The market in Papeete--Coffee at Shin Bung Lung's with a prince--Fish
the chief item--Description of them--The vegetables and fruits--The
fish strike--Rumors of an uprising--Kelly and the I. W. W.--The
mysterious session at Fa'a--Halellujah! I'm a Bum!--The strike
is broken.
The market in Papeete, the only one in Tahiti, has an air all its
own. It is different in its amateur atmosphere and roseate color,
in its isothermal romance and sheer good humor, from all others
I have seen--Port of Spain, Peking, Kandy, or Jolo. It is more
fascinating in its sensuous, tropical setting, its strange foods,
and its laughing, lazy crowds of handsome people, than any other
public mart I know. There is no financial exchange in Tahiti. Stocks
and bonds take the shape of cocoanuts, vanilla-beans, fish, and other
comforts. The brokers are merry women. The market is spot, and buyers
must take delivery immediately, as usually not a single security is
left at the end of the day's trading.
One must be at the market before five o'clock to see it all. Sunday
is the choicest day of all the week, because Sunday is a day of
feasting, and the marché then has a more than gala air. The English
missionaries had once made even cooking a fish on Sunday a crime,
severely punished; but the French priests changed all that, and the
French Sabbath, the New York Sabbath, was en règle.
All the east is purple and red, gorgeous, flaring, when I awake. There
are no windows in my connecting rooms in the Annexe. The sun rises
through their wallless front, and sets through their opening to the
balcony. What more liberal dispensation of nature? I am under the
shower in two minutes, long enough to go down the curved staircase,
with its admirable rosewood balustrade, and through the rear veranda to
the room in which the large cement basin serves for bath and laundry
and to lend a minute to the Christchurch Kid, the prize-fighter, to
inform me that he is to open a school of the manly art, with diplomas
for finished scholars and rewards for excellence. The recitals are
to be public, a fee charged, and all ambitious pupils are to be
guaranteed open examination in pairs and a just decision. The Kid
and Cowan are to be hors de combat.
A daughter of a French governor of the Low Archipelago is in the basin,
the door ajar, and the spray blinding her to my presence. She is
seventeen, café au lait--beaucoup de lait, kohl-eyed, meter-tressed,
and slim-bodied. She sings the himene of the battle of the limes and
coal and potatoes, with a new stanza concerning the return of the
Noa-Noa, and the vengeance of the Tahitian braves upon the pigs of
Peretania, Britain.
"Ia or a na! Bonjour, Goo' night!" she says impartially, and modestly
slips her pareu about her.
"Ia ora na oe!" I reply. "All goes well?"
"By cripe' yais; dam' goo'!" she answers, and goes humming on her
way to her shanty in the yard. She is the maid of my chamber, gentle,
willing, but never to be found for service. She learns English from
the Kid, the rubber-legged boot-black, and other gentleman adventurers
and tars of America and Europe, and she pours out bad words--I cannot
mention them--in innocent faith in their propriety. In French or
Tahitian she speaks correctly.
Outside the bath I hear the vehicles hurrying to market, and dressing
quickly in white drill, and wearing on my Paumotu hat a brilliant
scarlet pugaree, once the badge of subjugation to the Mohammedan
conquerors of India, I join the procession.
Bon dieu! what a morning! The reds and purples are dying in the orient,
and the hills are swathed in the half-white light of day. The lagoon
is now a glistening pearly gray. Moorea, the isle of the fairy folk,
is jagged and rough, as if a new throe of earth had torn its heights
and made new steeps and obelisks. Moorea is never the same. Every
hour of the day and every smile and frown of the sun creates valleys
and spires, and alters the outlines of this most capricious of islets.
Past the bust of Bougainville, past the offices of Emile Levy, the
pearler whom, to Levy's intense anger, Jack London slew in "The House
of Mapuhi"; past the naval depot, the American consulate with the red,
white, and blue flung in the breeze; the Commissariat de Police, the
pool of Psyche, and all the rows of schooners that line the quays,
with their milken sails drying on their masts, and I am by the stores
of the merchants. The dawn is slipping through the curtain of night,
but lamps are still burning. The traffic has roused the sleepers, and
they are dressing. They have brought, tied in pareus, their Sunday
clothes. Women are changing gowns, and men struggle with shirts and
trousers, awkward inflictions upon their ordinarily free bodies.
