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THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME XVIII
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No._ .......
[Illustration: A MAP TO ILLUSTRATE R. L. STEVENSON'S LIFE IN THE SOUTH
SEAS]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME EIGHTEEN
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
PAGE
Editorial Note ix
PART I.--THE MARQUESAS
CHAPTER
I. An Island Landfall 5
II. Making Friends 12
III. The Maroon 21
IV. Death 28
V. Depopulation 36
VI. Chiefs and Tapus 44
VII. Hatiheu 53
VIII. The Port of Entry 61
IX. The House of Temoana 69
X. A Portrait and a Story 77
XI. Long-Pig--a Cannibal High Place 85
XII. The Story of a Plantation 95
XIII. Characters 105
XIV. In a Cannibal Valley 112
XV. The Two Chiefs of Atuona 119
PART II.--THE PAUMOTUS
I. The Dangerous Archipelago--Atolls at a Distance 129
II. Fakarava: an Atoll at Hand 137
III. A House To Let in a Low Island 146
IV. Traits and Sects in the Paumotus 155
V. A Paumotuan Funeral 165
VI. Graveyard Stories 170
PART III.--THE EIGHT ISLANDS
I. The Kona Coast 187
II. A Ride in the Forest 197
III. The City of Refuge 203
IV. Kaahumanu 209
V. The Lepers of Kona 215
PART IV.--THE GILBERTS
I. Butaritari 223
II. The Four Brothers 229
III. Around Our House 237
IV. A Tale of a Tapu 247
V. A Tale of a Tapu (_continued_) 255
VI. The Five Days' Festival 265
VII. Husband and Wife 278
PART V.--THE GILBERTS--APEMAMA
I. The King of Apemama: the Royal Trader 289
II. The King of Apemama: Foundation Of Equator Town 298
III. The King of Apemama: the Palace of Many Women 306
IV. The King of Apemama: Equator Town And the Palace 313
V. King and Commons 321
VI. The King of Apemama: Devil-work 330
VII. The King of Apemama 342
LETTERS FROM SAMOA 351
EDITORIAL NOTE
_The following chapters are selected from a series which was first
published partially in 'Black and White' (February to December 1891),
and fully in the New York 'Sun' during the same period. The voyages
which supplied the occasion and the material for the work were three in
number, viz. one of seven months (June 1888 to January 1889) in the
yacht 'Casco' from San Francisco to the Marquesas, the Paumotus, Tahiti,
and thence northward to Hawaii; a second (June to December 1889) in the
trading schooner 'Equator,' from Honolulu, the Hawaiian capital, where
the author had stayed in the intervening five months, to the Gilberts
and thence to Samoa; and a third (April to September 1890) in the
trading steamer 'Janet Nicoll,' which set out from Sydney and followed a
very devious course, extending as far as Penrhyn in the Eastern to the
Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific._
_Before setting out on the first of these voyages, the author had
contracted to write an account of his adventures in the form of letters
for serial publication. The plan by and by changed in his mind into that
of a book partly of travel and partly of research, which should combine
the results of much careful observation and enquiry upon matters of
island history, custom, belief, and tradition, with some account of his
own experiences and those of his travelling companions. Under the
nominal title of 'Letters' he began to compose the chapters of such a
book on board the 'Janet Nicoll,' and continued the task during the
first ten months of his residence in Samoa (October 1890 to July 1891).
Before the serial publication had gone very far, he realised that the
personal and impersonal elements in his work were not very successfully_
_ combined, nor in proportions that contented his readers. Accordingly
he abandoned for the time being the idea of republishing the chapters in
book form. But when the scheme of the Edinburgh Edition was maturing, he
desired that a selection should be made from them and should form one
volume of that edition. That desire was carried out. The same selection
is here republished, with the addition of a half-section then omitted,
describing a visit to the Kona coast of Hawaii and the lepers' port of
embarkation for Molokai._
_It must be understood that a considerable portion of the author's
voyages above mentioned is not recorded at all in the following pages.
Of one of its most attractive episodes, the visit to Tahiti, no account
was written; while of his experiences in Hawaii only the visit to the
Kona coast is included. Several chapters which did not come out to the
writer's satisfaction have been omitted. Of the five sections here
given, each is complete in itself, with the exception of Part III. The
first deals with the Marquesas, the second with the Paumolus--the former
a volcanic and mountainous group, the latter a low group of atolls or
coral islands, both in the Eastern Pacific and both under the
protectorate of France. The third section is fragmentary, and deals, as
has been said, with only one portion of the writer's experiences in
Hawaii. The last two describe his residence in the Gilberts, a remote
and little-known coral group in the Western Pacific, which at the time
of his visit was under independent native government, but has since been
annexed by Great Britain. This is the part of his work with which the
author himself was best satisfied, and it derives additional interest
from describing a state of manners and government which has now passed
away._
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
BEING AN ACCOUNT OF EXPERIENCES AND OBSERVATIONS IN THE MARQUESAS,
PAUMOTUS AND GILBERT ISLANDS IN THE COURSE OF TWO CRUISES, ON THE
YACHT _CASCO_ (1888) AND THE SCHOONER _EQUATOR_ (1889)
PART I
THE MARQUESAS
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
CHAPTER I
AN ISLAND LANDFALL
For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while
before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the
afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It
was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling
to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had
attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's
schooner yacht, the _Casco_, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San
Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and
was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to
return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward
in a trading schooner, the _Equator_, of a little over seventy tons,
spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert
group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time
gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had
gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new
interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and
I decided to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third
cruise, in the trading steamer _Janet Nicoll_. If more days are granted
me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man
most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the
foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from
the uttermost parts of the sea.
