_The Simple Life in the South Seas--Servant Problems again--Foods and
Fruits of the Country--The Tree that digests--Home-made Vanilla--The
Invaluable Lime--How to cook a Turtle--In an Island Bungalow--The Little
House on the Coral Shore--Humours of Island Life--Burying a Cycle--A
Network of Names--Mr. Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin-Roof--The Night-dress
that went to Church--The Extraordinary Wedding--South Sea Musicians--A
Conductor’s Paradise--Society Journalism in Song._
HOUSEKEEPING in the South Sea Islands demands a section to itself. All
who are uninterested in such matters may, and doubtless will, begin to
skip at this point.
Nothing helps the white house-mistress more than the simple standard of
living set in most of the islands. It is true that if you are the wife
of an important official in the Government House entourage of Fiji, or
if you live in civilised, Americanised Honolulu, you will have to “do
things” much as they are done at home. But, with these two exceptions,
life in that enormous section of the globe known as the South Seas (much
of it, by the way,--is north of the Line) is simple and unpretentious.
In describing the home life of the white settlers in Raratonga,
I describe what is, with small local variations, the life of settlers
in almost every group of the Pacific, certainly, the life of all in the
eight different groups I visited myself, during the years I spent in the
South Seas. All over the island world, people dine in the middle of the
day, except when entertaining friends, keep few servants or none, and
dress and feed simply, because nothing else is possible. The trade
cottons in the stores form the material of every lady’s dresses, and
as for the making, common consent, not to speak of climatic conditions,
votes the simplest style the best. Where every stitch of sewing in dress
or blouse must be done by the person who is to wear the garment, it is
astonishing how soon one grows to regard elaborate tuckings, flouncings,
inlayings, with hostility, and how satisfied the eye becomes with the
simpler and less “fatigued” lines of the garments fashioned by women
who cannot hire a dressmaker for love or money. Evening dress is
almost always of the “blouse” description, and in a climate which works
universal mischief with delicate white skins, no matter how they are
protected, this is no matter for regret. Men buy their drill suits
ready-made from the trading stores at a few shillings apiece, and, with
a white dinner-jacket and black cummerbund, any one is ready for the
gayest of evening entertainments.
The great dress question--being thus resolved into the simple elements
of a few cotton frocks for every day, and a muslin or two for best,
behold! half the worry of modern life is lifted at a blow. “One must
look like other people”--the goad of the toiling townswoman--becomes
in the islands, “One looks like other people because one must,” and the
words are a lullaby of rest.
After dress, comes servants, in the list of small worries that turn
a woman’s fair locks grey, and swell the takings of the fashionable
hairdressers. Well, it cannot be said that there is no servant trouble
in the islands. White servants simply do not exist; they are far too
much in demand in America and Australasia to desert either of these
domestic paradises for the hotter and lonelier islands. Native girls
cannot be had either, since they marry at thirteen or thereabouts.
Native boys and men are the only resource. They come to work by the day,
and are fed in the house; their wages are generally about five shillings
weekly, in the case of a boy, and ten shillings for a man. So far as
they go, they are satisfactory enough; they work hard, and are extremely
honest, and they are amiability and good-nature itself. But their scope
is decidedly limited. They can garden, under direction; they can
sweep, fetch wood and water, clean the cooking-stove, husk and open the
cocoanuts, wash, peel and boil the vegetables, scrub the verandah floor,
clean the knives, wash up dishes, and whiten the shoes. That is about
all. The mistress of the house and her daughters, if she is lucky enough
to have any, must do all the serious cooking, make the beds, dust, tidy,
and lay the table for meals.
One cannot say, however, that health suffers from the necessity of doing
a certain amount of housework every day. On the contrary, the white
women of the islands are strong and handsome, and do not seem to suffer
from the heat nearly so much as the semi-invalid ladies who have come
to be regarded as the type of white womanhood in India, that paradise of
excellent service and servants.
