My life in the house of Tetuanui--Whence came the Polynesians--A
migration from Malaysia--Their legends of the past--Condition of
Tahiti when the white came--The great navigator, Cook--Tetuanui tells
of old Tahiti.
Happiness in civilization consists in seeing life other than it really
is. At Mataiea the simple truth of existence was joy. In the house of
the chief, Tetuanui, I knew a peace of mind and body as novel to me
as my surroundings. For the first time since unconcerned childhood I
felt my heart leap in my bosom when the dawn awoke me, and was glad
merely that I could see the sun rise or the rain fall. All of us have
had that feeling on certain mornings; but was it not interwoven with
the affairs of the day--a picnic, a rendezvous, our wedding, a first
morning of the vacation encampment? In Mataiea it was spontaneous, the
harking back to a beneficent mood of nature; the very sense of being
stirring the blood in delight, and girding up the loins instantly to
pleasurable movement.
I slept without clothing, and in a bound was at the door, with my
pareu about me. Already the family had begun the leisurely tasks of the
day. The fowls were on the sward under the breadfruit and papaya-trees,
and the mina-birds were swooping down on the grass near them to profit
by their uncovering of food. Those discriminating birds are like the
Japanese, seldom pioneering in wild places, but settling on developed
lands to gain by the slower industry of other peoples. "Birds that
live on cows," the Tahitians call the minas, because where there are
enough ruminants each bird selects one, and spends the day upon its
back, eating the insects that infest its skin.
The sun at six barely lit the beach and revealed the lagoon,
into which a stream from the mountains poured within Tetuanui's
confines. I threw off my garment and plunged into a pool under a clump
of pandanus-trees. It was cool enough at that hour to give the surface
nerves the slight shock I craved, but warmed as I lay in the limpid
water and watched the light sweeping past the reef in the swift way
of the tropics.
I danced upon the beach and pursued the land crabs to their burrows. I
hoped to see one wrench off a leg to prove what I had been told--that
if one in its movement to the salt water through the tall grass beyond
the sand, touched any filth, it clawed off the polluted leg, and that
a crab had been seen thus to deprive itself of all its eight limbs,
and after a bath to hobble back to its hole with the aid of its claws,
to remain until it had grown a complement of supports. I wondered
why it did not content itself with washing instead of mutilation. To
the biblical expounder it was an apt illustration of "cutting off an
offending member," as recommended in the Book.
At the house the family were preparing their first meal, and I
shared it with them--oranges, bananas, coffee, and rolls. The last,
with the New Zealand tinned butter, came from the Chinese store. We
sat on mats, and we drank from small bowls. The coffee was sweetened
with their own brown sugar, and the juice of nearly ripe cocoanuts,
grated and pressed, made a delicious substitute for cream. Over the
breakfast we talked, Tetuanui and Haamoura answering my questions
and taking me along the path of my inquiry into far fields of
former customs and ancient lore. They were, as their forefathers,
gifted in oral tradition, with retentive memories for their own past
and for the facts and legends of the racial history. We who have
for thousands of years put in writing our records cannot grasp the
fullness of the system by which the old Polynesian chiefs and priests,
totally without letters, or even ideographs, except in Easter Island,
kept the archives of the tribe and nation by frequent repetition of
memorized annals. So we got Homer's Odyssey, and the Song of Solomon.
What Tahiti was like before the white? That was to me a subject of
intense interest, now that I was fully aware of the situation after a
hundred and fifty years of exploitation, seventy-five years of French
domination, and thirty years of colonialism. The nature of the people
was little changed. The Tahitian was still naïf, hospitable, gentle,
indolent except as to needs, valuing friendship above all things,
accepting the evangelism of many warring Christian sects as a tumult
among jealous gods and priests, and counting sex manifestations free
expressions of affection, and of an appetite not more sacred nor more
shameful than hunger or thirst.
These were the qualities and rules of conduct ascribed to the
Tahitians by the first discoverers, especially by those who were
not narrowed in judgment by inexperience and religious fanaticism,
as were the British and French missionaries of early days, peasants
and apprentices who had forsaken the fields and workshops for the
higher sphere of devoteeism and freedom from manual labor. These
clerics, though often self-sacrificing and yearning for martyrdom,
attributed all differences from their standards or preachments to
inherent wickedness or diabolism.
