In the days of Captain Cook--The first Spanish
missionaries--Difficulties of converting the heathens--Wars over
Christianity--Ori-a-Ori, the chief, friend of Stevenson--We read the
Bible together--The church and the himene.
Captain Cook barely escaped shipwreck here. The Bay of Tautira is
marked on the French map, "Mouillage de Cook," the anchorage of
Cook. That indomitable mariner risked his vessels in many dangerous
roadsteads to explore and to procure fresh supplies for his crews. When
he had exhausted the surplus of pigs, cocoanuts, fowls, and green stuff
at one port, he sailed for another. Scurvy, the relentless familiar
of the sailor on the deep sea, made no peril or labor too severe. At
night Cook's ships approached Oati-piha, or Ohetepeha, Bay, as his
log-writers termed this lagoon, from the Vaitapiha River, flowing into
it, and the dawn found them in a calm a mile and a half from the reef.
They put down boats and tried to tow off their ships, but the tide set
them in more and more toward the rocks. For many hours they despaired
of saving the vessels, though they used "warping-machines," anchors,
and kedges. From my cook-house I saw where they had struggled for
their lives with breaker, current, and chartless bottom. A light
breeze off the land saved them, and in another day they returned to
"obtain cocoanuts, plantains, bananas, apples, yams and other roots,
which were exchanged for nails and beads." From the very pool into
which I dived Cook's hearties filled their casks with fresh water,
after shooting "two muskets and a great gun along the shore to
intimidate the Indians who were obstinate."
Cook, on his third voyage to Tahiti, found here a large wooden cross
on which was inscribed in Latin:
Christ conquered
Charles the Third Emperor
1774
It was plain that Spaniards had erected the cross, for Charles III was
King of Spain. These English tars hated the dons, with whom they had
but recently been embattled. When they were convinced that a Spanish
ship had been at Tautira twice since they had departed, and that the
builders of the cross had earned the respect and affection of the
natives, the Britons, in their old way of fair and assertive dealing,
left the cross standing after carving on the reverse in good Latin
as a claim of prediscovery:
George III King
1767, 1769, 1773, 1774, 1777.
Two Spanish priests, they learned, had lived in the village between
the arrival and return of the Spanish ships from Peru. They left no
imprint of their Catholic religion except the cross and a memory
of kindness; and why they resigned their mission to Tahiti is not
known. The British missionaries did not come until 1797, on the
Duff. They planted gardens and worked diligently and prayed. They
had vast patience, and confidence in their all-powerful and avenging
God, and a rapt devotion to his son, who forgave the sins of those
who adopted His faith. Their ideals were as fixed as the stars, and
their courage superior to the daily discouragements of their lives and
continuous hardships of separation from home. But they could not break
the strength of the superstitions of the pagans. A dozen years these
English ecclesiastics delved in their gardens, built their houses, and
begged Jehovah and Jesus to give them victory. Five years they mourned
without message or aid from England. Their clothes were in tatters,
and as covering their whole bodies with European garments from feet to
scalp, except face and hands, was a rigid prescription of their own
morals' and an example to the almost nude Tahitians, they suffered
keenly from shame. When, after half a decade, a brig arrived, its
supplies were found ruined by salt water and mold. The poor clerics,
in an earthly paradise, but hostile atmosphere, with little to report
to an unheeding England save the depths of the untilled field of
heathenry and depravity, might not have been blamed if they, too,
had given up their mission. The fruits of twelve years of gardening
and horticulture were destroyed in a day by ravaging parties. The
fact that their lives were spared and their persons not attacked,
except in a rare instance of an individual piece of villainy, is proof
of the mild dispositions of the infidels. The Tahitians worshiped
their gods with a superstitious awe not exceeded anywhere, and the
outlandish white men proclaimed openly that these gods were dirty
lumps of wood and stone and fiber, and to be despised in comparison
with the Christian Gods, Father and Son, which they implored them under
pain of eternal punishment to adopt. Imagine the fate of strangers who
settled in New England or Spain a hundred and twenty years ago and who
announced daily year in and year out that all the ancestors of the
people there were in hell, that their God and their angels, saints,
priests, and images were demons, or doing the work of demons, and
that only by acknowledging their belief in a deity unheard-of before,
by having water sprinkled on their heads, and ceasing the customs and
thoughts taught as most moral and divine by their own revered priests,
could they escape eternal misery as a consequence of a mistake made by
a man and a woman named Atamu and Ivi six thousand years earlier! In
Spain at that date the king whose name had been coupled with Christ's
on the cross near my house at Tautira was expelling the Jesuits from
his kingdom, and the Holy Office recorded its thirtieth thousand human
being burned at the stake in that country in the name of Jesus Christ.
