DEATH
The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is perhaps
the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height of males;
they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in action, graceful in
repose; and the women, though fatter and duller, are still comely
animals. To judge by the eye, there is no race more viable; and yet
death reaps them with both hands. When Bishop Dordillon first came to
Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but
newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his
fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to
readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque mis-spelling of Hapar.
There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any
genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have
been neglected: "He shall be able to see," "He shall be able to tell,"
"He shall be able to charm," said the friendly godmothers; "But he shall
not be able to hear," exclaimed the last. The tribe of Hapaa is said to
have numbered some four hundred when the small-pox came and reduced them
by one fourth. Six months later a woman developed tubercular
consumption; the disease spread like a fire about the valley, and in
less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that
new-created solitude. A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among
new races, the tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard this story
the date staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible. Early
in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first
case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by
the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, and
that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling. And depopulation
works both ways, the doors of death being set wide open, and the door of
birth almost closed. Thus, in the half-year ending July 1888 there were
twelve deaths and but one birth in the district of the Hatiheu. Seven or
eight more deaths were to be looked for in the ordinary course; and M.
Aussel, the observant gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this
rate it is no matter of surprise if the population in that part should
have declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four
hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the
estimated figures. And the rate of decline must have even accelerated
towards the end.
A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from Anaho to
Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling, but cruelly
steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted house which stands
highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily down upon its roof; the
_Casco_ well out in the bay, and rolling for a wager, shrank visibly;
and presently through the gap of Tari's isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to
hang cloudlike on the horizon. Over the summit, where the wind blew
really chill, and whistled in the reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy
fell of the pandanus, we stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the
next vale and bay of Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three
sides. On the fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs
down to seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one
practicable breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is
crowded with lovely and valuable trees,--orange, breadfruit,
mummy-apple, coco, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the
banana. Four perennial streams water and keep it green; and along the
dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the road, for a
considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley. The song of
the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a strong sense
of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like growth of the pandanus,
the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the black pigs galloping in the
bush, and the architecture of the native houses dissipated ere it could
be enjoyed.
The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more
melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is
deserted, the superstructure--pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical
timber--speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the
stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing
stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity.
We must have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms.
On the main road of the island, where it crosses the valley of Taipi,
Mr. Osbourne tells me they are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the
roads have been made long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their
desertion, and must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through
the bush, the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these
survivals: the grave-stones of whole families. Such ruins are tapu[2] in
the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become
outposts of the kingdom of the grave. It might appear a natural and
pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the rearguard of perished
thousands, that their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of
their fathers. I believe, in fact, the custom rests on different and
more grim conceptions. But the house, the grave, and even the body of
the dead, have been always particularly honoured by Marquesans. Until
recently the corpse was sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled
and sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind
of mummy. Offerings are still laid upon the grave. In Traitor's Bay, Mr.
Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son's. And the
sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the
laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred
for the French.
The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his
race. The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with
him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality
awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets
the reality with relief. He does not even seek to support a
disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and
communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave.
Hanging is now the fashion. I heard of three who had hanged themselves
in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though
this be a common form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I
cannot think it will continue popular in the Marquesas. Far more
suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the
fruit of the eva, which offers to the native suicide a cruel but
deliberate death, and gives time for those decencies of the last hour,
to which he attaches such remarkable importance. The coffin can thus be
at hand, the pigs killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already
through the house; and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is
conscious of achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like
Caesar's) adjusted for the final act. Praise not any man till he is dead,
said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners, might be
the Marquesan parody. The coffin, though of late introduction, strangely
engages their attention. It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is
to the European schoolboy. For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the
fathers; at last, but the other day, they let her have her will, gave
her her coffin, and the woman's soul is at rest. I was told a droll
instance of the force of this preoccupation. The Polynesians are subject
to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body. I was told
the Tahitians have a word for it, _erimatua_, but cannot find it in my
dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to succumb to
this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their houses, turned
them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two days has seen them
cured. But this other remedy is more original: a Marquesan, dying of
this discouragement--perhaps I should rather say this acquiescence--has
been known, at the fulfilment of his crowning wish, on the mere sight of
that desired hermitage, his coffin--to revive, recover, shake off the
hand of death, and be restored for years to his occupations--carving
tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old men's beards. From all this
it may be conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches
naturally. I heard one example, grim and picturesque. In the time of the
small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had no
thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived in it for
near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the passers-by,
talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for himself and
careless of the friends whom he infected.
