_The History of Tahiti--Drink and the Native--In the Old Wild Days--The
Simple and the Civilised Life--What an Island Town is like--The Lotos
Eaters--Cocoanuts and Courtesy--A Feast of Fat Things--The Orgy on the
Verandah--Schooners and Pearls--The Land of Tir-n’an-Oge._
ALTHOUGH I certainly did not use the few days of my stay in Tahiti
to the best advantage--although I saw none of the public buildings of
Papeëte, never set eyes on any of the officials of the place, and did
not collect any statistics worth mentioning, I gathered a few crude
facts of a useful kind, which are herewith offered as a sop to the
reader, who must be informed and improved, or know the reason why. (If
he would only go to Tahiti, that dear reader, whom, all travellers know
so well and fear so much! if he would just spend a week lying on the
coral beach, and strolling in the moonlight, and listening to native
songs, and feeding fat on native dainties--he would never want to be
informed of anything any more, and as to being improved... O Tahiti,
loveliest and least conventional of the siren countries of the dear
South Seas, can you lay your hand on your heart, and honestly declare
you are improving?)
Tahiti was discovered, not by Captain Cook, as is rather commonly
supposed, but by Captain Wallis of H.M.S. _Dolphin_, in 1767. Captain
Wallis formally took possession of the group in the name of His Majesty
King George III., and Captain Cook, in the course of his different
visits to the islands, laid the foundations of all the civilisation
they afterwards acquired. Nevertheless, the islands are French property
to-day. There is nothing in the Pacific better worth owning than the
Society group, more fertile, more beautiful, more healthy, richer in
valuable tropical products--and the construction of the Panama Canal,
an event which has been foreseen for several generations, will obviously
add much to the importance of the islands. Because of these, and other
excellent reasons, Great Britain, acting on the principles by which her
colonial policy is commonly guided, allowed the Society Islands to
slip gradually into the hands of a power better able than herself to
appreciate their value, and the group, after thirty-seven years of
“protection,” was finally taken possession of by France, in the year
1880. The native Queen, Pômare IV. (Pomare being a dynastic name like
Cæsar, but, unlike the latter, applied to both sexes), was allowed to
retain her state and possessions under the French protectorate. Her
successor, King Pomare V., who succeeded in 1877 and died in 1891, only
reigned for three years. After the formal annexation he retained his
title of king, and much of his state, but the power was entirely in
French hands. Prince Hinoe, his heir, who would in the ordinary course
have occupied the throne, lives in a handsome European-built house near
Papeete, and enjoys a good pension, but is otherwise not distinguished
in any way from the ordinary Tahitian.
Under French rule, the islands have done fairly well. There were at
first many regrettable disputes and troubles between opposing camps of
missionaries, but these have long since been made up. Commerce is
in rather a languishing state. The group exports copra, vanilla,
pearl-shell, and fruit, but the trade with America was so much on the
down-grade during the time of my visit, that steamers were leaving the
port with empty holds. The natives are well treated under the present
system; the liquor laws, however, are defective, and no Tahitian,
apparently, has any difficulty in obtaining as much strong spirits as
he wants and can pay for. The disastrous effects of such carelessness
as this need no mention to the reader who knows anything of darkskinned
races. For the benefit of the reader who does not, however, it may
be remarked that all colonial administrators agree concerning the bad
effects of intoxicants on coloured races of every kind. It matters not
at what end or part of the scale of colour the man may be--whether he
is a woolly-haired, baboon-jawed nigger from Central Africa, a grave,
intelligent, educated Maori of New Zealand, or a gentle child-like
native of Tahiti, barely café-au-lait as to colour--all the same, and
all the time, spirits are sure to convert him, temporarily, into
a raging beast, and, in the long run, to wipe out him and his kind
altogether. It is not a question of temperance principles or the
reverse, but merely a matter of common-sense policy, in dealing with
races which have shown themselves unable to withstand the effects of
the liquors that our hardier northern nations can use with comparative
safety. One may lay it down as a general principle that nothing with a
coloured skin on it can take, intoxicants in moderation--it is not at
all, or all in all, with the “native” when it comes to strong drinks.
Scientific folk would probably set down the comparative immunity of
the white races to the protection that lies behind them in the shape
of centuries of drinking ancestors. The coffee-coloured islander’s
great-grandparents did not know whisky, just as they never experienced
measles and other diseases, that do not usually kill the white, but
almost always put an end to the “man and brother.” Therefore, the
islander’s body has not, by inheritance, acquired those points of
constitution which enable the white to resist whisky and measles, and
other dangerous things; and when they touch him, he goes down at once. A
parallel may be found in the case of opium, which the white man, broadly
speaking, cannot take in moderation, although most of the yellow races
can. Europeans who once acquire a liking for the effects of opium will
generally die as miserable wrecks, in the course of a very few years.
A Chinaman, under similar circumstances, may, and often does, live to
a good old age, without taking any harm at all from his constant doses.