The incredulous Tahitians tolerated the queer white men who wore
long, black coats and who had learned their language, and who,
except as to religion, spoke gently to them, healed their wounds,
patted their children on the head, and taught them how to use iron and
wood in unknown fashions. They saw that these men drank intoxicants
in great moderation, lived in amity, and did not advantage themselves
in trade or with the native women, as did all the other white men. And
they wondered.
But they were convinced of the truth of their own religion. Their
chiefs and priests replied:
"If your first man and woman took the lizard's word and ate fruit
from the tabu tree, they should have been punished, and if their
children killed the son of your God, they should have been punished;
but why worry us about it? We have not killed you, and our first man
and woman respected all tabu trees."
They disdained the cruel message that their forefathers were in the
perpetually burning umu, the oven, as did that Frisian king, Radbod,
who with one leg in the baptismal font, bethought him to ask where
were his dead progenitors, and was answered by the militant bishop,
Wolfran, "In hell, with all unbelievers."
"Then will I rather feast with them in the halls of Woden than dwell
with your little, starveling Christians in heaven" said the pagan,
and withdrew his sanctified limb to walk to an unblessed grave in
proud pantheism.
Otu, the son of King Pomaré, had a revelation that the god Oro wished
to be removed to Tautira from Atehuru. The chiefs of that district
protested, and Otu's followers seized the idol, and went to sea
with him. They landed as soon as it was safe, and mollified the god
by a sacrifice; and having no victim, they killed one of Pomaré's
servants. The island then divided into hateful camps, and Moorea
joined the fray. The mission sided with the king, and the crews of two
English vessels fortified the mission, and with their modern weapons
helped the royal party to whip the other faction. Wars followed, the
mission was again invaded, the houses burned, and the missionaries, not
desiring martyrdom, fled to Australia, thousands of miles away. But two
remained, and kept at their preaching, and finally the genius of the
Clapham clerics triumphed. Pomaré ate the tabu turtle of the temple,
and a Christian nucleus was formed, headed by the sovereign. For years
a bloody warfare over Christianity distracted the islands, comparable
in intensity of feeling to that between Catholics and Huguenots in
France. The Christian converts were slaughtered by the hundreds,
and the pagans drove all the survivors to Moorea. After a season
the conquerors grew lonesome, and invited them to return and abjure
their false god, Ietu Kirito, whom they had defeated, and who by the
Christians' own statement had been hanged on a tree by the Ati-Iuda,
the tribe of Jews. Pomaré and eight hundred men landed from Moorea,
and with the missionaries began a song service on the beach, and
"Come, let us join our friends above," and "Blow ye the trumpets,
blow!" echoed from the hills.
Couriers carried all over Tahiti word of the outrage to the gods,
and the incensed heathens rose in immense numbers and attacked the
hymners. Fortunately, says the missionary chronicle, the Christians
had their arms with them, and after prayers and exhortations by the
clergy, Pomaré led his cohorts, men and women; and by the grace of God
and the whites, with a few muskets, they smote the devil-worshipers
hip and thigh, and chased them to the distant valleys.
Pomaré, directed by the now militant missionaries, sent a body of
gunmen to Tautira to capture the god Oro, whose principal temple was
very near where stood my kitchen. The iconoclasts, with the zeal of
neophytes, destroyed every vestige of the magnificent marae, and,
unwinding the many coverings of Oro, carried to the king the huge log
which had been the national god for ages. The king first used it in
his cook-house as a shelf, and finally for firewood.
