of the native race.
The theory which he expounds in The Polynesian Race is that the
Polynesian people carried with them into the islands of the Pacific a
culture and a set of ideas that connect them with the East Indians—with
the pre-Sanscrit culture and with an Arabian culture that touched both
the Hebrews and the East Indians. There is no reason to take this
theory into account now. The important thing is that Abraham Fornander,
in order to substantiate it, made an appeal to the traditions that were
then current amongst the natives of Hawaii.
At that time, over forty years ago, there was considerable native
scholarship. Haleole, who made an attempt to found a native literature
with his romance Laieikawai, was writing and publishing. The Mission
School in Lahainaluna on the Island of Maui had become a sort of
Hawaiian university. Abraham Fornander had the good sense to appeal to
native scholars, and he was able to get the best of them to interest
themselves in his project of collecting all the native lore that could
throw a light on the migrations of the Polynesian people. The Hawaiian
monarchy was then in undisputed existence; native institutions were
still vigorous; everywhere there were men and women whose memories were
stocked with the historical traditions and the romances of Hawaii.
With the help of a corps of native scholars a great deal of the
surviving tradition of Hawaii was collected by Fornander. Some of it
was published in the Hawaiian newspapers of the time, but no extensive
publication was given to it. The manuscripts were kept together; then,
on the death of Abraham Fornander in 1887, the collection was acquired
by Charles R. Bishop, the husband of Bernice Pauahi, an Hawaiian
royalty whose estate went to the foundation of the Bernice Pauahi
Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History in Honolulu.
Forty years after it had been got together, the publication of the
material was begun by the Bishop Museum. That was in 1916. The volumes
have appeared under the editorship of that veteran Hawaiian scholar,
Mr. Thomas Thrum, with the Hawaiian text on one page and the English
translation by Mr. John Wise on the other. It is Mr. Wise’s
translations that have furnished me with the bulk of the material for
this book.
Although the stories are described in the Museum publications as
folk-lore, I doubted from the time of my first reading of them that
they were folk-lore in the strict sense of the word; that is, I doubted
their coming out of an unlearned and popular tradition. The greater
number of them seemed to me to be deliberate compositions intended for
a rather select audience. And then I found that a great master of
Hawaiian tradition, Mr. William Hyde Rice, favored this opinion. In the
Introduction to his Hawaiian Legends [4] it is said:
Mr. Rice’s theory as to the origin of these legends is based on the
fact that in the old days, before the discovery of the Islands by
Captain Cook, there were bards and story-tellers, either itinerant
or attached to the courts of the chiefs, similar to the minstrels
and tale-tellers of mediæval Europe. These men formed a distinct
class, and lived only at the courts of the high chiefs.
Accordingly, their stories were heard by none except those people
attached to the service of the chiefs. This accounts for the loss
of many legends, in later years, as they were not commonly known.
These bards or story-tellers sometimes used historical incidents or
natural phenomena for the foundation of their stories, which were
handed down from generation to generation. Other legends were
simply fabrications of the imagination, in which the greatest
“teller of tales” was awarded the highest place in the chief’s
favor. All these elements, fiction combined with fact, and shrouded
in the mist of antiquity, came, by repetition, to be more or less
believed as true. This class of men were skillful in the art of the
“apo”—that is, “catching,” literally, or memorizing instantly at
the first hearing. One man would recite or chant for two or three
hours at a stretch, and when he had finished, his auditor would
start at the beginning of the chant and go through the whole mele
or story without missing or changing a word. These trained men
received through their ears as we receive through our eyes, and in
that way the ancient Hawaiians had a spoken literature much as we
have a written one.
And as to the substance of this spoken literature, Miss Martha Warren
Beckwith, who has made by her edition of Haleole’s romance of
Laieikawai a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Polynesian
poetry and romance, states that the traditional Hawaiian romance
belongs to no isolated group but to the whole Polynesian area. “We
find,” she says, “the same story told in New Zealand and Hawaii,
scarcely changed, even in name.” Miss Beckwith thinks that the bulk of
Hawaiian romance consists of stories about the demi-gods—beings
descended from the gods, or adopted or endowed by them. These legendary
tales reflect actual Polynesian conditions—“Gods and men are, in fact,
to the Polynesian mind, one family under different forms, the gods
having superior control over certain phenomena, a control which they
can impart to their offspring on earth.... The supernatural blends with
the natural in exactly the same way as to the Polynesian mind gods
relate themselves to men, facts about one being regarded as, even
though removed to the heavens, quite as objective as those which belong
to the other, and being employed to explain social customs and physical
appearances in actual experience.”
The bulk of the stories in the present volume are founded, then, on
Polynesian literature rather than on Polynesian folk-lore. They are
based on the compositions of men who were trained in the handling of
character and incident. There are stories in the volume that obviously
belong to folk-lore, however. The stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne, which are
not given in the Fornander Collection, but are taken from the work of
Mr. Thrum and Mr. Rice, are folk-lore, I believe. The stories of Ma-ui
the demi-god are folk-lore, too. The story of Hina coming from the land
under the sea, and the other story of her going to the moon and
becoming the woman in the moon, undoubtedly belong to Polynesian
folk-lore.
I do not believe that the Polynesian language, with its sounds that
seem to belong to the forest and the sea, is going or that it has to
go. Indeed, there may be a Polynesian revival similar to the national
revivals which we have seen in European countries; the Polynesian, with
tragic exceptions in the case of the people of the Marquesas, is coming
back. He has turned the corner; our diseases no longer threaten his
very existence. And yet, although his language and parts of his culture
will probably remain for many generations, his children, if they are in
the American territory of Hawaii, and if they are to read the romances
of old Hawaii, will have to read them in English. For them, and for the
neo-Hawaiian children—the children of American, British, Portuguese,
Japanese, and Chinese parents, mixed or unmixed with Hawaiian
blood—these stories have been reshaped. I have had to condense, expand,
heighten, subdue, rearrange—in a word, I have had to retell the
stories, using the old romances as material for wonder-stories. The old
stories were not for children; they gave an image of life to kings and
soldiers, to courtiers and to ruling women. As in all stories not
originally intended for children, much has had to be suppressed in
retelling them for a youthful audience.
And retelling them has meant that I have had to find a new form for the
stories. The form that I choose to give them is that of the European
folk-tale.
In Hawaiian romance there is a feeling that is rare in any body of
popular European romance—a feeling for the beauty of nature, for
flowers and trees, the aspect of the clouds, the look of the sea, the
sight of mountains, for the beauty of the rainbow and the waterfall.
And part of the delight in retelling these stories is in recalling the
beauties of places that are beautifully named. To be true in any
measure to the originals these stories of my retelling should have in
them the rainbow and the waterfall, the volcano, the forest, the surf
as it foams over the reef of coral. In the hula or Hawaiian ballet, and
in the poetry that is related to the hula, there is, as Dr. Nathaniel
Emerson has observed, always an idyllic feeling. This idyllic feeling
pervades Hawaiian romance also. The scene of many of the stories, when
not laid in lands that are frankly mythical, is laid in an Hawaiian
Arcadia. And how memorable these lands are!—Ku-ai-he-lani, the Country
that Supports the Heavens, and Pali-uli, the easeful land that the gods
have since hidden. Who would not roam through these lands with those
who first told of them and who first heard of them—the gracious and
vivid children of Wakea and Papa?