Otherwise, the islands help out the housekeeper considerably. She can
grow as much excellent coffee as the family are likely to want, on a
few bushes in the back yard, and peppers only have to be pulled off the
nearest wild chili tree. Taro, yam, sweet potato, can be bought from
the natives for a trifle, or grown with very little trouble. There will
probably be enough breadfruit, mango, orange, lime, and mammee-apple in
the grounds of the house, to supply all the family needs, and if any
one likes chestnuts, they can be picked up under the huge maupei trees
along any road. The mammee-apple or paw-paw, mentioned above, is one of
the most characteristic fruits of the islands. In Raratonga, it grows
with extraordinary fertility, springing up of itself wherever scrub is
cleared away, and coming to maturity in a few months. It is a slender
palm-like tree, from ten to thirty feet high, with a quaintly scaled
trunk, very like the skin of some great serpent, and a crown of pointed,
pinnated leaves, raying out fanwise from the cluster of heavy green and
yellow fruit that hangs in the centre. The fruit itself is rather like
a small melon, though wider at one end than the other. It looks likes a
melon, too, when cut open, and is both refreshing and satisfying, with a
sweetish, musky flavour, The small, soft black seeds in the centre are
a sovereign cure for dyspepsia, as is also the fruit itself in a lesser
degree. The whole of this wonderful tree, indeed, seems to be possessed
of digestive powers, for the toughest fowl or piece of salt beef will
become tender in a few hours, if wrapped in its leaves. When boiled in
the green stage the fruit is undistinguishable from vegetable marrow,
and if cooked ripe, with a little lime juice, it can be made into a
mock apple pie, much appreciated by settlers in a land where the typical
British fruit cannot be grown.
Cooking bananas are much used, and grow wild on the lands of the
natives, who sell them for a trifle. Every house has its own patch of
eating bananas of many kinds, and orange-trees are almost sure to be
there as well. There is always a huge bunch of bananas, and two or three
great palm-leaf baskets of oranges, on the verandah of every house, and
the inmates consume them both in uncounted numbers all day. Pineapples
are easily raised in the little bit of garden, or they can be bought for
a penny a piece. A vanilla vine will probably spread its beautiful thick
leaves over the fence, and hang out, in due season, a store of pods for
flavouring use in the kitchens. Arrowroot may be grown or bought--a big
basket sells for sixpence, and it has no more to do with the arrowroot
of the grocer’s shop at home, than a real seal mantle worth three
figures has to do with a two guinea “electric”. Limes grow wild
everywhere, and the island housewife makes full use of them. They clean
her floors, her tables, her enamelled ware, stained table linen, or
marked clothing; they wash her hair delightfully, and take the sunburn
off her face and hands; they make the best of “long drinks,” and the
daintiest of cake flavouring, they are squeezed into every fruit salad,
and over every stew; they take the place of vinegar, if the island
stores run low; in truth, they are used for almost every purpose of
domestic cooking, cleaning, or chemistry.
Cabbage of an excellent kind grows wild in a few islands. Tomatoes,
small but excellent in flavour, are found on the borders of the
seashore, in many. Nearly all English vegetables are grown by the white
settlers with extremely little trouble. The egg-plant, known in England
as a greenhouse ornament, here thrives splendidly in gardens, and
instead of the little plum-like fruit of the British plant, produces a
great purple globe as big as a fine marrow, which resembles fried eggs
very closely, if sliced and cooked in a pan. But in truth there is no
limit to the richness and generosity of the island soil. Were it not
for the troublesome item of butcher’s meat, housekeeping in the
Pacific would be marvellously cheap and easy. That, however, is the
housekeeper’s bugbear. Outside of Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti, the
Marquesas, and Honolulu, fresh beef is not be had at all, and fresh
mutton not often. In very many islands tinned meat and fowls are the
only resource; and the lady of the house must tax her ingenuity to the
utmost to find ways of disguising the inevitable “tin.” Curry, stew,
pie, mince; mince, pie, stew, curry--so runs the monotonous programme in
most houses; and disguise it as one may, the trail of the tin is over it
all.