All the night people who have journeyed from Papara, from Papenoo,
or nearer districts slumber upon the sidewalks. This sleeping about
anywhere is characteristic of the Tahitian. On the quays, in the
doorways of the large and small stores, in carriages, and on the
decks of the vessels, men and women and children lie or crouch,
sleeping peacefully, with their possessions near them.
In the fare tamaaraa, the coffee-houses of the Tinitos, the Chinese,
the venders of provender and the marketers alike are slipping their
taofe tau, their four-sous' worth of coffee, with a tiny pewter mug
of canned milk, sugar, and a half-loaf of French bread with butter.
My vis-á-vis at Shin Bung Lung's is Prince Hinoe, the heir to the
broken throne, a very large, smiling brown gentleman, who sits with
the French secretary of the governor, the two, alack! patting the
shoulders, pinching the cheeks, and fondling the long, ebon plaits
of the bevy of beauties who are up thus early to flirt and make
merry. Tahiti is the most joyous land upon the globe. Who takes life
seriously here is a fool or a liver-ridden penitent. The shop is
full of peals of laughter and stolen kisses. Those sons of Belial
who taught the daughter of the governor of the Dangerous Isles her
unspeakable vocabulary are here. They have been to the Paris, the
premier saloon of Papeete, for their morning's morning, an absinthe,
or a hair of the dog that bit them yester eve.
What jokes they have! Stories of what happened last night in the
tap-room of the cinematograph, how David opened a dozen bottles
of Roederer, and there was no ice, so all alike, barefooted and
silk-stockinged, drank the wine of Champagne warm, and out of beer
glasses; of Captain Minne's statement that he would kill a scion of
Tahitian royalty (not Hinoe) if he did not marry his daughter before
the captain returned from the Paumotus; and of Count Polonsky's
calling down the black procureur, the attorney-general, right in the
same tap-room, and telling him he was a "nigger," although they had
been friends before.
Tahitian and French and English, but very little of the latter,
echoes through the coffee-room. Even I make a feeble struggle to
speak the native tongue, and arouse storms of giggles.
The market-place faces the Mairie, the city hall, and its center
is a fountain beloved of youth. There sit or loll the maidens of
Papeete at night, and titter as pass the sighing lads. There wait
the automobiles to carry the pleasure bent to Kelly's grove at Fa'a,
where the maxixe and the tango rage, the hula-dancers quiver and
quaver, and wassail has no bounds.
When the whites are at dinner, the natives meet in the market-place,
which is the agora, as the place du gouvernment is the forum of the
dance and music of these ocean Greeks.
But at this hour it is wreathed with women, scores squat upon their
mats on the pave, their goods spread before the eyes of the purchasers.
The sellers of the materials for hats are many. The bamboo fiber,
yellowish white, is the choicest, but there are other colors and
stuffs. The women venders smoke cigarettes and are always laughing. Old
crones, withered and feeble, shake their thin sides at their own and
others' jokes.
Already the buyers are coming fast, householders and cooks and
bachelors and beaux, tourists and native beauties.
A score of groups are smoking and chatting, flirting and running
over their lists. Carriages and carts are tied everywhere, country
folk who have come to sell or to buy, or both, and automobiles, too,
are ranged beside the Mairie.
Matrons and daughters, many nationals, are assembling. The wife
of a new consul, a charming blonde, just from New Jersey, has her
basket on her arm. She is a bride, and must make the consul's two
thousand dollars a year go far. A priest in a black gown and a young
Mormon elder from Utah regard each other coldly. A hundred Chinese
cafe-keepers, stewards, and merchants are endeavoring to pierce the
exteriors of the foods and estimate their true value. The market is
not open yet. It awaits the sound of the gong, rung by the police
about half past five. Four or five of these officials are about,
all natives in gaudy uniforms, their bicycles at the curb, smoking,
and exchanging greetings with friends.
The question of deepest interest to the marketers is the fish. The
tables for these are railed off, and, peering through the barriers,
the onlookers comment upon the kinds and guess at the prices.
The market-house is a shed over concrete floors, clean, sanitary,
and occupied but an hour or two a day. There are three main divisions
of the market, meat, fish, and green things. Meat in Tahiti is better
uneaten and unsung. It comes on the hoof from New Zealand. Now, if you
are an epicure, you may rent a cold-storage chamber in the glacerie,
and keep your steaks and roasts until tender.