One of the ablest of them had regretted sorrowfully his having to
inform the Tahitians that all their ancestors were in hell. Some
clerics had made wearing bonnets the test of decency, and all had
taught that God hated any open ardor of attraction for the opposite
sex. Yet it was almost entirely to them that the far-away student
had to turn to learn any of the details of native life undefiled. The
mariners had stayed too brief a time to enter into these, and could
not speak Tahitian.
I knew that Tahitian life, political and economic, social and
religious, had been utterly changed, but I longed for an understanding
of what had been; a panorama of it before my eyes. I set out to
obtain this by constant interrogations of every one I thought might
have even a scrap of enlightenment for me.
On rainy days, when Chief Tetuanui did not oversee the making or
repair of roads in his district, and always when we were both at
leisure, I sat with him, and the elders of the neighborhood, and
queried them, or repeated for correction and comment my notes upon
their antiquities--notes founded on reading and my observation.
Whence had come these Polynesians or Maoris who peopled the ocean
islands from Hawaii to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to the
eastern Fijis? A race set apart by its isolation for thousands of years
from all the rest of the world, distinguished in all its habitats--
Hawaii, Samoa, the Marquesas, Tonga, the Paumotus, and the Society
archipelago, and New Zealand--by beauty of form, tint and uniformity
of color, height, and soft expression--an expression they vainly
sought to make terrible by tattooing?
The legends and chants of the race unfolded much of the mystery;
its language's relation to others, more. These Tahitians and all
their kind were ancient Aryans who in the dim past were in India,
and afterward in the Indian archipelago. They were in Sumatra, in
Java, in the Philippines long before the Malays. Certainly their
blood brothers, changed by millenniums of a different environment,
remain in Malaysia, known there as the aborigines (Orang-Benoa),
by the majority races. D'Urville said the Harfouras of Celebes were
identical physically with the Polynesians. At some unfixed date the
first of the Polynesians pushed out in their insecure craft for this
sea, driven away by the Malay-Hindu invasion or by interracial feuds.
The pioneer, according to the legend, was Hawaii-uli-kai-oo, Hawaii
and the Dotted Sea, a great fisherman and navigator. He sailed toward
the Pleiades from his unknown home in the far West, and arrived at
eastern islands. So pleased was he with them, that he returned to
his western birthplace for his family, and brought them to Polynesia.
Other Polynesians left the Asiatic archipelago about the end of the
first century, and went to many islands. Finally they reached the
Samoan, Tongan, Marquesan, Paumotuan, and Society groups, and Easter
Island and New Zealand. In pushing eastward they skirted Papua, but
were unable to stay, because the Papuans, whom the Polynesians had
long ago driven out of the Asiatic archipelago, were stronger than the
emigrants. They next tried Fiji, and tarried there longest, leaving
those powerful imprints on the Papuans in appearance and language
that make Fiji the anomaly of Melanesia. But the Fiji-Papuans at last
drove them out, and they left with blood in their eyes. When the whites
found the Marquesans in the sixteenth century, they were building at
Vaitahu great war-canoes to "attack the black people who used bows
and arrows." No living Marquesan had ever seen them nor could they
have attained Fiji in any strength, yet the historical hate persisted.
The Marquesans of the north said their race came from Hawaii, and
those of the south from Vavao. Seventeen places they had stopped at
in their great migration eastward, they said.
Pu te metani me Vevau
A anu te tai o Hawa-ii!
Pu atu te metani me Hawa-ii
A anu te ao e Vevau!
Blow winds from Vavao
And cool the sea of Hawaii!
Blow back, winds from Hawaii,
And cool the air of Vavao!
That was the Marquesan legendary chant, the primal command of their
God after creation. Vevau and Hawaii were placed in their former
abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being
Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and
when they reached the present American territory, of which Honolulu
is the capital, they called it Hawaii, as they had an island of the
Samoan group, Sawaii. It was in the fifth century they peopled the now
American Hawaii, and they remained unknown there until the eleventh,
when Marquesans, Tahitians, and Samoans began to pour in on them,
and continued to do so for a few generations. Then the present
Hawaiians were isolated and forgotten for twenty-one generations
until rediscovery by Captain Cook in 1778.