From then on the cross hecame the symhol of the new religion,
and those who had been most faithful to the old were the strongest
disciples. Until the French expelled the missionary-consul of England,
Pritchard, the missionaries virtually governed Tahiti; but with the
conflict of sects and the growing claims of trade, piety languished,
until now church-going was become a social pastime, and of small
influence upon the conduct of the Tahitians. The pastors were no longer
of the type of the pioneers, and with the fast decrease of the race,
the Tahitians were left largely to their own devices. Half a dozen
religions supported ministers from America and Europe in Papeete;
but there was no longer a fire of proselytizing, as all were nominally
Christians. In Tautira everybody went to the Protestant or the Catholic
church, the latter having a fifth as many attendants as the former. A
reason for this may have been that there was no French priest resident
at Tautira, and no Tahitian priests, whereas Tahitian preachers
abound. Also the chiefs were Protestants, and their influence notable.
Ori-a-Ori, though busied in his official duties, and by nature a
silent man, assumed of me a care, and in time gave me a friendship
beyond my possible return to him. I sent to Papeete for a variety
of edibles from the stores of the New-Zealand and German merchants,
and spread a gay table, to which I often invited Choti and T'yonni,
who were my hosts as frequently. Ori-a-Ori every evening sat with me,
and numbers of times we read the Bible, I, first, reciting the verse in
French, and he following in Tahitian. His greatest liking was for the
chapters in which the Saviour's life on the seaside with the fishermen
was described, but the beatitudes brought out to the fullest his deep,
melancholy voice, as by the light of the lamp upon the low table the
chief intoned the thrilling gospel of humility and unselfishness.
Never before had I appreciated so well the divine character of
Jesus or conjectured so clearly the scenes of his teaching upon the
shores of the Lake of Galilee. Excepting the tropical plants and the
eternal accent of the reef, the old Tahitian and I might have been in
Palestine with Peter and the sons of Zebedee and the disciples. They
were people of slender worldly knowledge, the carpenter's son knew
nothing of history, and ate with his fingers, as did Ori-a-Ori; but
their open eyes, unclouded by sophistication and complex interests,
looked at the universe and saw God. They lived mostly under the open
sky in touch with nature, dependent on its manifestations immediately
about them for their sustenance, and with its gifts and curses for
their concerns and symbols.
Occidentals, who seldom muse, to whom contemplation is waste of time,
do not enjoy the oneness with nature shared by these Polynesians
with the sacred Commoner whose beatitudes were to bring anarchy upon
the Roman world, and destroy the effects of the philosophies of the
ablest minds of Greece. The fishermen of Samaria were gay and somber
by turn, as were the Tahitians, doing little work, but much thinking,
and innocent and ignorant of the perplexing problems and offensive
indecencies of striving and luxury. The air and light nurtured them,
and they confidently leaned upon the hand of God to guide and preserve.
Thoreau's "Cry of the Human" echoed in the dark as the chief and I
chanted the idealistic desires of the friend of man:
We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest
life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted
from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature. He has
glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers. The
steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like
the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling
and shortlived blaze of candles.
One evening when we had walked down to the beach to gaze at the
heavens and to speculate on the inhabitants of the planets, we sat
on our haunches, our feet lapped by the warm tide, and for the first
time I drew our conversation to a man who in a brief friendship had
won the deep affection of this noble islander.
"Ori-a-Ori," I began, "in America, in the city where I lived, my
house was near a small aua, a park in which was a tii, a monument, to
a great writer, a teller of tales on paper. On a tall block of stone
is a ship of gold, with the sails spread; so she seems to be sailing
over the ocean. The friends of the teller of tales built this in in
his honor after he died. Now that writer was once here in Tautira--"
Ori-a-Ori leaned toward me, and in a voice laden with memories,
a voice that harked back over a quarter of a century, said slowly
and meditatively, but with surety:
"Rui? Is the ship the Tatto?"
I had awakened in his mind recollections, doubtless often stirred,
but very vague, perhaps, almost mythical to him, after so long a
time in which nothing like the same experience had come to him. Yet
that they were dear to him was evident. They were concerned with
his vigorous manhood, though he was a youthful grandfather when
the Casco brought Robert Louis Stevenson to Tahiti to live in the
house of Ori. I reminded him of their exchanging names in blood
brothership, so that Stevenson was Teriitera, and Ori was Rui. Rui was
his pronunciation of Louis, as all his family in Tautira called the
Scotch author. Ori-a-Ori had known them all, his mother, his wife,
and his loved stepson, Lloyd Osborne. Nine weeks they had stayed in
his house, which the Princess Moë, Pomaré's sister-in-law, had asked
Ori to vacate for the visitors before he knew them, but which he was
glad he had done when they became friends. Ori and his family had
retained only one room for their intimate effects, and had slept in a
native house on the site of my own. On the wild lawn across the road,
before his home, Rui had given his generous feast, costing him eighty
dollars at a time when he was most uncertain of funds, and gaining
him the reputation of the richest man known to the Tautirans, the
owner of the Silver Ship, as the Casco was called by the Paumotuans,
and by Stevenson afterward. There were four or five Tahitians I knew
here who remembered the amuraa maa of the sick man, who had his own
schooner, his pahi tira piti; but only Ori retained the deep, though
misty, impression made by a meeting of hearts in warmest kinship.