Fish is the chief item to the Tahitian. Give him only fish, and he
may murmur at his fate; but deny him fish, and he will hie him to the
reef and snare it for himself. All night the torches of the fishermen
gleam on the foaming reef, and often I paddle out near the breakers and
hear the chants and cries of the men as they thrust their harpoons or
draw their nets. So it is the women who sell the fish, while the weary
husbands and fathers lie wrapped in dreams of a miraculous draught.
There are three great aquariums in the world, at Honolulu, Naples, and
New York. There is no other such fish-market as this of Papeete, for
Hawaii's has become Asiaticized, and the kanaka is almost nil in the
angling art there. But those same fish that I gazed at in amazement in
the tanks of the museums are spread out here on tables for my buying.
Impossible fish they are, pale blue; brilliant yellow; black as
charcoal; sloe, with orange stripes; scarlet, spotted, and barred in
rainbow tints. The parrot-fish are especially splendid in spangling
radiancy, their tails and a spine in their mouths giving them their
name.
The impression made upon one's first visit to the Papeete market is
overwhelming, the plenitude of nature rejoicing one's heart, and the
care of the Great Consciousness for beauty and color, and even for
the ludicrous, the merely funny, causing curious groping sensations
of wonder at the varied plan of creation.
Sexual selection and suitability to survive are responsible. Those
vivid colors, those symmetrical markings, and laughable forms are
all part of the going on of the world, the adaptation to environment,
and the desire for love and admiration in the male and female.
These things from the deep seem hardly fish. They are bits of the
sunset, fragments of a mosaic, Futuristic pictures; anything but our
sodden, gray, or wateryhued fish of temperate climes. Some are as
green as the hills of Erin, others as blue as the sky, as crimson as
blood, as yellow as the flag of China. They are cut by nature in many
patterns, round, or sectional, like a piece of pie, triangular, almost
square; some with a back fin that floats out a foot or two behind.
They are grotesque, alarming, apparently the design of a joker. But
tread not on the domain of the scientist, for he will prove to
you that each separate queerness is only a trick of nature to fit
its owner to the necessities of his habitat. The parrot-fish are
screamingly fantastic. There are not even in the warm California or
Florida waters the duplicates of these rainbow fish. The Garibaldi
perch and the electric fish excite interest at Santa Catalina, but
here are a hundred marvels, and if I wish I can see them all as they
swim in and out of the coral caverns within the lagoon.
Porcupine fish are a delicacy, squid are esteemed, and even the
devilfish is on the tables, hideous, repellent, slimy, horned, and
tentacled; not mighty enough to crush out the life of the fisher,
as was the horrific creature in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea,"
whom his hero fought, yet menacing even when dead. It is a frightful
figure in its aspect of hatred and ugliness, but good to eat. See
that fat Tahitian thrust his finger into the sides of the octopus to
plumb its cooking qualities. It is quickly sold.
There are crabs and crawfish, eels and shrimps, prawns and varos,
all hung up on strings. There are oysters and maoao, alive
and dripping. The maoao is the turbo, a gastropod, a mysterious
inhabitant of a twisted shell, who shuts the door to his home with
a brightly-colored operculum, for all the world like half of a
cuff-button. One eats him raw or cooked or dried. But he is not so
odd as the varo one of the most delicious and expensive of Tahitian
foods. These sea centipedes, as the English call them in Tahiti,
are a species of ibacus, and are from six to twelve inches long,
and two wide. They have legs or feelers all along their sides, like
a pocket comb, a hideous head, and tail, and a generally repulsive
appearance. If one did not know they were excellent eating, and most
harmless in their habits, one would be tempted to run or take to a
tree at sight of them. Their shell is a translucent yellow, with black
markings. The female has a red stripe down her back, and red eggs
beneath her. She is richer in flavor, and more deadly than the male
to one who has a natural diathesis to poisoning by varos. Many whites
cannot eat them. Some lose appetite at their looks, their likeness to
a gigantic thousand-leg. Others find that the varo rests uneasy within
them, as though each claw or tooth of the comb grasped a vital part of
their anatomy. I think varos excellent when wrapped in hotu leaves,
and grilled as a lobster. I take the beastie in my fingers and suck
out the meat. Amateurs must keep their eyes shut during this operation.