This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to
the Marquesan. What is peculiar is the widespread depression and
acceptance of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance
languishes, the songs are forgotten. It is true that some, and perhaps
too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit
to support or to revive them. At the last feast of the Bastille,
Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the inanimate performance
of the dancers. When the people sang for us in Anaho, they must
apologise for the smallness of their repertory. They were only young
folk present, they said, and it was only the old that knew the songs.
The whole body of Marquesan poetry and music was being suffered to die
out with a single dispirited generation. The full import is apparent
only to one acquainted with other Polynesian races; who knows how the
Samoan coins a fresh song for every trifling incident, or who has heard
(on Penrhyn, for instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight
to twelve keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song
following another without pause. In like manner, the Marquesan, never
industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production. The exports
of the group decline out of all proportion even with the death-rate of
the islanders. "The coral waxes, the palm grows, and man departs," says
the Marquesan; and he folds his hands. And surely this is nature. Fond
as it may appear, we labour and refrain, not for the reward of any
single life, but with a timid eye upon the lives and memories of our
successors; and where no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his
own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato
practise virtue. It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should
sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy. Over all the landward
shore of Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes
to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the
trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was
nearly full. So long as the circus was there, so long as the _Casco_ was
yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his visit; and to
this end every woman must have a new dress, and every man a shirt and
trousers. Never before, in Mr. Regler's experience, had they displayed
so much activity.
In their despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts
and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian;
not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was
condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern,
sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last
departed, wrung the _Cascos_ by the hand as for a final separation.
Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the
nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and
as the traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another
described them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from
none could I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or
wherefore they were dreaded. We may be sure at least they represent the
dead; for the dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-pervasive.
"When a native says that he is a man," writes Dr. Codrington, "he means
that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast.
The intelligent agents of this world are to his mind the men who are
alive, and the ghosts the men who are dead." Dr. Codrington speaks of
Melanesia; from what I have learned his words are equally true of the
Polynesian. And yet more. Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful
suspicion rests generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest
cannibals of all, are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs. I
hazard the guess that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the dead,
continuing their life's business of the cannibal ambuscade, and lying
everywhere unseen, and eager to devour the living. Another superstition
I picked up through the troubled medium of Tari Coffin's English. The
dead, he told me, came and danced by night around the paepae of their
former family; the family were thereupon overcome by some emotion (but
whether of pious sorrow or of fear I could not gather), and must "make a
feast," of which fish, pig, and popoi were indispensable ingredients. So
far this is clear enough. But here Tari went on to instance the new
house of Toma and the house-warming feast which was just then in
preparation as instances in point. Dare we indeed string them together,
and add the case of the deserted ruin, as though the dead continually
besieged the paepaes of the living; were kept at arm's-length, even from
the first foundation, only by propitiatory feasts, and, so soon as the
fire of life went out upon the hearth, swarmed back into possession of
their ancient seat?
I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions. On the cannibal ghost
I shall return elsewhere with certainty. And it is enough, for the
present purpose, to remark that the men of the Marquesas, from whatever
reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts. Conceive how this
must tell upon the nerves in islands where the number of the dead
already so far exceeds that of the living, and the dead multiply and the
living dwindle at so swift a rate. Conceive how the remnant huddles
about the embers of the fire of life; even as old Red Indians, deserted
on the march and in the snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame
expiring, and the night around populous with wolves.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] In English usually written "taboo": "tapu" is the correct Tahitian
form.--[ED.]