His ancestors have been opium takers, the Englishman’s have not. It is
the case of the islander and the spirits over again.
After which digression, one has some way to come back to the fact that
the French Government does not prevent the Tahitian from drinking
gin nearly so effectively as it should, and that, in consequence, the
diminution of the native population receives a downward push that it
does not in the least require. In the Fijis, British rule keeps spirits
strictly away from all the natives, with the exception of the chiefs,
and something, at least, is thereby done to slacken the decline that
afflicts the people of almost every island in the Pacific. The Fijian
chiefs, as a rule, drink heavily, and do not commonly live long, thus
providing another argument in favour of restriction.
The population of Tahiti is indeed much less than it should be. Captain
Cook’s estimates of native populations are now understood to have been
mistaken in many cases, owing to the fact that he calculated the entire
numbers from the density of occupation round the shores. As most Pacific
islands are inhabited about the coasts alone, the interior being often
unsuitable for cultivation, and too far removed from the fishing-grounds
to suit an indolent race, it can easily be understood that serious
errors would arise from such a method of estimate. The diminution,
therefore, since ancient times, is not quite so alarming as the first
writers on the Pacific--and, indeed, many who followed them--supposed
it to be. If the sums worked out by the travellers who visited Honolulu
in the sixties, or Tahiti a little later, had been correct, both of
these important groups would long since have been empty of all native
population. But the Hawaiian group has still a very fair number of
darkskinned people, while Tahiti, including all its islands, had a
population, according to the census of 1902, of over thirteen thousand,
one-eighth of whom are said to be French, and a smaller number Chinese
and other foreigners.
Still, it cannot be said that this is a large, or even a fair population
for a group of islands covering 580 square miles, nor can it be denied
that the numbers of the Tahitians are steadily on the decrease.
The exact causes of the decline are disputed, as indeed they are in
connection with every other coloured race in the Pacific. European
diseases of a serious kind are extremely common in the group, and
consumption also is frequent. These are two obvious causes. Less easily
reckoned are the unnamed tendencies towards extinction that follow the
track of the white man through the lands of primitive peoples, all
over the world. There can be no doubt that the old life of the
Pacific--feasting, fighting, making love, and making murder: dressing in
a bunch of leaves, and living almost as completely without thought for
the morrow as the twittering parrakeets in the mango trees--suited the
constitution of the islander better than the life of to-day.
It may have been bad for his spiritual development, and it certainly
was bad for any wandering white men who came, by necessity or choice, to
visit his far-away fastnesses. But he lived and flourished in those bad
days, whereas now he quietly and unostentatiously, and quite without any
rancour or regret, dies.
Why? Old island residents will tell you that, even if every disease
brought by the white man were rooted out to-morrow, the native would
still diminish in numbers. He has done so in islands where the effects
of European diseases were comparatively slight. He does so in New
Zealand, where the Maori (the supposed ancestor of most of the island
peoples) is petted, cherished, and doctored to an amazing extent by the
ruling race, and yet persists in dying out, although he is not
affected by consumption or other evils to any serious extent. There are
undoubtedly other causes, and perhaps among them not the least is
the fact that, for most Pacific races, life, with the coming of
civilisation, has greatly lost its savour.
It used to be amazingly lively in Tahiti, in the wild old days. Then,
the Tahitian did not know of white men’s luxuries--of tea and sugar and
tinned stuffs, lamps and kerosene, hideous calico shirts and gaudy
ties, muslin gowns and frilled petticoats for the women, “bits” to make
patchwork quilts with, and beds to put the quilts on, and matchwood
bungalows to put the beds in, and quart bottles of fiery gin to drink,
and coloured silk handkerchiefs to put away on a shelf, and creaking
shoes to lame oneself with on Sundays. Then, he did not let or sell his
land to some one in order to get cash to buy these desirable things;
nor did his womankind, for the same reason, adopt, almost as a national
profession, a mode of life to which the conventionalities forbid me to
give a name. Nor did the distractions of unlimited church-going turn
away his mind from the main business of life, which was undoubtedly that
of enjoyment. He had no money, and no goods, and did not want either. He
had no religion (to speak of) and desired that still less. All he had
to do was to secure a good time, and get up a fight now and then when
things in general began to turn slow.
It must be said that the existence of the “Areoi,” a certain secret
society of old Tahiti, went far to minimise the risk of dullness.
The members formed a species of heathen “Hell-Fire Club,” and
they cultivated every crime known to civilisation, and a few which
civilisation has happily forgotten. Murder, theft, human sacrifices,
cannibalism, were among their usual practices, and the domestic
relationships of the Society (which was large and influential, and
included both sexes) are said to have been open to some criticism. They
were popular, however, for they studied music and the dance as fine
arts, and gave free entertainments to every one who cared to come. They
travelled from village to village, island to island, giving “shows”
wherever they went, and winning welcome and favour everywhere by the
brilliance and originality of their improprieties. They were as wicked
as they knew how, and as amusing, and as devilish, and as dazzling....