That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's hero is
less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them;
they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind
fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a
visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more
rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power
upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside
travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea
and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and
language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit
as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first
sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a
virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon was an hour down
by four in the morning. In the east a radiating centre of brightness
told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline, the morning bank was
already building, black as ink. We have all read of the swiftness of the
day's coming and departure in low latitudes; it is a point on which the
scientific and sentimental tourist are at one, and has inspired some
tasteful poetry. The period certainly varies with the season; but here
is one case exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four,
the sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could
distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon. Eight
degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval was passed
on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall
heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then
approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness.
Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the
starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in
cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun
displayed the needles of Ua-pu. These pricked about the line of the
horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they
stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit
signboard of a world of wonders.
Not one soul aboard the _Casco_ had set foot upon the islands, or knew,
except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was
with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the
bosom of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The
land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and
buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl
and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The
suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were
confounded with the articulations of the mountain; and the isle and its
unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.
There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.
Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay
concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-mark given--a
certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack
and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary
of nature. These we were to find; for these we craned and stared,
focussed glasses, and wrangled over charts; and the sun was overhead and
the land close ahead before we found them. To a ship approaching, like
the _Casco_, from the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous
features of a striking coast; the surf flying high above its base;
strange, austere, and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and
Jane, or Adam and Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the
breakers.
Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear the
explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there
was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that
quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze,
the _Casco_ skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach
and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The
trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have
been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the
Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more
considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now
with a deeper entry; and the _Casco_, hauling her wind, began to slide
into the bay of Anaho. The coco-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so
graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen
crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of
mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it
was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every
crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nesting there
like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the
razor edges of the summit.
Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,
continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way,
appearing motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of
young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a
hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a
house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and
one of these surrounded with what seemed a garden. These conspicuous
habitations, that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of
the passage of whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands
and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native
village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of
beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and
whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the coco-tree and the island man
are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. "The coral waxes, the palm
grows, but man departs," says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all
three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of
anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner
of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner
turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great
event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may
extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship's
company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.
Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the
hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across
the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European clothes:
the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief, Taipi-kikino.
"Captain, is it permitted to come on board?" were the first words we
heard among the islands. Canoe followed canoe, till the ship swarmed
with stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in a shirt,
some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some,
and these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful
patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as
something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange
and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity--all
talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with
us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices
palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome; no show of civility; no
hand extended save that of the chief and Mr. Regler. As we still
continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint ran high and rude;
and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our meanness amid jeering
laughter. Amongst other angry pleasantries--"Here is a mighty fine
ship," said he, "to have no money on board!" I own I was inspired with
sensible repugnance; even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their
power; we had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the
fact that they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of
timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else have
reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and
accomplices of native outrage? When he reads this confession, our kind
friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.
Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was filled
from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned generations,
squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with
embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are large, luminous, and
melting; they are like the eyes of animals and some Italians. A kind of
despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring
orbs, and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless
crowd: and a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of
articulate communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the
dwellers of some alien planet.
To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to
cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify his
diet. But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under
whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are
on every hand of us, constraining and preventing. I was now to see what
men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been
conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or
Papinian. By the same step I had journeyed forth out of that comfortable
zone of kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be
remedied; and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images.
Methought, in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and
when I returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I
should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text. Nay, and I
even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged; perhaps they
were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent friend, Kauanui,
whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the rest, for a man of some
authority, might leap from his hams with an ear-splitting signal, the
ship be carried at a rush, and the ship's company butchered for the
table.
There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor
anything more groundless. In my experience of the islands, I had never
again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-day, I should
be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised. The majority of Polynesians
are easy folk to get in touch with, frank, fond of notice, greedy of the
least affection, like amiable, fawning dogs; and even with the
Marquesans, so recently and so imperfectly redeemed from a
blood-boltered barbarism, all were to become our intimates, and one, at
least, was to mourn sincerely our departure.