MAKING FRIENDS
The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-estimated.
The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak
with elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has
a tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an attempt upon the
others.
And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters
abound. Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the
bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and hamlet;
and even where these are unserviceable, the natives themselves have
often scraped up a little English, and in the French zone (though far
less commonly) a little French-English, or an efficient pidgin, what is
called to the westward "Beach-la-Mar," comes easy to the Polynesian; it
is now taught, besides, in the schools of Hawaii; and from the
multiplicity of British ships, and the nearness of the States on the one
hand and the colonies on the other, it may be called, and will almost
certainly become, the tongue of the Pacific.
I will instance a few examples. I met in Majuro a Marshall Island boy
who spoke excellent English; this he had learned in the German firm in
Jaluit, yet did not speak one word of German. I heard from a gendarme
who had taught school in Rapa-iti that while the children had the utmost
difficulty or reluctance to learn French, they picked up English on the
wayside, and as if by accident. On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls
in the Carolines, my friend Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the
lads playing cricket on the beach and talking English; and it was in
English that the crew of the _Janet Nicoll_, a set of black boys from
different Melanesian islands, communicated with other natives throughout
the cruise, transmitted orders, and sometimes jested together on the
fore-hatch. But what struck me perhaps most of all was a word I heard on
the verandah of the Tribunal at Noumea. A case had just been heard--a
trial for infanticide against an ape-like native woman; and the audience
were smoking cigarettes as they awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable
French lady, not far from tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared
she would engage the prisoner to be her children's nurse. The bystanders
exclaimed at the proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke
no language. "_Mais vous savez_," objected the fair sentimentalist;
"_ils apprennent si vite l'anglais_!"
But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first stage of
my relations with natives I was helped by two things. To begin with, I
was the showman of the _Casco_. She, her fine lines, tall spars, and
snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon, and the white, the
gilt, and the repeating mirrors of the tiny cabin, brought us a hundred
visitors. The men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms, as their
fathers fathomed out the ships of Cook; the women declared the cabins
more lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in
the chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I
have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and
delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions.
Biscuit, jam, and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European
parlours, the photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their
everyday costumes and physiognomies, had been transformed, in three
weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign; alien faces,
barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered, in the swerving
cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise. Her Majesty was often
recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss her photograph;
Captain Speedy--in an Abyssinian war-dress, supposed to be the uniform
of the British army--met with much acceptance; and the effigies of Mr.
Andrew Lang were admired in the Marquesas. There is the place for him to
go when he shall be weary of Middlesex and Homer.
It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth some
knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not much
beyond a century has passed since these were in the same convulsive and
transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both cases an alien
authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed, new customs
introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding money as the means and
object of existence. The commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound
to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the
cherished practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,
proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under cloud of
night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving Highlander;
long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-eating Kanaka. The
grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and resentments, the alarms and
sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs, reminded me continually of the days
of Lovat and Struan. Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a
touchy punctilio, are common to both races: common to both tongues the
trick of dropping medial consonants.
Here is a table of two widespread Polynesian words:--
House. Love.[1]
Tahitian FARE AROHA
New Zealand WHARE
Samoan FALE TALOFA
Manihiki FALE ALOHA
Hawaiian HALE ALOHA
Marquesan HA'E KAOHA
The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan
instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots.
Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch,
written with an apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a
perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to this day. When a Scot
pronounces water, better, or bottle--_wa'er, be'er_, or _bo'le_--the
sound is precisely that of the catch; and I think we may go beyond, and
say, that if such a population could be isolated, and this
mispronunciation should become the rule, it might prove the first stage
of transition from _t_ to _k_, which is the disease of Polynesian
languages. The tendency of the Marquesans, however, is to urge against
consonants, or at least on the very common letter _l_, a war of mere
extermination. A hiatus is agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even
of the stranger soon grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the
Marquesan will you find such names as _Haaii_ and _Paaaeua_, when each
individual vowel must be separately uttered.
These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own
folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not only inclined
me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but continually modified
my judgment. A polite Englishman comes to-day to the Marquesans and is
amazed to find the men tattooed; polite Italians came not long ago to
England and found our fathers stained with woad; and when I paid the
return visit as a little boy, I was highly diverted with the
backwardness of Italy: so insecure, so much a matter of the day and
hour, is the pre-eminence of race. It was so that I hit upon a means of
communication which I recommend to travellers. When I desired any detail
of savage custom, or of superstitious belief, I cast back in the story
of my fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal
barbarism: Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's head, the second-sight,
the Water Kelpie--each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the
black bull's head of Stirling procured me the legend of _Rahero_; and
what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts, enabled me
to learn, and helped me to understand, about the _Tevas_ of Tahiti. The
native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his
lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must
rouse and share; or he had better content himself with travels from the
blue bed to the brown. And the presence of one Cockney titterer will
cause a whole party to walk in clouds of darkness.