It is a great day in the islands when turtle are caught. They are not
common in the groups frequented by white people, since they prefer the
lonely, barren atolls where the soil is dry and infertile; but now and
then a “school” is found, and a big catch made. Then there is rejoicing
in the land, and cooking in every house of an uncommonly-liberal and
elaborate kind. The South Sea turtle are enormous, often weighing as
much as seven or eight hundred pounds, and occasionally touching the
thousand. Such a monster as this would easily feed a large household for
a week--but alas, in tropical climates fresh meat, even when scalded,
will not keep more than three days; so a good deal is usually wasted.
The famous turtle soup, is made from the flippers, which are full of
gelatine; and it may safely be assumed that no London aldermen fed on
dying creatures carried half across the world has ever tasted soup so
good as that made from a fine healthy turtle just out of the sea. The
grass-green fat of the upper shell is used to put in the soup, and to
fry the thick steaks of turtle beef, also to baste the big roast of
turtle meat that is generally a feature of a turtle dinner. The eggs (of
which there will probably be a large bucketful at least) are fried in
green fat, and eaten as they are, shell-less, crisp and golden, tasting
rather like roast chestnut. The tripe is cooked like ordinary tripe; the
liver is fried. An excellent dinner, but surely an indigestible one?
By no means. It is a curious property of this turtle meat that a much
larger quantity of it can be eaten than of any ordinary butcher’s meat,
without any sense of repletion or after ill effects. This is the great
dainty of the South Sea islands, and if to a turtle dinner be added
bisque soup made from mountain river crayfish, a real island fruit
salad, with lime juice and cocoanut cream, a freshly plucked pineapple,
a dish of mangoes, granadillas, and a cup of island-grown coffee, not
the Carlton or the Savoy could do better for a travelling prince.
All South Sea Island “white” houses are more or less alike, being
built of coral concrete (occasionally of wood) and fitted with imported
windows and doors. The verandah is the great feature of the building;
for there the family will probably spend most of their time, reading,
smoking, receiving callers, or simply lounging in long chairs and
listening to the monotonous singing of the natives in the thatched reed
houses near at hand. Splendid climbing plants wreathe the pillars
and sloping roofs of these verandahs--stephanotis, Bougainvillea,
and countless gay tropical flowers whose ugly Latin names only an
accomplished botanist could remember. Gardenias, gorgeous white trumpet
lilies, tall bushes of begonia; pink, yellow and scarlet hibiscus,
crimson poinsettia, delicate eucharis lilies, run riot about the
grounds, and orange and lemon flowers fill the air with an exquisite
perfume.
Within, the high-pitched, deep, church-like roof rises above a range of
partition walls separating the different rooms, but giving a common air
supply to all, since the dividing walls are not more than ten or twelve
feet high. There are no secrets in an island house; what any one says at
one end can be heard at the other, and a light burning late in anybody’s
bedroom keeps all the rest awake. In the older houses the roof is of
“rau” or plaited pandanus thatch, of a soft brown tone, delightfully
cool and exceedingly picturesque. The rafters, in such a house, will
be almost black with age, and beautifully latticed and patterned with
finely plaited “sinnet” (cocoanut fibre). More modern houses have
corrugated iron roofs, generally painted red. The water supply from
these roofs is of some importance, and they are less expense and trouble
than the thatch; but the latter is incomparably the more picturesque,
and a good deal the cooler as well.
The floor is always covered with native matting (pandanus leaf, split
and plaited). This is of a pleasant tan colour in tone, and very cool
and clean. The furniture is generally basket and bamboo, with a native
“tappa” cloth (of which I shall have more to say later on) on the table.
There are sure to be groups of old native weapons on the walls--lances
and spears and clubs and arrows--and a few island fans, arranged in
trophies, and garlanded with chains of shells. On the steps of
the verandah one usually finds a fern or two, planted in big white
clam-shells off the reef, and there may be others in the drawing-room.’
A piano is a great luxury; the island climate is not kind to pianos.
Harmoniums are more common.
The bedrooms may have ordinary beds imported from Auckland, or they may
have (what is quite as good) native bedsteads made of ironwood, laced
across with sinnet, and covered with soft pandanus leaf mats, over which
the under sheet is laid. Unless it is the cool season there will not be
a blanket. Mosquito curtains, of course, protect each bed. All windows
and doors are wide open, day or night, hot season or cool.