Catching varos is tedious and requires skill. They live in the sand of
the beach under two or three feet of water. One has to find their holes
by wading and peering. They are small at the top, but roomy below. One
cannot see these holes through ruffled water. Once located, grapnels,
or spools fitted with a dozen hooks, are lowered into them. A pair
inhabits the same den. If the male is at home, he seizes the grapnel,
and is raised and captured, and the female follows. But if the female
emerges first, it is a sure sign that the male is absent in search of
food. I have pondered as to this habit of the varo, and have tried
to persuade me that the male, being a courteous shrimp,--he is a
kind of mantis-shrimp,--combats the intruding hooks first in order
to protect his loved one; but the grapnel is baited with fish, and
though masculine pride would insist that chivalry urges varo homme
to defend his domestic shrine, fishers for the tidbit say that he
is after the bait, and holds to it so tightly that he sacrifices his
life. Nevertheless, the lady embraces the same opportunity to rise,
and their deserted tenement is soon filled by the sands.
Trapping varos calls for patience and much dexterity. The mere finding
of the holes is possible only to natives trained from childhood. Six
varos make a good meal, with bread and wine, and they are most
enjoyable hot--also most indigestible.
"Begin their eating by sucking a cold one," once said a bon vivant
to me. "Only when accustomed to them should you dare them hot and
in numbers."
Flying-fish are sold, many of them delicate in taste and shapely.
One may buy favorite sauces for fish, and some of the women offered
them to me. One is taiaro, made of the hard meat of the cocoanut,
with pounded shrimp, and allowed to ferment slightly. It is put up in
bamboo tubes, three inches in diameter, and four or five feet long,
tied at the opening with a pandanus-leaf for a seal. It is delicious
on raw fish. I have seen a native take his fish by the tail and
devour it as one would a banana; but the Tahitians cut up the fish,
and, after soaking it in lime-juice, eat it with the taiaro. It is
as tasty as Blue Points and tabasco.
There are two other epicurean sauces, one made of the omotu, the
soft cocoanut, which is split, the meat dug out and put in the hue,
the calabash, mixed with a little salt water, lime-juice, and the
juice of the rea, the saffron, and allowed to ferment. This is the
mitihue, a piquant and fetid, puante sauce that seasons all Tahitian
meals. The calabash is left in the sun, and when the sauce dries up,
water is poured on the dry ingredients, a perpetual saucebox.
In the arrangement of vegetables our own hucksters could learn. Every
piece is scraped and cleansed. String beans are tied together in
bundles like cigars or asparagus, and lettuce of several varieties,
romaine and endive, parsnips, carrots, beets, turnips, and even
potatoes, sweet and white, are shown in immaculate condition. The
tomatoes do not rival ours, but Tahiti being seventeen degrees below
the equator, one cannot expect such tropical regions to produce
temperate-zone plants to perfection. That they are provided at all is
due to the Chinese, those patient, acute Cantonese and Amoyans. The
Tahitian has no competence in intensive cultivation or the will to
toil. Were it not for the Chinese, white residents in many countries
would have to forego vegetables. It is so in Mexico and Hawaii and
the Philippines, although Japanese in the first two compete with them.
The main food of the Tahitians is feis, as is bread to us, or rice to
the Asiatic. It is not so in the Marquesas, eight hundred miles north,
where breadfruit is the staff, nor in Hawaii, where fermented taro
(poi) is the chief reliance of the kanaka. The feis, gigantic bananas
of coarse fiber, which must be cooked, are about a foot in length,
and three inches in diameter, and grow in immense, heavy bunches in
the mountains, so that obtaining them is great labor. They are wild
creatures of heights, and love the spots most difficult of access. Only
barefooted men can reach them. These feis are a separate species. The
market-place is filled with them, and hardly a Tahitian but buys
his quota for the day. The fei-gatherers are men of giant strength,
naked save for the pareu about the loins, and often their feet from
climbing and holding on to rocks and roots are curiously deformed, the
toes spread an inch apart, and sometimes the big toe is opposed to the
others, like a thumb. There are besides many kinds of bananas here for
eating raw; some are as small as a man's finger, and as sweet as honey.
The fei-hunters hang six or seven bunches on a bamboo pole and bring
them thus to market. One meets these young Atlases moving along the
roads, chaplets of frangipani upon their curling hair, or perhaps a
single gardenia or tube-rose behind their ears, singing softly and
treading steadily, smiling, and all with a burden that would stagger
a white athlete.