"Rui gave me knives and forks and dishes from the schooner to remember
him by," said the chief, abstractedly. "Tati, my relation, has them. I
have not those presents Rui handed me. Tati said that I ate with my
fingers, and that he was the head of the Teva clan; so I gave them
to him. Many papaa visit Tati at Papara. He is rich. Aue! I have not
the presents Rui put down on my table."
I said over for him what Rui had written:
I love the Polynesian; this civilization of ours is a dingy,
ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much
of that the very beauty of the poor beast ... if you could live,
the only white folk, in a Polynesian village, and drink that warm,
light vin du pays of human affection, and enjoy that simple dignity
of all about you....
Paiere, the adopted son of Ori, who was a boy when the Casco was at
Tautira, claimed a vivid remembrance of many incidents. He especially
had been impressed by the numbers of corks that flew in the house
and on the green; and when I invited him to a bottle of champagne,
he made hissing sounds and a plop to indicate that Rui had a penchant
for that kind of wine.
"I used to fetch him oranges and mangoes, and climb for drinking nuts,
of which Rui was fond," said Paiere.
Paiere was a deacon or functionary of the Protestant church, as was
Ori-a-Ori, and I went with the entire family to the Sunday evening
service. For weeks preparations and rehearsals for a himene nui,
a mammoth song service, had been agitating the village. Under my
trees the children gathered of late afternoons and imitated the
grown-up folk in their melodies. From the verandas and from the
church at night issued the peculiar strain of the himene, somehow
bringing to me, lying on my mat under the stars, a sense of fitness
to the prospect--the clear heavens, the purple lagoon, the wind in
the groves, and the low rumble of the surf.
On the Sunday of the himene nui, I met the French priest as he tied his
horse by the door of the Catholic church. He was in a dark cassock or
gown, his long, black beard and a flat, half-melon shaped hat giving
him a distinctive appearance in the simple settlement. He was old,
and weary from his hot ride, but courteous as world-wide travelers are,
and at his request I dropped in on his service before the other. He sat
by the middle door, and the twenty or thirty of the congregation on the
floor at one end. They sang a himene, and he followed and corrected
them from a book, so that their method was formal. Congregational
singing not being customary in Catholic churches, it was probable that
in Tahiti they had had to meet the competition of the Protestants,
who from their beginnings in Polynesia had made a master stroke by
developing this form of worship in extraordinary consonance with the
native mind.
The Protestant temple held a hundred and fifty people. It was a
plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at
one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half
a dozen deacons. The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered,
he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats. He had a white
shirt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool,
and were barelegged. All wore solemn faces of a jury bringing in a
death-verdict. Paiere nodded to a volunteer janitor, who insisted
upon my occupying a chair he brought.
Every one else was on the floor on mats, in two squares or separate
divisions. Babies lay at their mothers' extended feet, and others
ran about the room in silence. The pastor's sermon was about Ioba
and his tefa pua, which he scraped with poa, the shells of the
beach. He pictured the man of patience as if in Tautira, with his
three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, and Tofari, urging him
to deny God and to sin; and the speaker struck the railing with his
fist when he enumerated the possessions taken from Ioba by God, but
returned a hundredfold. After he had finished, wiping the sweat from
his brow with a colored kerchief, the himene began.
The only advance we have made since the Greeks is, in music. Possibly
in painting we have better mediums; but in philosophy, poetry,
sculpture, decency, beauty, we have not risen. We cure diseases
more skilfully, but we have more; in health we are crippled by our
cities and our customs. Our violins and pianos, our orchestras,
and symphonies, are our great achievements; but in these South Seas,
where they do not count, the people had evolved a mass utterance of
canticles more thrilling and, more enjoyable than the oratorios of
Europe. In these himenes one may see transfigured for moments the
soul of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, which
smothers his articulation.