How the young Tahitian lad, not yet tattooed, and considered of no
importance, must have reverenced and envied them! how he must have
imitated their pranks in the seclusion of the cocoanut groves, and
hummed over their songs, and longed for the time when he himself should
be big enough to run away from home, and go off with the delightful,
demoniacal, fascinating Areois!
Then there was always a native king in Tahiti in those days, and a
number of big native chiefs, each one of whom had his own little court,
with all the exciting surroundings of a court which are never missing in
any part of the world, from Saxe-Niemandhausen to Patagonia. And there
were tribal fights from time to time, when property changed hands, and
war-spears were reddened, and a man might hunt his enemy in the dusk,
stealthy, soft-footed, with heart jumping in his breast, along the
shadowy borders of the lagoon.... Murder and mischief and fighting and
greed, pomp of savage courts and stir of savage ambitions, and the other
world that nobody knew or cared about, shut off by a barrier of seas
unexplored.... It was a life in which a man undoubtedly did live, a life
that kept him quick until he was dead. Does the decline of Pacific races
look less unaccountable now?
In these days, the Tahitian is undoubtedly improved. He never was a
very “bad lot” all round, in spite of the Areois; but Civilisation,
of course, had to take him in hand once it was known he was there, for
Civilisation will not have loose ends or undusted corners in her
house, if she can help it. So the people of Tahiti were discovered, and
converted, and clothed, and taught, and they gave up being Areois, and
worshipping heathen gods, and going about without shirts and skirts,
and they went frequently to church, and supported their white pastors
generously, and began to trade with the Europeans, so that the latter
made much money.
They are quite happy and uncomplaining, and manage to have a reasonably
good time in a quiet way, but they _will_ die out, and nobody can
prevent them. You see, they are rather bored, and when you are bored,
the answer to the question, “Is life worth living?” is, at the least,
debatable--to a Pacific Islander.
I have written of this at some length, because, _mutatis mutandis_, it
applies to nearly all the island races.
It is not only the Tahitian who looks back with wistful eyes to the
faded sunset of the bad old times, with all their savage gaudiness of
scarlet blood and golden licence, and languishes in the chill pale dawn
of the white man’s civilisation. It is the whole Pacific world, more or
less. The Simple Life in the raw original is not, by many a long league,
as simple and innocent as it is supposed to be, by those new and noisy
apostles of a return to Nature, who have never got nearer to the things
of the beginning than a week-end up the Thames--but, unsimple and
uninnocent as it is, it suits the coloured man better than anything
else. Would one, therefore, wish to put back the clock of time,
re-establish heathenism and cannibalism over all the Pacific, and see
Honolulu, Fiji, Samoa, with their towns and Government Houses, and
shops and roads and plantations, leap back to the condition of the still
uncivilised western islands, where no man’s life is safe, and the law of
might is the only law that is known? Hardly. There is no answer to the
problem, and no moral to be drawn from it either. But then, you do not
draw morals in the South Seas--they are not plentiful enough.
The Society Islands--which were so named in compliment to the Royal
Society--lie between 16° and 18° south latitude, and 148° and 158° west
longitude. Tahiti itself is much the largest, the driveway round
this island being about ninety miles long. Huaheine, Raiatea, Murea,
Bora-Bora, and the small islands Taha’a and Maitea, are much less
important. The only town of the group is Papeëte.
So much, for the serious-minded reader, already mentioned, who knows
most things beforehand, and likes his information cut-and-dried. The
commoner and more ignorant reader, I will assume, knows no more
about Tahiti than I did before I went, and therefore will be glad of
amplification.
Sixteen degrees only from the equator is hot--very hot at times--and
does not allow of a really cool season, though the months between April
and October are slightly less warm than the others, and at night one may
sometimes need a blanket. Everything near the equator is a long way from
England, and everything on the south side of the line is a very long
way, and anything in the Pacific is so far off that it might almost as
well be in another star. Tahiti, therefore, is quite, as the Irish say,
“at the back of God-speed.”
Perhaps that is where much of its charm lies. There is a fascination in
remoteness, hard to define, but not on that account less powerful. “So
far away!” is a word-spell that has charmed many a sail across the seas,
from the days of the seekers after the Golden Fleece till now.
Papeëte was the first of the island towns that I saw, and it is so
typical an example of all, that one description may serve for many.