The South Sea housekeeper has a few insect plagues to fight against,
but not nearly so many as her sister in India or Jamaica. The ants eat
everything that is not hung or covered up. Enormous hornets, in the cool
season, lurk about ceilings, bookcases and cupboards, sleepy, cross, and
ready to dart a fearful sting, if accidentally touched. Cockroaches are
destructive at all times. Fleas do not trouble much, and flies are only
annoying in a few islands. Mosquitoes are troublesome in the hot season,
but give little annoyance at other times. Centipedes and scorpions
exist, but are not common. They do come into houses occasionally, and
(being very poisonous, though not deadly) frighten the inmates quite as
much as the inmates undoubtedly frighten them. It is the rarest possible
thing, however, to hear of a European being bitten.
Education is not an unsolvable problem in the islands, since quite a
large number of groups possess convent schools, where even such extras
as music, languages, and fancy needlework can be taught.
On the whole, the difficulties of housekeeping are somewhat less than at
home, and the cost certainly much smaller. It is true that a good
many tinned stuffs are used, and tinned food is always dear; but the
cheapness of everything that the soil produces makes up that difference,
and the simple standard of living swings the balance still further to
the right side. I am of opinion myself that white families would benefit
both in comfort and in pocket by adopting the native style of house,
which is, as already mentioned, a structure of small neat sticks or
poles set very closely and strongly, but not filled in. The roof is
always thatched. In such a house, the air circulates freely without any
draught, and there is a pleasant, diffused light during the daytime.
At night, when native houses are more or less transparent, the
privacy-loving white can draw thin cotton curtains across his walls
until the lights are put out.
One such house, built for and used by white people, was conspicuous for
the simple beauty of the design. The interior was very plainly furnished
with a few bamboo tables and chairs, and a light stretcher bed or two.
Its curtains were of printed muslin from the store, and its floor was
nothing but white coral sand brought from the beach. The house stood
sheltered, by tall palms, and the sea was so near that all day one could
watch the soft sparkle of the creaming surf through the half-transparent
walls, and all night long one slept to the matchless lullaby of the
humming reef.
_(Windows blurred with beating mud, grey London roaring by in the
rain; haggard faces, and murky summer, and the snake of custom clipping
stranglingly about the free man’s throat--O Island wanderer, back in the
weary North, does your sea-bird’s heart fly swift from these to those,
and-sicken for the lands where you must go no more?)_
*****
Raratonga is full of funny things, if one knows where to look for them.
One would not suppose that the tombs of the natives were a likely spot.
Yet I would defy the most serious of graveyard moralisers to count
over the list of things that the Raratongan buries in the tombs of his
departed relatives, without feeling his seriousness badly shaken. Little
household ornaments belonging to the deceased are pathetic, certainly;
so, in a lesser degree, are the Sunday clothes that often accompany
their wearer on the long journey. But what is one to say of bicycles,
Japanned bedsteads, and even pianos? All these things have been buried
by Raratongans in the big concreted tombs that crop up sociably along
the edges of the public road every here and there. The piano, I must
add, was dug up again, by order of an indignant missionary, who gave the
disconsolate mourners a good lecture on heathenistic practices, and the
necessity of drawing the line somewhere.
Native names are sometimes exceedingly funny to the perverted white
mind, although to the owners they may be dignified, poetic, and even
beautiful. One young coffee-coloured lady of my acquaintance had
been named (in Raratongan) “Cup-of-Tea.” Another was
“Box-with-a-Hole-in-It”--another “Tin-of-Meat.” I should suppose, from
my knowledge of their religious training, that each of these ladies
possessed a godly scripture name of her own, properly bestowed on her
at her proper baptism. But in the Cook Islands, the name a native
is christened by, and the name he or she goes by, are almost always
distinct, which is certainly confusing. Worse confusion still is caused
by the odd habit of changing these commonly accepted names on any
great occasion that seems to need special commemoration. The natives
themselves never seem to become puzzled over all these name-changes,
but so much can hardly be said of the whites. It is, at the least,
perplexing to employ a gardener called Zebedee by the missionaries,
Thunderstorm by his friends, and Tin Roof by his relatives--like the
notable character in _The Hunting of the Snark_,
Whose intimate friends called him Candle-Ends,
And his enemies Toasted Cheese.