They gave the old names to Polynesia that they knew in Asia, as all
over the world emigrants carry their home names, not only Hawaii,
or Savaii, for Java, but Moorea, a Javan place, to the island near
Tahiti; Bora-Bora from Sumatra to a Society island; Puna of Borneo
to places in Tahiti, Kauai, and Hawaii; Ouahou of Borneo to Oahu, on
which Honolulu is; and Molokai, from the Moluccas, to another island
of Hawaii. One might cite hundreds of examples, all going to prove
their far-away origin, as Florida, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,
New England, New York, and Albany, indicate theirs.
That there were any inhabitants in the South Sea islands occupied by
the Polynesians is improbable but a race of mighty stone-carvers had
swept through that ocean, perhaps many thousands of years before,
and had left in the Ladrones and in Easter Islands monuments and
statues now existing which are a profound mystery to the ethnologist,
the archaeologist, and the engineer. If the Polynesians came upon
any of the stone builders, they had killed or absorbed them.
The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved on wood in Easter
Island by some of the Polynesians there half a century ago would
denote there had been intercourse with the people who had made them,
and who were not the Polynesians.
Once in Samoa, and finally at home there, after their Fiji disaster,
they had gone adventuring, or the canoe drift of unfortunates caught
by wind and tide had brought populations to all the other Polynesian
islands, and principally to Tahiti. This island in the center of
Polynesia, and especially favored by nature, had been a source of
growth and distribution of the race, the Paumotus, New Zealand,
and probably the Marquesas, and Hawaii having been stocked from it,
the language developing furthest in it, and customs, refinements,
and leisure reaching their highest pitch in the marvelous culture,
savage though it was, which astounded the Europeans. Yet all these
people remained curious as to what might be beyond the distance,
and a hundred years ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to
search for Utupu, a Utopia from which the god Tao introduced the
cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for the mystic land of
their forefathers, as from Ireland to India the happy isles of the
west was a myth. The mariners of Erin had long seen the Tir-n'an-Oge
just beyond the horizon.
The Tahitians had a legend of the god Maui, that "he brought the earth
up from the depths of the ocean, and when mankind suffered from the
prolonged absence of the sun and lived mournfully in obscurity, with
no ripening fruits, Maui stopped the sun and regulated its course,
so as to make day and night equal, as they are in Tahiti."
Does not this hark back to a clime where the inequality of day and
night was greater than in the tropics?
Lieutenant Bovis of the French navy, who seventy years ago, after
ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his conclusions, said that
after him it would be useless to hunt in the memories of the living
for anything of the past, for the old men were dead or dying, and
those now in middle age did not even speak or understand the old
language in which the records were told. He had, he said, arrived
in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti of the true native, the
Tahiti unspoiled by European civilization, was only a memory, but
by years of labor he had taken from the lips of the venerable their
recollections of conditions in their childhood and early manhood,
and what their fathers had told them, and by comparison he had been
able to write intelligently of former times.
If Bovis found the real Tahiti no longer existent seventy years ago,
what must I look for when two generations or three had died since,
and swift steamships coursed where only the clipper had sailed? Yet
Tahiti was the least spoiled of islands on liner routes, because France
being so far from it, and the French such poor business men, they had
not exploited the natives except in the way of taxes. The bureaucracy
lived on the imposts, but they had not reformed the people by laws
and punishments, and made them see the wisdom of acquiescence in a
scheme of regular work, as had the British missionary government in
Tahiti and the American missionary government in Hawaii, in the name
of an avenging and critical Lord. No people believed in the dignity
of labor more than the Tahitians, because they refused to do any more
than was requisite for health, cleanliness, comfort, and pleasure,
and saw no more dignity or greater indignity in helping me on with my
boots or bringing me my dinner or massaging my body than in listening
to a sermon or catching fish.
They thought absurd and artificial the ideas foisted by politicians,
merchants, and lawyers that it was dignified to sit in an office, to
sell goods, or to draw up agreements, or undignified to disembowel a
pig, make a net, or dig an oven. They saw governors and bankers spend
all day chasing a boar or angling for a fish which they did not eat
when they possessed it. They thought them queer, and that their own
regimen of work and play was more sensible.