Imagine, then, a long, one-sided street, always known in every group as
“the beach.” The reason is apparent--it really is a beach with
houses attached, rather than a street with a shore close at hand. The
stores--roomy, low, wood-built houses, largely composed of verandah--are
strung loosely down the length of the street. Flamboyant trees, as large
as English beeches, roof in the greater part of the long roadway with
a cool canopy of green, spangled by bunches of magnificent scarlet
flowers. Almost every house stands in a tangle of brilliant tropical
foliage, and the side streets that run off landwards here and there, are
more like Botanic Gardens with a few ornamental cottages let loose among
them, than prosaic pieces of a town--so richly does the flood of riotous
greenery foam up over low fence tops, and brim into unguarded drains and
hollows, so gorgeously do the red and white and golden flowers wreathe
tall verandah posts, and carpet ugly tin roofs with a kindly tapestry of
leaf, and bloom. Foot to foot and hand to hand with Nature stands man,
in these islands, let him but relax for a moment, and--there!--she has
him over the line!... Leave Papeëte alone for a couple of years, and you
would need an axe to find it, when you came back.
There are a number of hotels in Papeëte--mostly of an indifferent sort,
and none too cheap--and there are several large cafés and restaurants,
run on lines entirely Parisian, and a crowd of smaller ones, many owned,
by Chinese, where the hard-up white may feed at a very small cost,
pleasantly enough, if he does not ask too many questions about the
origin and preparation of his food. There are three local newspapers,
and a military band plays in the afternoons, and there are clubs of all
kinds’ and not a little society, which--being society--is in its essence
bound to be uninteresting and flat, even here in the many-coloured South
Seas. But under all this, the native life flows on in its own way, and
the Tahitian takes his pleasure after his immemorial fashion, as quietly
and as lazily as he is allowed. I have spoken hitherto of only one side
of the main street. The other, which gives directly on the sea, belongs
to the Tahitian life of Tahiti. Here, a green slope of soft grass
stretches down to the greener waters of the sparkling lagoon: delicate
palms lean over the still sea-mirror, like beauties smiling into a
glass; flamboyant and frangipani trees drop crimson and creamy blooms
upon the grass; and, among the flowers, facing the sea and the ships and
the dreamy green lagoon, lie the natives, old and young. They wear the
lightest of cotton clothing, scarlet and rose and butter-cup yellow, and
white scented flowers are twisted in their hair. Fruits of many colours,
and roots and fish, lie beside them. They eat a good part of the day,
and their dogs, sleeping blissfully in the shade at their feet, wake up
and eat with them now and then. There is plenty for both--no one ever
goes short of food in Tahiti, where the pinch of cold and hunger, and
the burden of hard, unremitting, unholidayed work are alike unknown.
Sometimes the natives wander away to the river that flows through the
town, and take a bath in its cool waters; returning later to lounge, and
laze, and suck fruit, and dream, on the shores of the lagoon again. The
sound of the surf, droning all day long on the coral reef that bars the
inner lake of unruffled green from the outer ocean of windy blue, seems
to charm them into a soft half-sleep, through which, with open but
unseeing eyes, they watch the far-off creaming of the breakers in the
sun, and the flutter of huge velvet butterflies among the flowers,
and the brown canoes gliding like water-beetles about the tall-masted
schooners in the harbour. With sunset comes a cooling of the heated air,
and glowworm lights begin to twinkle through the translucent red walls
of the little native houses scattered here and there. It will soon be
dark now: after dark, there will be dancing and singing in the house;
later, the sleeping mats will be laid out, and with the moon and the
stars glimmering in through the walls upon their still brown faces, the
Tahitians will sleep.... So, in the sunset, with
Dark faces, pale against the rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters
wander home.
Only a flash in the long cinematograph of the wonderful track that
circles the globe, is Tahiti. I cannot tell of Murea, the marvellous
island that lies opposite Papeete, seven and a half miles away, because,
during the few days I spent in Tahiti, no boat was going there, and none
could be induced to go. So I had to look at Murea’s splintered towers
and spiring pinnacles, and wonderful purple goblin palaces, floating
high among the clouds, from the tantalising distance of Papeëte harbour.
Nor could I join some steamer friends in driving round the ninety-mile
roadway, as we had intended--stopping in native towns, and seeing
something of the inner life of the island--because no one in the capital
had any teams for hire just then, and nobody knew when there would be
any. Some of us went up the river to see Pierre Loti’s bathing pool,
and came back rather disappointed, and others drove out to the tomb
of Pômare V., three miles from the town. It was a pile of concrete and
stone, modelled after European fashions, and not especially interesting.
One of the ladies of the party wandered off with me down the beach,
neither of us being interested in the resting-place of the defunct
Pomare--and here we found plenty of food for mind and body both. For was
not this a pandanus, or screw-pine, which we had read about, overhanging
the lagoon, with the quaintest mops of palmy foliage, set on long
broom-handles of boughs, and great fruits like pineapples hanging among
the leaves, and yellow and scarlet kernels lying thick on the sand
below--the tree itself perched up on tall bare wooden stilts formed
by the roots, and looking more like something from a comic scene in a
pantomime, than a real live piece of vegetation growing on an actual
shore? And were not these cocoanuts that lay all about the beach under
the leaning palms--nuts such as we had never seen before, big as a
horse’s head, and smooth green as to outside, but nuts all the same?