The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the west of
the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A grove of palms,
perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as for a triumph) with
fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour. A road runs from end to
end of the covert among beds of flowers, the milliner's shop of the
community; and here and there, in the grateful twilight, in an air
filled with a diversity of scents, and still within hearing of the surf
upon the reef, the native houses stand in scattered neighbourhood. The
same word, as we have seen, represents in many tongues of Polynesia,
with scarce a shade of difference, the abode of man. But although the
word be the same, the structure itself continually varies; and the
Marquesan, among the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet
the most commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage
houses of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of
the polite Samoan--none of these can be compared with the Marquesan
_paepae-hae_, or dwelling platform. The paepae is an oblong terrace
built without cement of black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty feet
in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and accessible
by a broad stair. Along the back of this, and coming to about half its
width, runs the open front of the house, like a covered gallery: the
interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in its bareness, the sleeping
space divided off by an endlong coaming, some bright raiment perhaps
hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one of White's sewing-machines, the
only marks of civilisation. On the outside, at one end of the terrace,
burns the cooking-fire under a shed; at the other there is perhaps a
pen for pigs; the remainder is the evening lounge and _al fresco_
banquet-hall of the inhabitants. To some houses water is brought down
the mountain in bamboo pipes, perforated for the sake of sweetness. With
the Highland comparison in my mind, I was struck to remember the
sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I have sat and been
entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands. Two things, I
suppose, explain the contrast. In Scotland wood is rare, and with
materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is
excluded. And in Scotland it is cold. Shelter and a hearth are needs so
pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day after a bare
bellyful, and at night when he saith, "Aha, it is warm!" he has not
appetite for more. Or if for something else, then something higher; a
fine school of poetry and song arose in these rough shelters, and an air
like "Lochaber no more" is an evidence of refinement more convincing, as
well as more imperishable, than a palace.
To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and
dependants resort. In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes, and
the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps the lamp
glints already between the pillars of the house, you shall behold them
silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and children; and the dogs
and pigs frisk together up the terrace stairway, switching rival tails.
The strangers from the ship were soon equally welcome: welcome to dip
their fingers in the wooden dish, to drink cocoa-nuts, to share the
circulating pipe, and to hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of
the French, the Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San
Francisco and New Yo'ko. In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any
tourist, I have met the same plain and dignified hospitality.
I have mentioned two facts--the distasteful behaviour of our earliest
visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon the
cushions--which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan manners.
The great majority of Polynesians are excellently mannered; but the
Marquesan stands apart, annoying and attractive, wild, shy, and refined.
If you make him a present he affects to forget it, and it must be
offered him again at his going: a pretty formality I have found nowhere
else. A hint will get rid of any one or any number; they are so fiercely
proud and modest; while many of the more lovable but blunter islanders
crowd upon a stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies. A
slight or an insult the Marquesan seems never to forget. I was one day
talking by the wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes
suddenly to flash and his stature to swell. A white horseman was coming
down the mountain, and as he passed, and while he paused to exchange
salutations with myself, Hoka was still staring and ruffling like a
gamecock. It was a Corsican who had years before called him _cochon
sauvage_--_cocon chauvage_, as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so
nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of
greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits,
fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship
with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and
pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell
cocoa-nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things that a
gentleman should give, not sell; or at least that he should not sell to
any friend. On another occasion I gave my boat's crew a luncheon of
chocolate and biscuits. I had sinned, I could never learn how, against
some point of observance; and though I was drily thanked, my offerings
were left upon the beach. But our worst mistake was a slight we put on
Toma, Hoka's adoptive father, and in his own eyes the rightful chief of
Anaho. In the first place, we did not call upon him, as perhaps we
should, in his fine new European house, the only one in the hamlet. In
the second, when we came ashore upon a visit to his rival, Taipi-kikino,
it was Toma whom we saw standing at the head of the beach, a
magnificent figure of a man, magnificently tattooed; and it was of Toma
that we asked our question: "Where is the chief?" "What chief?" cried
Toma, and turned his back on the blasphemers. Nor did he forgive us.
Hoka came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of all the
countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the _Casco_.
The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute. The flying
city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James's Park affords but a
pale figure of the _Casco_ anchored before Anaho; for the Londoner has
still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan passes to his grave
through an unbroken uniformity of days.
On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a valedictory
party came on board: nine of our particular friends equipped with gifts
and dressed as for a festival. Hoka, the chief dancer and singer, the
greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the handsomest young fellows in the
world--sullen, showy, dramatic, light as a feather and strong as an
ox--it would have been hard, on that occasion, to recognise, as he sat
there stooped and silent, his face heavy and grey. It was strange to see
the lad so much affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift
one of the curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our
friend, so gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of
the half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:
strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan, the
last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all been given
to us by their possessors--their chief merchandise, for which they had
sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers, which they pressed on
us for nothing as soon as we were friends. The last visit was not long
protracted. One after another they shook hands and got down into their
canoe; when Hoka turned his back immediately upon the ship, so that we
saw his face no more. Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and
facing us with gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis
dipped the ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats. This was the
farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and
though the _Casco_ remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not one
returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided appearing on
the beach. This reserve and dignity is the finest trait of the
Marquesan.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Where that word is used as a salutation I give that form.