"What land is this?" asked Cook, and understanding him, the Tahitians
answered, "Otaiti oia" or, "This is Tahiti."
Cook put it down as Otaheite, pronounced by him Otahytee. It was Cook's
carpenter who was building a house for a chief, a friend of Cook's,
and lost all his tools during the visit of the high priest of the
god Hiro and his acolytes. Hiro was the first king in their myths,
and, until Christianity came, the god of business. When Cook sailed
away, the tools were taken to the marae, or temple of Hiro, where
the priest said he would cause the prized tools to reproduce their
kind, like fruit. He planted them in a field near by and watched for
results. The lack of any result except rust was an able argument for
the Christian missionaries, when they came, to destroy his cult by
laughing at the foolishness of his ideas and the weakness of his god.
The discoverers reported that the Tahitians and all other Polynesians
were thieves and liars, for the reason that they often seized pieces
of iron, tools, and firearms that they saw on the ships or ashore
in the houses occupied by the first whites, and then lied about
their actions. The whites killed scores for these crimes, one of the
initial murders of Cook's crew being the shooting of Chief Kapupuu
as he departed in his canoe from their ship with some bits of metal
he had taken. Malo, the native historian, who heard the account from
eye-witnesses, explained the incident as follows, first mentioning
the sighting of Cook's vessels and the wonder of the natives:
One said to another, "What is that great thing with branches?" Others
said, "It is a forest that has slid down into the sea," and the gabble
and noise was great. Then the chiefs ordered some natives to go in a
canoe and observe and examine well that wonderful thing. They went,
and when they came to the ship, they saw the iron that was attached
to the outside of the ship, and they were greatly rejoiced at the
quantity of iron.
Because the iron was known before that time from wood with iron
[in or on it] that had formerly drifted ashore, but it was in small
quantity, and here was plenty. And they entered on board, and they
saw the people with white foreheads, bright eyes, loose garments,
corner-shaped heads, and unintelligible speech.
Then they thought that the people [on board] were all women, because
their heads were so like the women's heads of that period. They
observed the quantity of iron on board of the ship, and they were
filled with wonder and delight.
Then they returned and told the chiefs what they had seen, and how
great a quantity of iron. On hearing this, one of the warriors of the
chief said, "I will go and take forcible possession of this booty,
for to plunder is my business and means of living."
The chiefs consented. Then this warrior went on board of the ship
and took away some of the iron on board, and he was shot at and was
killed. His name was Kapupuu. The canoes [around the ship] fled away
and reported that Kapupuu had been killed by a ball from a squirt-gun.
And that same night guns were fired and rockets were thrown up. They
[the natives] thought it was a god, and they called his name Lonomakua,
and they thought there would be war.
Then the chiefess named Kamakahelei, mother of Kaumualii, said,
"Let us not fight against our god; let us please him that he may
be favorable to us." Then Kamakahelei gave her own daughter as a
woman to Lono. Lelemahoalani was her name; she was older sister of
Kaumualii. And Lono [Captain Cook] slept with that woman, and the
Kauai women prostituted themselves to the foreigners for iron.
Cook was one of the best of the navigators of the South Seas, a
devout churchman, and a believer in the decalogue of Moses. He thought
stealing or lying odious before the Lord and men. But the Polynesians
did not so think. Most of their possessions were in common, and telling
the truth was unimportant. If one asked them about anything they had
no interest in, they might tell the truth or might not. If they had
interests, these were served by their replies. This is as in diplomacy
to-day, when the interests of one's country allows prevarication,
and even in Christian ethics both patriotism and self-preservation, as
well as hospitality, permit flat falsehood. Our own spies are honest
heroes, and the man who would not deceive a man who sought to kill
him or burn his house would be considered a fool and not worth saving.
"There is plenty more in the kitchen," we say to guests out of
hospitality and pride, though the kitchen is as bare as Mother
Hubbard's cupboard. She could not lie to the dog.
Now, to the native who saw all around him on the ship huge masses
of the material most precious to him in the world, it was as if an
American in Yucatan saw in a native hut heaps of gold and diamonds
not valued by the savage. Suppose the savage left the American alone
with the treasure!
