DEPOPULATION
Over the whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we
find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of
even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian
trembled for the future. We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin's
theory of coral islands, and suppose a rise of the sea, or the
subsidence of some former continental area, to have driven into the tops
of the mountains multitudes of refugees. Or we may suppose, more
soberly, a people of sea-rovers, emigrants from a crowded country, to
strike upon and settle island after island, and as time went on to
multiply exceedingly in their new seats. In either case the end must be
the same; soon or late it must grow apparent that the crew are too
numerous, and that famine is at hand. The Polynesians met this emergent
danger with various expedients of activity and prevention. A way was
found to preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits
forty feet in depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am
told, in the Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the
teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and
cannibalism. Among the Hawaiians--a hardier people, in a more exacting
climate--agriculture was carried far; the land was irrigated with
canals; and the fish-ponds of Molokai prove the number and diligence of
the old inhabitants. Meanwhile, over all the island world, abortion and
infanticide prevailed. On coral atolls, where the danger was most
plainly obvious, these were enforced by law and sanctioned by
punishment. On Vaitupu, in the Ellices, only two children were allowed
to a couple; on Nukufetau, but one. On the latter the punishment was by
fine; and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child
spared.
This is characteristic. For no people in the world are so fond or so
long-suffering with children--children make the mirth and the adornment
of their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries.
"Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them." The stray bastard
is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted
children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I
may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far
as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities
of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous
Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with
embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be
the better for a beating. It is a daily matter in some eastern islands
to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and the mother, so far
from punishing, scarce ventures to resist. In some, when his child was
born, a chief was superseded and resigned his name; as though, like a
drone, he had then fulfilled the occasion of his being. And in some the
lightest words of children had the weight of oracles. Only the other
day, in the Marquesas, if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger,
I am assured the stranger would be slain. And I shall have to tell in
another place an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki
having taken a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted
the situation and loaded me with gifts.
With such sentiments the necessity for child destruction would not fail
to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling in the
Tahitian brotherhood of Oro. At a certain date a new god was added to
the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished and made popular.
Oro was his name, and he may be compared with the Bacchus of the
ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to
island; they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes,
sang, danced, acted; gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength; and
were the artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group.
Their life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the
highest in the land aspired to join the brotherhood. If a couple stood
next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of
policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a
mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of
conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its
members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave
offspring--I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the
design seems obvious. Famine menacing the islands, and the needful
remedy repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind by these
trappings of mystery, pleasure, and parade. This is the more probable,
and the secret, serious purpose of the institution appears the more
plainly, if it be true, that after a certain period of life, the
obligation of the votary was changed; at first, bound to be profligate;
afterwards, expected to be chaste.
Here, then, we have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men,
child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle,
invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan
salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers,
the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal
tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding
and alarm. And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in
the Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter
Island, we find the same race perishing like flies. Why this change? Or,
grant that the coming of the whites, the change of habits, and the
introduction of new maladies and vices, fully explain the depopulation,
why is that depopulation not universal? The population of Tahiti, after
a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary. I hear of a
similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight
increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as healthy and at
least as fruitful as before the change. Grant that the Tahitians, the
Maoris, and the Paumotuans have become inured to the new conditions; and
what are we to make of the Samoans, who have never suffered?
Those who are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be ready
with solutions. Thus I have heard the mortality of the Maoris attributed
to their change of residence--from fortified hill-tops to the low,
marshy vicinity of their plantations. How plausible! And yet the
Marquesans are dying out in the same houses where their fathers
multiplied. Or take opium. The Marquesas and Hawaii are the two groups
the most infected with this vice; the population of the one is the most
civilised, that of the other by far the most barbarous, of Polynesians;
and they are two of those that perish the most rapidly. Here is a strong
case against opium. But let us take unchastity, and we shall find the
Marquesas and Hawaii figuring again upon another count. Thus, Samoans
are the most chaste of Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely
fertile; Marquesans are the most debauched: we have seen how they are
perishing; Hawaiians are notoriously lax, and they begin to be dotted
among deserts. So here is a case stronger still against chastity; and
here also we have a correction to apply. Whatever the virtues of the
Tahitian, neither friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he
seems to have outlived the time of danger. One last example: syphilis
has been plausibly credited with much of the sterility. But the Samoans
are, by all accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so;
and it is not seriously to be argued that the Samoans have escaped
syphilis.