[Illustration: 0055]
[Illustration: 0056]
A native slipped silently from among the thick trees beside us--a
bronze-skinned youth of eighteen or nineteen, dressed only in a light
pareo or kilt of blue and white cotton. He stood with hands lightly
crossed on his breast, looking at us with the expression of infinite
kindliness and good-nature that is so characteristic of the Tahitian
race. We signed to him that we wanted to drink, and he smiled
comprehendingly, shook his head at the nuts on the ground, and lightly
sprang on to the bole of the palm beside us, which slanted a little
towards the sea. Up the trunk of that tree, which inclined so slightly
that one would not have thought a squirrel could have kept its footing
there, walked our native friend, holding on with his feet and hands, and
going as easily as a sailor on a Jacob’s ladder. Arrived in the crown
some seventy feet above, he threw down two or three nuts, and then
descended and husked them for us.
[Illustration: 0062]
Husking a cocoanut is one of the simplest-looking operations in
the world, but I have not yet seen the white man who could do it
effectively, though every native is apparently born with the trick. A
stick is sharply pointed at both ends, and one end is firmly set in the
ground. The nut is now taken in the hands, and struck with a hitting and
tearing movement combined, on the point of the stick, so as to split the
thick, intensely tough covering of dense coir fibre that protects the
nut, and rip the latter out. It comes forth white as ivory, about the
same shape and size as the brown old nuts that come by ship to England,
but much younger and more brittle, for only the smallest of the
old nuts, which are not wanted in the islands for copra-making, are
generally exported. A large knife is used to crack the top of the nut
all round, like an egg-shell, and the drink is ready, a draught of pure
water, slightly sweet and just a little aerated, if the nut has been
plucked at the right stage. There is no pleasanter or more refreshing
draught in the world, and it has not the least likeness to the “milk”
contained in the cocoanuts of commerce. No native would drink old nuts
such as the latter, for fear of illness, as they are considered both
unpleasant and unwholesome. Only half-grown nuts are used for drinking,
and even these will sometimes hold a couple of pints of liquid. The
water of the young cocoanut is food and drink in one, having much
nourishing matter held in solution. On many a long day of hot and
weary travel, during the years that followed, I had cause to bless the
refreshing and restoring powers of heaven’s best gift to man in the
tropics, the never-failing cocoanut.
[Illustration: 0097]
I will not insult the reader by telling him all the uses to which the
tree and its various products are put, because those are among the
things we have all learned at our first preparatory school; how the
natives in the cocoanut countries make hats and mats and houses, and
silver fish-servers and brocaded dressing-gowns, and glacé kid boots
with fourteen buttons (I think the list used to run somewhat after that
fashion--it is the spirit if not the letter)--all out of the simple
cocoanut tree; a piece of knowledge which, somehow or other, used to
make us feel vaguely virtuous and deserving, as if we had done it all
ourselves....
But all this time the youth is standing like a smiling bronze statue,
holding the great ivory cup in his hands, and waiting for us to drink.
We do so in turn, Ganymede carefully supporting the cup in his upcurved
hands, and tilting it with a fine regard for our needs, as the water
drops down in the nut like the tide on a sandy shore when the moon calls
back the sea.
[Illustration: 0103]
Then we take out purses, and want to pay Ganymede; but he will not be
paid, until it becomes plain to him that the greatest politeness lies in
yielding. He takes our franc, and disappears among the trees, to return
no more. But in a minute, out from the bush comes running the oddest
little figure, a very old, grey-bearded man, very gaily dressed in
a green shirt and a lilac pareo, and laden very heavily with ripe
pineapples. We guess him to be Ganymede’s father, and see that our guess
was right, when he drops the whole heap of fruit upon the ground at our
feet, smiling and bowing and murmuring incomprehensively over it, and
then begins to vanish like his son.
“Here--stop!” calls my companion. “We don’t want to take your fruit
without buying it. Come back, please, come back!”
The little old-gentleman trots back on his thin bare legs, recalled more
by the tone than the words, which he obviously does not understand, and
takes a hand of each of us in his own brown fingers. He shakes hands
with us gently and firmly, shaking his head negatively at the same time,
and then, like the romantic youths of Early Victorian novels, “turns,
and is immediately lost to view in the surrounding forest,” carrying the
honours of war, indubitably, with himself.
“Well, they are real generous!” declares my American companion, as we go
back to the tomb. “By the way, Miss G--------, I guess you’d better not
sit down on that grass to wait for the rest. I wouldn’t, if I was you.”
“Why not? it’s as dry as dust.”
“Because the natives say it’s somehow or other--they didn’t, explain
how--infected with leprosy, and I guess they ought to know; there’s
plenty of it all over the Pacific---- I rather thought that would hit
you where you lived.”
It did. I got up as quickly as a grasshopper in a hurry. Afterwards, on
a leper island thousands of miles away from Tahiti---- But that belongs
to another place.