But the Tahitians did not murder for blood lust, had no assassination,
and virtually no theft. Our own Anglo-Saxon law laid down the maxim,
"Caveat emptor!" "Let the buyer beware!" which meant that the truth
notwithstanding, the buyer must not let the seller of anything cheat
him by failure to state the exact facts or faults, and expect the
law to remedy his stupidity.
Chief Tetuanui's word was his bond because he had learned that
square-dealing brought him peace of mind, but other natives had found
out that to cheat the white man first was the only possible way of
keeping even with him. The maxim of the king of Apamama, quoted by
Ivan Stroganoff, was pertinent. Hospitality was as sacred to the
Tahitians as to the old Irish. It was shameful not to give a guest
anything he desired.
"Es su casa, señor!" said the Spaniard, and did not mean it; but the
Tahitians literally did mean that the visitor was welcome to all his
valuables, and did not reserve his family, as did the don.
The chevalier of the Legion of Honor upon whose mat I sat was emphatic
as to the respect of the old Tahitians for their chiefs.
"It was the whole code," said he, "and when the French broke it down
they destroyed us. There is Teriieroo a Teriierooterai, whose family
were chiefs of Punaauia for generations, shifted to Papenoo. Each
governor or admiral made these transfers here, as in the Marquesas
and all the islands, with the primary object of lessening native
cohesion, of Frenchifying us. They ruined our highest aspirations
and our manners."
I had seen something of the same sweeping away of a code and the
resultant evils and degradation in Japan. When Bushido imposed itself
on all above the herd, they had a sense of honor not surpassed
by the people of any nation; but commerce, the destruction of the
castes of samurai, heimin, and eta, the plunging of a military people
into business and competition with Western cunning, and the lacquer
of Christianity which had done little more than Occidentalize to a
considerable degree a few thousands, without giving them the practice
of the golden rule, or an appreciation of the Sermon on the Mount,
had robbed the Japanese of an ancient code of morality and honor,
and replaced it with nothing worth while--an insatiable ambition to
equal Occidental peoples and to conquer Oriental ones, and a thousand
factories which killed women and children.
"We were divided into three distinct castes," said Tetuanui. "The Arii,
or princes; Raatira, or small chiefs and simple landed proprietors;
and the Manahune, or proletariat. Alliances between Arii and Raatira
made an intermediate class--Eietoai. There was also a caste of
priests subject to the chief, their power all derived from him, but
yet tending to become hereditary by the priests instructing their
sons in the ceremonies and by taking care of the temple."
"That's the way the Aaron family got control of the Jewish priesthood,"
I interpolated. "They gave the people what they wanted, first a golden
calf god, and then an ark, and they had charge of both."
The chief frowned. He was a confirmed Bible reader, and the Old
Testament was so much like the Tahitian legends that he believed
every word of it.
"The Arii," he said, "were sacred and had miraculous strength and
powers. The food they touched was for others poison. There was a head
in each Arii family to whom the others were subject; he was often
an infant, and almost always a young man, for the eldest son of the
chief was chief and the father only regent. This custom continued
until comparatively recently in most families besides those of the
Arii. The Arii were the descendants of the last conquerors of these
islands. But their advent must have been ancient, for their power was
uncontested, and their rights were so many, their duties so few, and
the devotion of the people to them was so great, that only centuries
could have established them so firmly. Probably they came after the
Raatira. The Raatira were separated by too great a barrier to have
assisted in the conquest. No Raatira could become an Arii; no Arii a
Raatira. The latter were closer to the commoners, and paid the same
respect to the Arii as did the Manahune.
"If an Arii woman wedded a Raatira man, the marriage was said to be
with a taata ino, ino meaning literally bad, and taata man. This term
applied to all not Arii, and indicated the contempt of the Arii for
all below them. The Arii had many words solely for their own use, and
tapu, or prohibited, to all others; they had a hundred privileges. The
Raatira were probably the power broken by the Arii. The Raatira
had conquered the Manahune, and were themselves bested by the Arii,
the newest come."
The chief sighed. He was like an old Irish storyteller recounting
the departed glories of Erin.