But it is even worse to be informed--some day, when you go to look after
Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin Roof down in the village, and ask why he has
not turned up to weed your pineapples--that his name isn’t any of the
three, but “Barbed Wire,” because he has just finished putting up a
fence of barbed wire round the grave of his boy who died last year, and
has resolved to call himself henceforth, “Barbed Wire,” in memory of his
son!
Native notions about European clothes often provide a feast of fun for
the whites, who set the copies in dress.
When a lace-trimmed garment of mine, usually reserved for private wear
under the shades of night and the shelter of a quilt and sheet, went to
Sunday morning church as a best dress in full daylight, on the person of
the laundress who had been entrusted with my clothes for the wash, the
funny side of the affair was so much the more conspicuous, that the
borrower never got the reproof she certainly ought to have had. And
when a certain flower toque, made of poppies (a blossom unknown to
the Pacific) first drove the women of the island half-distracted
with excitement, and then led to thirty-six native ladies appearing
simultaneously at a dance in Makea’s grounds, wearing most excellent
copies of my Paris model, done in double scarlet hibiscus from the bush,
the natural outrage to my feelings (which every woman who has ever
owned a “model” will understand) was quite swallowed up in the intense
amusement that the incident caused to everybody on the grounds.
I was unfortunate enough to be away on the island schooner when a great
wedding took place--the nuptials of one of the queen’s nieces--and so
missed the finest display of native dress and custom that had
occurred during the whole year. The bride, I heard, wore fourteen silk
dresses--not all at once, but one after the other, changing her dress
again and again during the reception that followed the wedding ceremony
in the mission church, until she almost made the white spectators giddy.
The presents were “numerous and costly” from the guests to the bride,
and from the bride to the guests, for it is Raratongan custom to give
presents to the people who come to your wedding; a fashion that would
considerably alleviate the lot of the weary wedding guest, if only it
could be introduced over here. The gifts for the bride were carried
in by the givers, and flung down in a heap one by one, each being duly
announced by the person making the present, who showed no false modesty
in describing his contribution. “Here’s twenty yards of the most
beautiful print for Mata (the bride), from Erri Puno!” “Here’s three
baskets of arrowroot, the best you ever saw, for Mata, from Taoua.”
“Here’s eighteen-pence for Mata and Tamueli, from Ruru,” flinging the
coins loudly into a china plate. So the procession went on, until the
gifts were all bestowed, the bride meanwhile standing behind a kind of
counter, and rapidly handing out rolls of stuff, tins of food, ribbons,
gimcracks of various kinds, to her guests as they passed by. When all is
added up, the amusement seems to be about all that any one really clears
out of the whole proceeding.
The Cook Islanders are among the most musical of Pacific races. They
have no musical instruments, unless “trade” mouth-organs, accordions,
and jew’s harps may be classed as such, but they need none, in their
choral singing, which is indescribably grand and impressive. Here as
elsewhere in the islands, one traces distinctly the influence of the two
dominant sounds of the island world--the low droning of the reef, and
the high soft murmur of the trade wind in the palms. The boom of the
breakers finds a marvellously close echo in the splendid volume of
the men’s voices, which are bass for the most part, and very much more
powerful and sonorous than anything one hears in the country of the
“superior” race. The women’s voices are somewhat shrill, but they sound
well enough as one usually hears them, wandering wildly in and out of
the massive harmonies of the basses.
A Philharmonic conductor from the isles of the North would surely think
himself in heaven, if suddenly transported to these southern isles of
melody and song. The Pacific native is born with harmony in his throat,
and time in his very pulses. It is as natural to him to sing as to
breathe; and he simply cannot go out of time if he tries. Solo singing
does not attract him at all; music is above all things a social
function, in his opinion, and if he can get a few others--or better
still, a few score others--to sit down with him on the ground, and begin
a chorus, he is happy for hours, and so are they.