L--------, the ever-amiable, our half-caste landlady at the little
bungalow hotel, all overgrown with bougainvillea and stephanotis, was
grieved because we had seen nothing in the way of “sights,” and declared
her intention of giving a native dinner for us.
[Illustration: 0070]
It was not very native, but it was very amusing. It took place in the
verandah of the hotel, under a galaxy of Chinese lanterns, with an
admiring audience of natives crowding the whole roadway outside, and
climbing up the trees to look at us. This was principally because the
word had gone forth in Papeëte (which owns the finest gossip-market in
the South Seas) that the English and American visitors were going to
appear in native dress, and nobody knew quite how far they meant to
go--there being two or three sorts of costume which pass under that
classification.
The variety which we selected, however, was not very sensational. The
ladies borrowed from L--------‘s inexhaustible store, draped themselves
in one or other of her flowing nightdress robes, let loose their hair,
and crowned themselves with twisted Tahitian corqnets of gardenia and
tuberose. A scarlet flower behind each ear completed the dress, and drew
forth delighted squeaks from the handmaidens of the hotel, and digs in
the ribs from L--------, who was nearly out of her mind with excitement
and enjoyment. Shoes were retained, contrary to L--------‘s entreaties,
but corsets she would not permit, nor would she allow a hairpin or
hair-ribbon among the party. The men guests wore white drill suits
with a native pareo, scarlet or yellow, tied round the waist. It was
a gay-looking party, on the whole, and the populace of Tahiti seemed to
enjoy the sight.
[Illustration: 0080]
The dinner was served at a table, but most of the dishes were on green
leaves instead of plates, and L-------- begged us, almost with tears in
her eyes, to eat the native dainties with our fingers, as they tasted
better that way. Little gold-fish, baked and served with cocoanut sauce,
were among the items on the menu: sucking-pig, cooked in a hole in the
ground, fat little river crayfish, breadfruit baked and served hot, with
(I regret to say) European butter, native puddings made of banana and
breadfruit, and the famous raw fish. Some of the guests would not touch
the latter, but the rest of us thought it no worse than raw oysters, and
sampled it, with much enjoyment. I give the receipt, for the benefit of
any one who may care to try it. Take any good white fish, cut it up into
pieces about two inches long, and place the latter, raw, in lime-juice
squeezed from fresh limes, or lemon-juice, if limes are not to be had.
Let the fish steep for half a day, and serve it cold, with cocoanut
sauce, the receipt for which is as follows:--Grate down the meat of a
large cocoanut, and pour a small cup of sea-water over it. Leave it for
three or four hours, and then strain several times through muslin (the
fine brown fibre off young cocoanut shoots is a correct material, but
the reader may not have a cocoanut in his back garden). The water should
at last come out as thick and opaque as cream.
This is the true “milk of the cocoanut” about which one so often hears.
It is of immemorial antiquity in the South Seas.
Captain Cook mentions it in his _Voyages_, and describes the cocoanut
shells full of it, that were given to every man at a feast, in which to
dip his food. When used as a sauce for meat or fish, one or two fresh
red peppers from the nearest pepper bush are cut up and put in. Chili
pepper, judiciously used, is a fair substitute for the latter. The sauce
is also used for many native puddings and sweet dishes, in which case it
is made with fresh water and the pepper is left out. As a fish sauce it
is unsurpassed, and may be recommended to gourmands as a new sensation.
It should be served in bowls of brown cocoanut shell.
[Illustration: 0091]
Breadfruit some of us tasted for the first time at this dinner. It was
universally liked, though a few maintained that it resembled potato more
than bread. I found it very like the latter, with a suggestion of floury
cracknel biscuit. It is most satisfying and nourishing. One never,
in island travels, feels the want of fresh bread when breadfruit is
available. L-------- had cooked it native fashion, peeled and baked
on hot stones in a pit in the ground. It is a good-sized fruit in its
natural state, about as large as a medium hothouse melon, and bright
green in colour. The skin is divided into lizard-like lozenges, and the
surface is very rough. Whether it is indigenous to the islands or not,
I cannot say, but it was there when Cook came, and it grows wild very
freely, providing an immense store of natural food.
Taro we also had, baked native style. It is a plant in use over almost
all the Pacific, very easily cultivated and rapidly producing immense
bluish-coloured roots, which look like mottled soap when cooked and
served. It is extremely dense and heavy, but pleasant to most tastes.
The white taro is a less common kind, somewhat lighter.
The mangoes that were served with the meal (among many other fruits)
were of a variety that is generally supposed to be the finest in the
world. No mango is so large, so sweet, or so fine in grain, as the mango
of Tahiti, and none has less of the turpentine flavour that is so much
disliked by newcomers to tropical countries. It is a commonplace of the
islands that a mango can only be eaten with comfort in a bath, and many
of the guests that evening would not have been sorry for a chance to
put the precept into practice, after struggling with one or two mangoes,
which were, of course, too solid to be sucked, and much too juicy
and sticky not to smear the hands and the face of the consumers
disastrously.