I read to him in French Bovis' opinions that the Raatira, defeated,
retained part of their lands, served the new masters, and kept in
subjection the people they had themselves beaten. They attached
themselves to the Arii of their district, fought for them in their
quarrels or wars, and were consulted in assemblies, and allowed to
speak to the crowd. I recalled that this was a privilege dearly prized
by all Polynesians, the lack of reading and writing having, as in
Greece, developed oratory and orators to a remarkable excellence. I
was in Hawaii when the offices of the first legislature under the
American flag were campaigned for, after years of repression by the
sugar planters' oligarchy, and I had heard the natives speak a score
of times, and always with delight and wonder. They valued free speech.
"The Arii were shrewd," said Chief Tetuanui, "and early invented a
plan for keeping the Raatira in subjection. If two Raatira disputed
possession of land, the one who believed himself defrauded could
yield to the king or a member of the royal family the land, to which
he usually had no right at all. The Arii thus got possession of more
and more land from time to time, and the Raatira were loath to contend
among themselves.
"The Manahune owned nothing by law, but they lived on the lands of
Arii and Raatira, and were seldom evicted. They had the fruits of
their labor with a tithe or so for their masters; they left to their
children their accumulations, tentative, but actual, and their service
was pleasant; more in the nature of gifts than rent. The Manahune
could not rise above his caste except by the rare nomination of the
king, but they could become Teuteu Arii, or servants of an Arii,
and might thus acquire immense importance.
"Like the eunuchs at courts or the mistresses of the noble and rich,"
I remarked.
The chief shrugged his shoulders.
"The Manahune might become a priest or even join the society of the
Arioi," he rejoined. "The government was simple. The will of the prince
was supreme, but by custom things ran smoothly, and the prince, or
Arii, had seldom to urge his power. There were, of course, instances
of extortion, of bursts of anger, of feuds, of jealousies; but most
of the time the Raatira saw that the Arii were well served, and were
their intermediates with the commoners. The regular obligations of the
inferior classes were to meet at certain times to hand to the chiefs
presents, food, clothing or useful instruments, and they sought to
exceed one another in generosity. They met to build houses, to repair
them, or to construct the rock foundations of houses, according to
the importance of the chief, or Arii. They built the canoes, made
the nets, and did the fishing. The sea was divided into properties,
as was the land. The Arii had the reefs where the fish most abounded.
"War was declared with religious ceremonies. Sacrifices were the basis
of these ceremonies, and a human victim the most efficacious. The
augurs examined the entrails, the auspices, much as did the pagans
of old. Certain priests had certain duties. The Tahua Oripo, night
runners, reported the movements of the enemy. They were professional
war spies, and they acquired a marvelous ability. Sometimes they were
able to lead their party so as to surprise the enemy and slaughter
them, but usually there were preliminaries to war which warned the
other side. A herald was sent in the costume of a great warrior. He
was of high birth or famous for his fighting. He delivered himself of
his mission ceremoniously, and was never attacked. Every locality had
its war-chants, its songs of defiance. Today only a few fragments
survive. Wars were waged mostly on account of the ambitions of
princes, as to-day in Europe and Asia. But the effort of Christianity
to oust paganism in Tahiti brought about many sanguinary conflicts,
and plainly God was with the missionaries, who caused the battles. In
1815 the Battle of Feipi gave Tahiti to Pomaré the Great, and to the
Protestant ministers, who were his backers. Over three hundred were
killed. A woman, the queen of the island of Huahine, commanded in
the absence of Pomaré.
"Sometimes after a battle the vanquished sent heralds to signify their
yielding and to know the wish of the victor; they disbanded their
troops, left their arms on the field, and the war was over. Usually
the defeated warriors were allowed to return home without more ado
after their confession of failure, but when the rage was great, the
victors, with furious cries, gave the signal of carnage, and slew
all they met. If the prince beaten escaped the first consequences
of the rout, he was safe and lost only a portion of his territory,
and in some wars only his prestige. He remained respected, and his
privileges were about the same as before. The Arii were all of the
same tribe, all related, and though they ruled different districts
and valleys, and fought one another, they would not degrade one of
their own family and rank. Thus power remained in the same families,
princes, chiefs, and priests, and only the Raatira and the Manahune,
the bourgeoisie and the commoners, really suffered.