The taro looks like a war-club, several feet long, three inches thick,
and with a fierce knob. It and its tops are in demand. The breadfruit
are as big as Dutch cheese, weighing four or five pounds, their green
rinds tuberculated like a golf-ball. Sapadillos, tamarinds, limes,
mangoes, oranges, acachous, and a dozen other native fruits are to be
had. Cocoanuts and papayas are of course, favorites. There are many
kinds of cocoanuts. I like best the young nut, which has the meat
yet unformed or barely so, and can be eaten with a spoon, and holds
about a quart of delicious wine. No matter how hot the day, this wine
is always cool. One has only to pierce the top of the green rind,
and tilt the hole above one's mouth. If one has alcoholic leanings,
the wine of a cocoanut, an ounce of rum, two lumps of sugar, a dash
of grenadine, and the mixture were paradise enow.
The papayas, which the British call mammee-apple or even mummy-apple or
papaw, because of the West Indian name, mamey, are much like pumpkins
in appearance. They grow on trees, quite like palms, from ten to thirty
feet high, the trunk scaly like an alligator's hide, and the leaves
pointed. The fruit hangs in a cluster at the crown of the tree, green
and yellow, resembling badly shaped melons. The taste is musky sweet
and not always agreeable to tyros. The seeds are black and full of
pepsin. Boiled when green, the papaya reminds one of vegetable marrow;
and cooked when ripe, it makes a pie stuffing not to be despised. I
have often hung steaks or birds in the tree, protected by a cage
from pests, or wrapped them in papaya-leaves to make them tender. The
very atmosphere does this, and the pepsin extracted from the papaya
by science is much used by druggists instead of animal extracts.
The market closed, the venders who have come in carts drive home,
while those Tahitians who are not too old adorn themselves with
flowers and seek pleasure. Young and old, they are laughing. Why? I
need never ask the reason here, but look to the blue sky, the placid
sea within the lagoon, the generous fruitage of nature, the palms and
flowers ever present and inviting; the very sign of the gentle souls
and merry hearts of these most lovable people. When I am alone with
them I do not walk. I dance or skip.
Life is easy. The fei, the breadfruit, the cocoanut, the mango, and the
taro are all about. No plow, no hoe, or rude labor, but for the lifting
of one's hand there is food. The fish leap in the brine, and the pig
fattens for the oven. Clothes are irksome. A straw hut may be built
in an hour or two, and in the grove sounds the soft music of love.
Aue! nom de poisson! within a day the market became a
wailing-place. There were no fish. The tables daily covered with
them were empty. The happy wives and consorts who had been wont to
sell the catch of the men remained in their homes, and the fishers
themselves were there or idle on the streets. The districts around
the island, which for decades had despatched by the daily diligence,
or by special vehicle or boat, the drafts of the village nets, sent not
a fin. Never in Tahiti's history except when war raged between clans,
or between Tahitians and French, had there been such a fish famine.
And, name of a dog! it was due to a grève, a strike. It came upon the
Papeete people like a tidal wave out of the sea, or like a cyclone
that devastates a Paumotu atoll, but, entre nous, it had been brooding
for months. Fish had been getting dearer and dearer for a long time,
and householders had complained bitterly. They recalled the time
when for a franc one could buy enough delicious fish for a family
feast. They called the taata hara, the native anglers, cochons,
hogs, and they discussed when they gathered in the clubs, or when
ladies met at market, the weakness of the authorities in allowing
the extortion. But nothing was done. The extortion continued, and
the profanity increased. At the Cercle Bouganville Captain Goeltz
and the other retired salts banged the tables and said to me:
"Sacré redingote! is it that the indigènes pay the governor or give
him fish free? Are we French citizens to die of hunger that savages
may ride in les Fords?"
They shouted for Doctor Funks, and drank damnation to the régime
that let patriots surfer to profit les canaques. But, in reality,
the governor months ago had secretly begun a plan to help them.
One day the governor, his good lady being gone to visit at Raiatea,
had given his cook three francs to buy fish for the déjeuner at the
palace. When they came on the table, a bare bite for each of the
company, the governor had called in the chef.
"Mais, I gave you three francs for the fish, n'est-ce pas?"
"Mais, vous don' lai moi t'ree franc, oui, oui," answered the
Chinese. "Moi don'lai canaque po po'sson."