L-------- gave us many French dishes with our native dinner, to suit all
tastes, and gratify her own love of fine cookery, but these would be
of little interest to recount. I cannot forget, however, how this
true artiste of the kitchen described the menu she had planned, on the
morning of the entertainment. She sat down beside me on a sofa to tell
the wondrous tale, and, as she recited dish after dish, her voice rose
higher and higher, and her great black eyes burned, and she seized me
by the arm and almost hugged me in her excitement. When she came to the
savouries, tears of genuine emotion rose in her eyes, and at the end
of the whole long list, her feelings overcame her like a flood, and,
gasping out--“Beignets d’ananas à la Papeete; glaces. Vénus, en Cythère;
fromage----” she cast herself bodily into my arms and sobbed with
delight. She was fully fifteen stone, and the weather was exceedingly
warm, but I admired her artistic fervour too much to tell her to sit
up, and stop crying over my clean muslin (as I should have liked to do),
because it seemed to me that L-------- was really a true artiste in her
own way, and almost worthy to rank, in the history of the kitchen, with
Vatel the immortal, who fell upon his sword and died, because the fish
was late for the royal dinner.
Of the other evening, when half a dozen guests of mixed nationalities
began, through a temptation of the devil, to talk politics at ten
o’clock on the verandah--of the fur that, metaphorically speaking,
commenced to fly when the American cast the Irish question into the
fray, and the Englishman vilified Erin, and the Irishwoman, following
the historical precedent, called the Frenchwoman to her aid, and the
latter in the prettiest manner in the world, got up and closed her
two small hands round the throat of John Bull, and choked him into
silence--it would not be necessary to tell, had not the sequel been
disastrous to the fair name of our steamship party in Papeete. For a big
banana spider, as big in the body as half a crown, and nearly as hard,
came suddenly out from the stephanotis boughs, and, like a famous
ancestor, “sat down beside” a lady of the party. This caused the
politicians to rush to the aid of the lady, who had of course mounted
a chair and begun to scream. The spider proved extremely difficult
to kill, and had to be battered with the legs of chairs for some time
before he yielded up the ghost--one guest, who found an empty whisky
bottle, and flattened the creature out with it, carrying off the honours
of the fray. After which excitement, we all felt ready for bed, and
went.
“And in the morning, behold” the kindly L-------- smiling upon her
guests, and remarking: “Dat was a real big drunk you all having on the
veràndah, after I gone to bed!”
“Good heavens, L--------!” exclaims Mrs. New England, pale with horror,
“what do you mean?”
“Surely, Mrs. L--------, you do not suppose for an instant any of
our party were--I can hardly say it!” expostulates a delicate-looking
minister from the Southern States, here for his lungs, who was very
prominent last night in arguing Ireland’s right to “secede” if she
liked.
“That’s a good one, I must say,” remarks John Bull, rather indignantly.
But L-------- only smiles on. She is always smiling.
“Dat don’t go, Mr. ----------” she says pleasantly. “I couldn’t sleep
last night, for the way you all kicking up, and the girl, she say
you fighting. Madame ---------- she trying to kill Mr. Bull, all the
gentlemen smashing the leg of the chairs, the lady scream--and dis
mornin’, I findin’ a large whisky bottle, all drunk up.”
I am privately choking with laughter in a corner, but I cannot help
feeling sorry for Mrs. New England, who really looks as if about to
faint.
“_I_ don’ mind!” declares L-------- delightedly. “Why, I been thinking
all dis time you haven’t been enjoyin’ yourself at all. I like every
one here they having a real good time. Every one,” she smiles--and melts
away into the soft gloom of the drawing-room, where she sits down, and
begins to play softly thrumming, strangely intoxicating Tahitian dance
music on the piano.
“_Elle est impayable!_” says the Frenchwoman, shrugging her shoulders.
“From all I hear of Tahiti, my dear friends, I think you shall find
yourselves without a chiffon of character to-morrow.... But courage! it
is a thing here the most superfluous.”
Madame was a true prophet, I have reason to know; for many months after,
the story of the orgy, held on L--------‘s verandah by the English and
French and American ladies and gentlemen, reached me in a remote corner
of the Pacific, as “the latest from Papeete.” What I wanted to know, and
what I never shall know, for my boat came in next day, and took me away
to Raratonga--was whether the minister from the South eventually died of
the shock or not. I do not want to know about the lady from New England,
because I am quite certain she did--as certain as I am that I should
have, myself, and did not.
Of the prospects in Tahiti for settlers I cannot say much. It was said,
while I was in Papeete, that there was practically no money in the
place, and the traders, like the Scilly Island washerfolk of well-known
fame, merely existed by trading with each other. This may have been an
exaggeration, or a temporary state of depression. The vanilla trade,
owing to a newly invented chemical substitute, was not doing well, but
judging by what I saw next year in Fiji, the market must have recovered.