"We copied you in Europe," I interposed. "There the kings, kaisers,
and czars took care not to lower the dignity of monarchy, and are
virtually all related. None of them ever deposed another of long
enthroning, and none of them has been killed in a battle in centuries."
"Aue!" exclaimed the chief. "Ioba said, 'Wisdom is no longer with
the old.'"
"Job talked like a revolutionist," I said. "That would be treason
among the diplomats and lawyers of Europe and America. How did women
get along in your father's day?"
Tetuanui got up to stretch his huge body. He had been squatting on
his haunches for an hour.
"Let Haamoura, my wife, say as to them," he returned laughingly. "She
knows all the old ways. I must see if the nets are to be stretched
to-day."
Mme. Tetuanui and I had a lengthy confabulation. No Tahitian was
better informed than she upon the former status of her sex in Tahiti,
and from her I gained a lively summary.
Woman was inferior among the old Tahitians. Man had here as everywhere
so ordained, and religion had fixed her position by taboos, as among
the Hebrews. She was often merely a servant, yet she maintained a
unique sex freedom. Her body was her own, and not her husband's as in
the English common law. She prepared the man's food and never sat at
meals with him. If she ate at the same time, which was seldom, she sat
at a distance, but near enough to hear his commands. It is so to-day
when Tahitian men gather for feasting without foreigners, as in the
Philippines, Japan, and China, and in many European countries. The
Hausfrau of the small merchant, laborer, or farmer is a drudge. In
Japan the woman remains subject to the hourly whims and wants of her
husband, and to his frequent infidelity, though she is true to him.
The Tahiti wife had the care of the canoe, the paddles, and all the
fishing and hunting things, and she accompanied her husband often in
these pursuits. The husband had to make the fire, prepare the oven,
kill the pig or dog or fowl, and do the outside chores; but she
had a lesser position than he at all public observances. She could
not become a priest or enter the temple, but must remain always at
a distance from the marae. Yet she could be a queen or a chiefess,
and as such was as powerful as a man, making war in person, and often
leading her troops valiantly. The Tahitian women were nearly as strong
as the men and mentally their full equal. They wound their husbands
around their fingers or treated them cruelly in many instances,
astonishing the whites by their independence. Only religion, the
taboos, held them in any restraint.
If a queen bore a child by an unknown father, the child was as royal
as if the descendant of a long line of kings; but if the father was
notoriously a commoner, the child remained a prince, though not so high
of rank as if his father had been an Arii. If a king had children by
a woman beneath his rank, they had no rights from their father, but
held a mixed position proportioned to the power of the father. He
established their rank by his personal prestige, as the kings of
Europe forced their bastards on the courts. Sixty years ago Tamatoa,
King of Raiatea of the Society Islands, himself the highest born of
all the chiefs of the archipelago, was forced to adopt a child of
King Pomaré of Tahiti to succeed him because his own children were
by a woman of the people.
The woman thus had an advantage over the man in being able to transmit
her rank to her children, a survival of the matriarchate custom once
ruling the world. Polygamy was rarely indulged, though not forbidden. A
chief here and there might have two or three wives. Women were allowed
only one husband, but often avowed lovers were tolerated, if not
feared, by the husband. Mr. Banks, president of the Royal Astronomical
Society of England, was horrified after he had made love to Queen
Oberea of Papara in the absence of her husband to find her attendant
was a cavalière servente. His Anglican morals were shocked. He had
thought himself the only male sinner by her complacence.
Before Christianity was forced on them, the Tahitians married in
the same rank, and with considerable right to choice. The tie might
be dissolved by the same authority binding it, the chief or head
of the clan. Inequality of rank, or near consanguinity, were the
only obstacles to marriage. Rank might be overcome, but never the
other. It was as in China, where Confucius himself laid down the law:
"A man in taking a wife does not choose one of the same surname as
himself." And in one of the Chinese commentaries the following reason
is given for this law: "When husband and wife are of the same surname,
their children do not do well and multiply." The prohibited degrees
were more distant than among us. It was a horror of incest that had
led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children
for adoption. Only this explanation could reconcile it with the
almost superstitious love the Polynesian father and mother have for
children. Their feeling surpasses the parental affection prevailing
in the remainder of the world, yet adoption is a stronger bond than
blood. No child was raised by its own genitors. The Tetuanuis had
brought up twenty-five, all freely given them at birth or after
weaning. The taboo was strict.