The governor had led in the chorus of sácres and diables. All at
the table were of the redingote family, all feeding from the national
trough at Paris, and they had the courage and power to end the damnable
imposition on the slender purses of Papeete citizens. Sapristi! this
robbery must cease. He must go slow, however. Being an honest and
unselfish man, he investigated and initiated legislation so carefully
and tardily that the remedy for the evil was applied only four days
ago. He had returned to France, so one could not say that he consulted
his own purse; but the present governor, an amiable man and a good
bridge-player, also liked fish, and they pay no bonanza salaries,
the French. The fishermen had known, of course, of the approaching
end of their piracy, but, like Tahitians, waited until necessity
for action. The official paper in which all laws are published had
the ordinance set out in full. Translated, briefly, from the French,
it ran like this:
That the Governor of the establishments of France in Oceania,
a chevalier of the Legion of Honor [this information is inserted
in every degree, announcement and statement the governor makes, and
stares at one from a hundred trees], in view of the "article du decret
du 21 decembre, 1885," etc. [and in view of a dozen other articles
of various dates since], considering that fish is the basis of the
alimentation of the Tahitians, that in the Papeete public market, fish
has been monopolized with the result that its price has been raised
steadily, and a situation created injurious to the working people,
the cost of living necessitating a constant increase in salaries,
orders that after a date fixed, fish be sold by weight and at the
following prices per kilo, according to the kind of fish:
30 cents a kilo 25 cents a kilo 20 cents a kilo
1st category 2d category 3d category
Aahi Auhopu Ature
Ahuru Au aavere Atoti
Anae Ioio Aoa-Ropa
Apai Mahimahi Faia
Ava Moi Fee
Lihi Nato Fai
Mu Nape Honu
Nanue Orare Inaa
Oeo Paere Maere
Paaihere Parai Maito
Paraha peue Puhi pape Marara
Tehu Tohe veri Manini
Varo Taou Mao
Oura (chevrette) Uhi Mana
Paapaa (crabs) Ume Ouma
Oura-miti (langouste) Vau Oiri
Roi Pahoro
Tuhura Patia
Puhu miti
Pahua
Tapio
As a kilo is two and a fifth pounds, the ature that Joseph caught
by the Quai de Commerce, being in the third category, would cost,
under the ukase, less than ten cents a pound. Crabs being in the
first category--paapaa,--would cost about thirteen cents a pound,
and the succulent varo the same, whereas they were then two francs,
or forty cents a pound. We lovers of sea centipedes toasted the brave
governor vociferously.
The decrees were nailed to the trees on the Broom Road, in the rue
de Rivoli, and in the market-place. The populace were joyous, though
some old wholesale buyers like Lovaina questioned the wisdom of the
governor's edict and the effect on themselves.
"If they do that," said she, "maybe, by'n'by they fix my meal or
lime squash."
Until the date of carrying out the mandate, one picked out a pleasing
fish or string of fish, all nicely wrapped in leaves, and one asked,
"A hia? How much?"
When Lovaina inquired the price, she smiled her sweetest, rubbed
the saleslady's back, and uttered some joke that made her sway with
laughter, so that price became of no importance. But a sour-faced
white or a pompous bureaucrat paid her saving, and Chinese, who kept
the restaurants, invoked the curse of barrenness upon the venders.
The day came for the new scheme of fish-selling to go into effect. The
mayor, a long-bearded and shrewd druggist, had bought up all the
half-way accurate scales in the city, for there had not been a
balance in the market. Everything was by strings, bunches, feels,
and hefts. The fish counters, polished by the guardian of the marché,
were now brilliant with the shiny apparatus.
The long-awaited morning found a crowd peeping through the
railing half an hour earlier than usual. All would have a fill
of delicacies. Lovaina with the Dummy drove down to the Annexe for
me. Vava was making queer signs to her which either were unintelligible
or which she thought absurd. She waved her long forefinger before him,
which meant: "Don't talk foolishness. I am not a fool."
We reached the market-place when only a score or two had gathered.
A thousand devils! there was not a fish on the slabs. The merry wives
were absent. The condition was plain.
The Dummy uttered a demoniacal grunt, and shook his head and hands
before Lovaina in accusation. She answered him with a movement of
her head up and down, which signified acquiescence.
"Dummy know," she said mysteriously. "That Vava he find everything. He
like old-time tahutahu, sorcerer. He tell me Annexe no fish. He say
now no fish till finish those masheen."
She laughed and rubbed my shoulders.
"The fish slip away," she said, "and leave only their scales! Aue!"