The climate of Tahiti is matchless for vanilla growing, and land is not
very difficult to get.
Quite a number of small schooners seemed to be engaged in the pearling
trade with the Paumotus--a group of islands covering over a thousand
miles of sea, and including some of the richest pearl beds in the
world--(French property). I never coveted anything more than I coveted
those dainty little vessels. Built in San Francisco, where people know
how to build schooners, they were finished like yachts, and their snowy
spread of cotton-cloth canvas, when they put out to sea, and their
graceful bird-like lines, would have delighted the soul of Clarke
Russell. One, a thirty-ton vessel, with the neatest little saloon in
the world, fitted with shelves for trading; and a captain’s cabin like a
miniature finer stateroom, and a toy-like galley forward, with a battery
of shining saucepans, and a spotless stove--snowy paint on hull and
deckhouses, lightened with fines of turquoise blue--splendid spiring
masts, varnished till they shone--cool white awning over the poop, and
sparkling brasses about the compass and the wheel, was so completely a
craft after my own heart that I longed to run away with her, or take her
off in my trunk to play with--she seemed quite small enough, though
her “beat” covered many thousand miles of sea. Poor little _Maid of the
Islands!_ Her bones are bleaching on a coral reef among the perilous
pearl atolls, this two years past, and her captain--the cheerful, trim,
goodnatured X--------, who could squeeze more knots an hour out of his
little craft than any other master in the port save one, and could tell
more lies about the Pacific in half an hour, than any one from Chili
to New Guinea--of his bones are coral made, down where the giant clam
swings his cruel valves together on wandering fish or streaming weed,
or limb of luckless diver, and where the dark tentacles of the great
Polynesian devil-fish
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
The pitcher that goes to the well, and the schooner that goes to
the pearl islands, are apt to meet with the same fate, in time.
Nevertheless, tales about the Paumotus are many, and interesting enough
to attract adventurers from far, if they were known. How the rumour of
a big pearl gets out; how a schooner sets forth to run down the
game, pursues it through shifting report after report, from native
exaggeration to native denial, perhaps for months; how it is found at
last, and triumphantly secured for a price not a tenth its worth; how
one shipload of shell, bought on speculation, will have a fortune in
the first handful, and the next will yield no more than the value of the
shell itself--this, and much else, make good hearing.
“Look at that pearl,” said a schooner captain to me one day, showing me
a little globe of light the size of a pea, and as round as a marble. “I
hunted that for a year, off and on. The native that had it lived way
off from anywhere, but he knew a thing or two, and he wouldn’t part. I
offered him goods, I offered him gin, I offered him twenty pounds cash,
but it was all no go. How d’you think I got it at last? Well, I’ll tell
you. I went up to his island with the twenty pounds in a sack, all in
small silver, and when I came into his house, I poured it all out in a
heap on the mats. ‘Ai, ai, ai!’ he says, and drops down on his knees in
front of it--it looked like a fortune to him. ‘Will you sell now?’ says
I, and by Jove, he did, and I carried it off with me. Worth? Can’t say
yet, but it’ll run well into three figures.”
The pearling in the French islands is strictly preserved, and the terms
on which it is obtainable are not known to me. Poaching is a crime not
by any means unheard of.
A glance at the map, and the extent of the Paumotu group, will explain
better than words why the policing of the pearl bed must necessarily be
incomplete.
The steamer came in in due course, and carried me away to the Cook
Islands. Huaheine and Raiatea, in the Society group, were called at
on the way, but Bora-Bora was left out, as it is not a regular port of
call. I am glad I did not land on Bora-Bora, and I never shall, if I
can help it. No place in the world could be so like a fairy dream as
Bora-Bora looked in the distance. It was literally a castle in the air;
battlements and turrets, built of vaporous blue clouds, springing steep
and impregnable from the diamond-dusted sea to the violet vault of
heaven. Fairy princesses lived there, one could not but know; dragons
lurked in the dark caves low down on the shore, and “magic casements,
opening on the foam of perilous seas,” looked down from those far blue
pinnacles.
Perhaps there is a village on Bora-Bora, with a dozen traders, and
an ugly concrete house or two, tin-roofed, defacing the beauty of the
palm-woven native homes, and a whitewashed church with European windows,
and a school where the pretty native girls are taught to plait back
their flowing hair, and lay aside their scented wreaths of jessamine and
orange-blossom.
But if all these things are there, at least I do not know it, and
Bora-Bora can still remain to me my island of Tir-na’n-Oge--the fabled
country which the mariners of ancient Ireland sought through long ages
of wandering, and only saw upon the far horizon, never, through all the
years, setting foot upon the strand that they knew to be the fairest in
the world. If they had ever indeed landed there.... But it is best for
all of us to see our Tir-na’n-Oge only in the far away.
Le seul rêve, intéresse.
Vivre sans rêve, qu’est-ce?
Moi, j’aime la Princesse
Lointaine.