Illegitimate children were as welcome as others. The husband might
have been so jealous as to meditate killing his wife; but when her
child was born, although he knew it to be a bastard, he gave it the
same love and care as his own. There were exceptions, but one might
cite on the opposite side innumerable cases where, despite the most
open adultery, the husband has taken his wife's offspring for his
own. It was well that this was so, for adultery was so habitual that
were bastards not made welcome, there would have been much suffering
by children, innocent themselves. Here, as in civilization, men love
their bastards often more than their legitimate sons and daughters.
This prohibition against keeping one's own must have arisen when
there were very few inhabitants in Tahiti, for it is the outcome of a
natural guarding against sexual relationship in tribes or communities
where all are thrown together intimately, and stringent opposition
to such practices needed to prevent promiscuity. One must look, as
in the case of taboos, deeper than the surface for the beginning of
this custom of trading babies, for that is what it often amounted
to--friends exchanging offspring as they might canoes.
It is said that the powerful sentiment among historical nations
opposing marriage between brother and sister and other close kindred
originated in the desire to make such connections odious, to preserve
virtue and decency among those in hourly intimacy. Monarchs and
nations long refused to bend to it. The Ptolemies and Pharaohs
married incestuously; Cleopatra, her brother. The Ptolemies married
their daughters, as did Artaxerxes, who wedded Atossa. The Ballinese
married twins of different sex. Abraham married his half-sister
by the same father. Moses's father married his aunt. Jacob took
to wife two sisters, his own cousins. In Great Russia until this
century a father married his son to a young woman, and then claimed
her as his concubine. When a son grew up, he followed his father's
example, though his wife was old and with many children. The Tamils
of southeast India, the Malaialais of the Kollimallais hills, have the
same custom. Inbreeding maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost
of its vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. Examples
to the contrary are numerous in human and animal life. More than nine
hundred residents of Norfolk Island are descendants of the mutineers of
the British ship Bounty. They were begat by eight of the mutineers, and
intermarried for a century. They show no deterioration from this cause.
Hardly any crime is more loathed than incest, but the abomination grew
slowly as man progressed. Such ties have been abhorrent for long in
most countries. A belief that incestuous children were weak mentally
or physically came much later in the ages. The Polynesians must have
remarked that inbreeding accentuated the faults in a strain, making
for an accumulation of them. This would be a very far advance in human
observation; but the Polynesian, by experience, or knowledge brought
from his old Asiatic home, must have held such a theory, and sought
in the system of adoption, and in not bringing up consanguineous
children together, to ward off such misfortune. This at least is a
plausible reason for such an unnatural practice among a people so
unquestionably child-lovers.
The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. There were no exogamous
taboos. The tribe or clan was the chief unit, not the family. The
phratry tie was stronger than that of the father and mother. In the
totem scheme of other islands and continental groups all the women
of his mother's totem were taboo to a man, though their relationship
might be remote. Yet as husband and wife had different totems, and
children took their mothers' totems, a man might in rare instances,
even with this barrier, wed his own daughter. This has happened in
Buka and in North Bougainville.
The plan of adoption in Polynesia is matched to a degree by the
fosterage common in Ireland in early days. There children were sent
to be reared in the families of fellow-clansmen of wealth. At a year
they left their own thresholds, and their fosterage ended only at
marriage. Every fostered person was under obligation to provide for
the old age of his foster-parents, and the affection arising from
this relationship was usually greater and regarded more sacred than
that of blood relationship. This is true to-day of the Tahitians.
"But children nowadays are often brought up by their own parents,"
said Mme. Tetuanui, rising to prepare the déjeuner, and I for a swim
in the lagoon, "and if adopted, they go from one home to the other
as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their
children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few
of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui
and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to
give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs
and well-to-do. Our race is passing so fast through the miseries the
white has brought us that little ones are as precious as life itself."