To the Pacific traveller, this endless chanting is as much a part of the
island atmosphere as the palms and the reef and the snowy coral strand
themselves. One comes, in time, to notice it hardly more than the
choral song of beating breaker and long trade wind, to which it is so
wonderfully akin. But at the first, wonder is continually awakened
by the incomparable volume of the voices, and the curious booming
sound--like the echo that follows the striking of some gigantic
bell--which characterises the bass register of island men’s singing. The
swing and entrain of the whole performance are intoxicating--the chorus,
be it ten or a thousand voices, sweeps onward as resistlessly as a
cataract, and the beat of the measure is like the pulse of Father Time
himself. There are several parts as a rule, but they wander in and out
of one another at will, and every now and then a single voice will break
away, and embroider a little improvisation upon the melody that is like
a sudden scatter of spray from the crest of a rolling breaker. Then
the chorus takes it up and answers it, and the whole mass of the voices
hurls itself upon the tune like the breaker falling and bursting upon
the shore.
It is very wonderful, and very lovely; yet there are times--at one in
the morning, let us say, when the moon has crept round from one side of
the mosquito curtain to the other since one lay down, and the bats have
finished quarrelling and gone home, and the comparative chill of the
small hours is frosting the great green flags of the bananas outside
the window with glimmering dew--when the white traveller, musical or
unmusical, may turn over on an uneasy couch, and curse the native love
of melody, wondering the while if the people in the little brown houses
down the road ever sleep at all?
What are the subjects of the songs? That is more than the natives
themselves can tell you, very often, and certainly much more than a
wandering traveller, here to-day, and gone next month, could say. Many
of the chants are traditional, so old that the customs they refer to are
not half remembered, and full of words that have passed out of use. A
good number now-a-days are religious, consisting of hymns and psalms
taught by the missionaries, and improved on, as to harmony and setting,
by the native. The island love of choral singing must be an immense
assistance to the church services, since it turns these latter into
a treat, instead of a mere duty, and the native can never get enough
church, so long as there is plenty of singing for him to do. Some of the
secular songs are understood to refer to the deeds of ancestors; some
are amatory; some--and those the most easily understood by white people
who know the native languages--are in the nature of a kind of society
journal, recording the important events of the last few days, and making
comments, often of a very free nature, on friends and enemies, and the
white people of the island. Most of these latter are not good enough
scholars to understand the chants, even if they can talk a little
native, which is just as well, when oratorios of this kind are to be
heard every evening among the “rau” roofed huts:
“Big-Nose who lives in the white house has got a new
suit of clothes.”
Chorus. “A new suit of clothes, a new suit, suit, suit of
clothes!”
“Big-Nose cannot fasten the coat, he is so fat, ai! ai,
fat like a pig fit for killing!”
Chorus. “Ai, Ai! a pig for killing, like a pig for killing,
Big-Nose is like a pig fit for killing!”
“Big-Nose had a quarrel with his wife to-day, a quarrel,
a great quarrel, Big-Nose drank wisiki, much wisiki.”
(All together, excitedly.) “A quarrel, a great quarrel,
much wisiki Big-Nose drank, Big-Nose!”
“The wife of Big-Nose of the white house has long hair,
though she is very old, long hair that came to her in
a box by the sitima (steamer)!”
Chorus. “Long hair, long hair, long hair, in a box on the
steamer. A box on the steamer, on the steamer,
long hair for the wife of Big-Nose who lives in the
white house.”
A resident who really understood the natives and their music once or
twice translated choruses for me that were quite as personal as the
above. I have never since then wondered, as I used to wonder, where on
earth the merry peasants of opera, with their extraordinary knowledge
of the principals’ affairs, and their tireless energy in singing about
them, were originally sketched.
(Scholars will probably trace a resemblance to the Greek chorus here. I
leave it to them to work out the wherefore, which makes me giddy even
to think of, considering the geographical elements involved in the
problem.)
But now enough of Raratonga, for the schooner _Duchess_ is waiting
to carry me away to the other islands of the group, and, after many
thousands of miles travelled by steamer upon “all the seas of all the
world,” I am at last to learn what going to sea really is.