M. Lontane, the second in command of the gendarmes, was sent
scouting, and reported to the governor--not the one who originated
the manifesto--that the famine was the result of an organized revolt
against the law and order of the land. Fishermen he had questioned,
replied simply, "Aita faito, paru! Aita hoo, paru!" Which, holy
blue! meant, "No scales, fish! No price, fish!"
What to do? One cannot make a horse drink unless one gives him
red peppers to eat. Even the Government could not make a fisherman
fish for market, as there was a law against enforced labor except as
punishment for crime or in emergencies, such as during the existence
of martial law, the guarding against a conflagration, or a tidal
wave or cyclone. At the Cercle Militaire many of the bureaucrats,
and especially the doctor who had treated the cow-boy, were for
martial law, anyway. Napoleon knew, said the fierce médecin. "A
whiff of grapeshot, and the reef would be again gleaming with lights,
and the diligences would pour in with loads of fish."
Doctor Cassiou, a very old resident, and not at all fierce, asked
his confrere against whom would the grapeshot be directed. Would he
gather the fishermen from all over Tahiti, and decimate them, the
way the Little Corporal purged mutiny out of his regiments? Lontane
was sent out again. In the Cerele Bougainville he took a rum punch
before starting on his bicycle, and he swore by his patron saint,
Bacchus, that he would solve the problem even if denied the remedy
of force majeure.
Within three hours of his return from Patutoa, a meeting was called
of the council of state, the governor, the doctors, the druggist,
a merchant or two, and a lawyer, and before it M. Lontane disclosed
that the natives were possessed by a new devil that he feared was a
recrudescence of the ancient struggle for independence.
Each fisherman he had examined refused to answer his interrogations,
saying only, "I dobbebelly dobbebelly."
The governor scratched his ear, and the mayor wiggled his hands behind,
as he had on the wharf after the battle of the limes, coal, and
potatoes. The lawyer said it must be an incantation, but that it was
not Tahitian, for that language had no "d" in its alphabet. M. Lontane
and all his squad were given peremptory orders to unriddle the enigma.
Meanwhile the fishless market continued. It was not entirely fishless,
for before the bell rang we would see over the railings a few handfuls
of varos, crayfish, and shrimps and perhaps a dozen small baskets of
oysters. A policeman prevented a riot, but could not stay the rush
when the bell rang and the gate was opened. The lovers of shellfish
and the servants of the well-to-do snatched madly at the small supply,
and paid whatever extravagant price was demanded. The scales were
never touched, and any insistence upon the new legal plan and price
was laughed at. With these delicacies beyond their means, the natives
stormed the two pork butchers, the Tinitos. They grabbed the chops and
lumps of pig, poking and kneading them, shouting for their weight,
and in some instances making off without paying. There was such a
howdy-do that extra policemen were summoned to form all into line.
There were no scaly fish, and it came out that the shellfish were
caught by women, widows who had no men to obey or please, who had
children, or who wanted francs to buy gewgaws or tobacco; and a few
unsocial men fishers who did not abide by the common interests of
their group.
At Lovaina's we were on a tiresome round of canned salmon, eggs,
and beef, and eggs rose to six sous each. In about a fortnight we
began to have fish as usual, and Lovaina signed to me that the Dummy
procured them in the country. I was very curious, and asked if I might
accompany him. She said that he would call for me at the Annexe the
next time he went.
I was awakened after midnight in my room--the doors were never
locked--by the Dummy leaning over and shaking me. I opened my eyes,
and he put his fingers to his lips. I dressed, and went with him in
the old surrey. We drove through the night along the Broom Road. Once
past the cemetery we were in the country. The cocoanut-trees were
gray ghosts against the dark foliage and trunks of the breadfruits
and the sugar cane; the reef was a faint gleam of white over the
lagoon and a subdued sound of distant waters.
We jogged along, and as we approached Fa'a, I lit a match and looked
at my watch. It was nearly two o'clock. The Dummy stopped the horse
at Kelly's dance-hall in a palm grove. The building was of bamboo
and thatch, with a smooth floor of Oregon pine, and was a former
himene house. Kelly had rented it from the church authorities. The
dancing was over for the night, but a few carts were in the grove,
and the lights were bright. We went inside, and found forty or fifty
Tahitians, men and women, squatting or sitting on the floor, while on
the platform was Kelly himself, with his accordion on the table. He saw
me and shouted "Ia ora na!" And after a few minutes, while others came,
began to speak. What he said was interpreted by a Frenchman, who, to my
astonishment, proved to be the editor of one of those anti-government
papers printed in San Francisco, that Ivan Stroganoff had shown me.