A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a high note, beginning
a few words from a hymn, or an improvisation. She sang through a
phrase, and then others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens,
without any apparent rule except close harmony. These voices burst
in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some
singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming
bass. The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees,
entered into the volume of sound, and were mingled in the emmeleia,
a resulting magnificence of accord that reminded me curiously of a
great pipe-organ.
The himene was the offspring of the original efforts of the
Polynesians to adapt the songs of the sailormen, the national airs
of the adventurers of many countries, the rollicking obscenities and
drinking doggerel of the navies, and the religious hymns drilled into
their ears by the missionaries, English and French. Now the words and
the meanings were inextricably confused. A leader might begin with,
"I am washed in the blood of the Lamb," or, "The Son of Man goes
forth to war, a golden crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams
afar--who follows in his train?" But those striking in might prefer
such a phrase as, "The old white pig ran into the sea," or, "Johnny
Brown, I love your daughter," or something not possible to write
down. It was mostly in the old Tahitian language, almost forgotten,
and thus unknown to the foreign preachers. Sex and religion were as
mingled here as in America.
The airs were as wild as they were melodious; here a rippling torrent
of ra, ra, ra-ra-ra, and la, la, la-la-la breaking in on the sustained
verses of the leaders; falsetto notes, high and strident, savage and
shrilling, piercing the thrumming diapason of the men; long, droning
tones like bagpipes, bubbling sounds like water flowing; and all
in perfect time. The clear, fascinating false soprano of the woman
leader had a cadence of ecstasy, and I marked her under a lamp. Her
head was thrown back, her eyes were closed, and her features set as
in a trance. Her throat and mouth moved, and her nostrils quivered,
her countenance glorified by her visions which had transported her
to the bosom of Abraham.
The atmosphere rang as with the chimes of a cathedral, the
echoes--there were none in reality--returning from roof and tree, and
I had the feeling of the air being made up of voices, and of whirling
in this magic ether. The woman I observed would seem about to stop,
her voice falling away almost to no sound, and the prolonged drone
of the chorus dying out, when, as if she had come to life again,
she sang out at the top of her lungs, and the ranks again took up
their tones. I could almost trace the imposition of the religious
strain upon the savage, the Christian upon the heathen, like the
negro spirituals of Georgia, and I sat back in my chair, and forgot
the scene in the thoughts induced by the himene.
The souls of the Tahitians were not much changed by all their outward
transformation. Superficial, indeed, are the accomplishments of
missionaries, merchants, and masters among these Maoris. The old
guard dies, but never surrenders; the boast of Napoleon's soldiers
might be paraphrased by the voice of the Maori spirit. Our philosophy,
our catechisms, and our rules have not uprooted the convictions and
thought methods of centuries. Bewildered by our ambitions, fashions,
and inventions, they emulate us feebly, but in their heart of hearts
think us mad. Old chiefs and chiefesses I have had confess to me that
they were stunned by the novelties, commands, and demands of the papaa
(foreigner), but that their confusion was not liking or belief. In his
youth, in the midst of these bustling whites, the Tahitian imitates
them and feels sometimes humiliated that he is not one of them. But
in sober middle age all these new desires begin to leave him, and he
becomes a Maori again. The older he grows, the less attractive seem
the white man's ways and ambitions, though pride, habit, and perhaps
an acquired fear of the hell painted by priests and preachers from the
distant lands keep him church-going. Gods may differ, but devils never.
Choti and T'yonni and I spent an hour at my house before they walked
home to bed, and Choti read as a soporific, with a few bottles of
Munich beer, the "Sermon to the Fishes" of St. Antonius. As he read,
we heard the joyous stridence of an accordion in a hula harmony. The
upaupahura was beginning in the grove where Uritaata lived. The austere
St. Antonius had lectured long to the eels on the folly of wiggling,
to the pikes on the immorality of stealing, and to the crabs and
turtles on the danger of sloth. But:
"The sermon now ended,
Each turned and descended;
The pikes went on stealing,
The eels went on eeling;
Much edified were they,
But preferred the old way.
"The crabs are back-sliders,
The stock-fish thick-siders,
The carps are sharp-set,
All the sermon forget;
Much delighted were they,
But preferred the old way."