These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any particular
cause, or even from many in a single group. I have in my eye an able
and amiable pamphlet by the Rev. S.E. Bishop: "Why are the Hawaiians
Dying Out?" Any one interested in the subject ought to read this tract,
which contains real information; and yet Mr. Bishop's views would have
been changed by an acquaintance with other groups. Samoa is, for the
moment, the main and the most instructive exception to the rule. The
people are the most chaste, and one of the most temperate of island
peoples. They have never been tried and depressed with any grave
pestilence. Their clothing has scarce been tampered with; at the simple
and becoming tabard of the girls, Tartuffe, in many another island,
would have cried out; for the cool, healthy, and modest lavalava or
kilt, Tartuffe has managed in many another island to substitute stifling
and inconvenient trousers. Lastly, and perhaps chiefly, so far from
their amusements having been curtailed, I think they have been, upon the
whole, extended. The Polynesian falls easily into despondency:
bereavement, disappointment, the fear of novel visitations, the decay or
proscription of ancient pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and
sadness detaches him from life. The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the
emptiness of his new life are striking; and the remark is yet more
apposite to the Marquesas. In Samoa, on the other hand, perpetual song
and dance, perpetual games, journeys, and pleasures, make an animated
and a smiling picture of the island life. And the Samoans are to-day the
gayest and the best entertained inhabitants of our planet. The
importance of this can scarcely be exaggerated. In a climate and upon a
soil where a livelihood can be had for the stooping, entertainment is a
prime necessity. It is otherwise with us, where life presents us with a
daily problem, and there is a serious interest, and some of the heat of
conflict, in the mere continuing to be. So, in certain atolls, where
there is no great gaiety, but man must bestir himself with some vigour
for his daily bread, public health and the population are maintained;
but in the lotos islands, with the decay of pleasures, life itself
decays. It is from this point of view that we may instance, among other
causes of depression, the decay of war. We have been so long used in
Europe to that dreary business of war on the great scale, trailing
epidemics and leaving pestilential corpses in its train, that we have
almost forgotten its original, the most healthful, if not the most
humane, of all field sports--hedge-warfare. From this, as well as from
the rest of his amusements and interests, the islander, upon a hundred
islands, has been recently cut off. And to this, as well as to so many
others, the Samoan still makes good a special title.
Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:--Where there have
been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful,
there the race survives. Where there have been most, important or
unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes. Each change,
however small, augments the sum of new conditions to which the race has
to become inured. There may seem, _a priori_, no comparison between the
change from "sour toddy" to bad gin, and that from the island kilt to a
pair of European trousers. Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is
any more hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will
sometimes die of pin-pricks. We are here face to face with one of the
difficulties of the missionary. In Polynesian islands he easily obtains
pre-eminent authority; the king becomes his _maire du palais_; he can
proscribe, he can command; and the temptation is ever towards too much.
Thus (by all accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own
knowledge) the Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more or
less degree unliveable to their converts. And the mild, uncomplaining
creatures (like children in a prison) yawn and await death. It is easy
to blame the missionary. But it is his business to make changes. It is
surely his business, for example, to prevent war; and yet I have
instanced war itself as one of the elements of health. On the other
hand, it were perhaps, easy for the missionary to proceed more gently,
and to regard every change as an affair of weight. I take the average
missionary; I am sure I do him no more than justice when I suppose that
he would hesitate to bombard a village, even in order to convert an
archipelago. Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian
islands) that change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.
There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet criticism. I
have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during fevers, mistaken
treatment of children, native doctoring, or abortion--all causes
frequently adduced. And I have said nothing of them because they are
conditions common to both epochs, and even more efficient in the past
than in the present. Was it not the same with unchastity, it may be
asked? Was not the Polynesian always unchaste? Doubtless he was so
always: doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably
chaste visitors from Europe. Take the Hawaiian account of Cook: I have
no doubt it is entirely fair. Take Krusenstern's candid, almost
innocent, description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider
the disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war
of lust) the American missionaries were once shelled by an English
adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American
warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas,
and carry off a complement of women for the cruise; consider, besides,
how the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods, as
appears plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii; and again, in the
story of the discovery of Tutuila, when the really decent women of Samoa
prostituted themselves in public to the French; and bear in mind how it
was the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the business of
the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.
Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a
virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even
in the most degraded islands, has been further degradation. Mr. Lawes,
the missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity
had declined there since the coming of the whites. In heathen time, if a
girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or brother would dash the
infant down the cliffs; and to-day the scandal would be small. Or take
the Marquesas. Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection
the young were strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to
look upon one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it)
like dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and
Ua-pu escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a fortnight in
promiscuous liberty. Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my
authority, and declare themselves better informed. I should prefer the
statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood
alone, which it is far from doing) to the report of the most honest
traveller. A ship of war comes to a haven, anchors, lands a party,
receives and returns a visit, and the captain writes a chapter on the
manners of the island. It is not considered what class is mostly seen.
Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge
England by the ladies who parade Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen
who share with them their hire. Stanislao's opinion of a decay of virtue
even in these unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his
very example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced
by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii. And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we
might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners. I do not think
that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now
obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count
paternal kinship. It is not possible to give details; suffice it that
their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and
vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy,
reason, and almost life itself are in abeyance.