Kelly addressed the audience, "Fishermen and fellow stiffs." He said
that the fish strike was a success, and if they all remained true to
one another, they would win, and the scales would be kicked out. The
few scabs who sold fish in the market only made sore those unable to
buy. He said that he had found out that the law applied only to the
market-place, and that a plan would be tried of hawking fish from house
to house in Papeete. They would circumvent the governor's proclamation
in that way. He praised their fortitude in the struggle, and after the
editor had interpreted stiffs by te tamaiti aroha e, which means poor
children, and scabs by iore, which means rats, and had ended with a
peroration that brought many cries of "Maitai! Good!" Kelly took up
his accordion, and began to play the sacred air of "Revive us Again!"
He led the singing of his version:
"Hallelujah! I'm a bum! Hallelujah! Bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out! To save us from sin!"
The Tahitians rocked to and fro, threw back their heads, and, their
eyes shut as in their religious himenes, chorused joyfully:
"Hahrayrooyah! I'm a boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!
Hahrayrooyah! Hizzandow! To tave ut fruh tin!"
They sang the refrain a dozen times, and then Kelly dismissed the
meeting with a request for "three cheers for the I. W. W."
There is no "w" in French or in Tahitian, and the interpreter said,
"Ruperupe ah-ee dohblevay dohblevay!" And the Tahitians: "Ai dobbebelly
dobbebelly!"
Kelly came down from the platform, his freckled face shining and
his eyes serious but twinkling. He greeted me as the natives lit
cigarettes and filed out.
"I'm runnin' their strike for them," he said. "It 's on the square. The
poor fish! They don't make hardly enough to pay for their nets, let
alone an honest day's pay, and they're up half the night and takin'
chances with the sharks and the devil-fish. They have to pay market
dues and all sorts of taxes. They 're good stiffs all right, and
every one has a membership card in the I. W. W. applied for."
When we went outside, I saw that the Dummy who had been a witness of
the scene in the hall, had a large package of fish in the surrey,
and all around there were other packages of them. The men had been
selling to those who came to Fa'a for them, the law extending only
to the market in Papeete.
The strikers hawked the fish in town the next day, but this was
immediately forbidden. Hungry for fish--the Tahitians have one word
meaning all that--though the people were, few could drive out to Fa'a
to fetch them. Within Papeete fish were mysteriously nailed to the
trees at night, and over each was a card with the letters, "I. W. W."
Again a meeting of the council of state was called, and at it
M. Lontane revealed the meaning of those cabalistic letters and the
leadership of Kelly. He had tracked down the fishermen and found
their headquarters at the dance hall.
At the Cercle Bougainville there was an uproar. Merchants drank
twice their stint of liquor in their indignation. Syndicalism was
invading their shores, and their already limited labor supply would
be corrupted.
I could not picture too seriously the wrath of the honest traders
at the traitorous conduct of Kelly, "a white man," as told by
M. Lontane. I was upbraided because of Kelly being an American with
an Irish name. Lying Bill said it was "A bloody Guy Fawkes plot."
M. Lontane took full credit for the discovery of what he termed
"A complot that would rival the Dreyfus case."
He struck his chest, and asked me sternly if I knew of M. LeCoq,
the great detective, of Emile Gaboriau.
Kelly was arrested in the midst of his dancing soirée at Fa'a. He
was put in the calaboose, and when he frankly said that he had come
to Tahiti to preach the gospel of I. W. W.-ism and that he believed
the fishermen had all the right on their side, he was sentenced as
"a foreigner without visible means of support, a vagrant, miscreant,
vagabond, and dangerous alien," to a month on the roads, and then to
be deported to the United States, whence he had come.
The strike or walk-out was broken. With the cessation of the
direction of Kelly and his heartening song, the fishermen gradually
went back to their routine, and their women folk to the market. The
scales were in operation, but the himene, "Hahrayrooyah! I'm a
boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!" was sung from one end of Tahiti
to another, and "Ai dobbebelly dobbebelly" was made at the Cercle
Bougainville a password to some very old rum said to have belonged
to the bishop who wrote the Tahitian dictionary.