_Pearl-fishing at Penrhyn--The Beautiful Golden-Edge--Perils of the
Pearl Diver--A Fight for Life--Visit to a Leper Island--A God-forsaken
Place--How they kept the Corpses--The Woman who sinned--A Nameless
Grave--On to Merry Manahiki--The Island of Dance and Song--Story of the
Leper and his Bird--Good-bye to the Duchess._
A DAY or two after leaving Malden we sighted Penrhyn, lying five
degrees further south, but for some unexplained reason a very much
hotter place than Malden. Penrhyn is an island that is famous all over
the South Sea world, and not unknown even in Europe. Its pearl-shell and
pearls, its strange, wild, semi-amphibious natives, and its melancholy
leper station, make it a marked spot upon the Pacific map; and a certain
rather fictitious value attaching to its stamps has made the name of the
island familiar to all stamp collectors at home. The general impression
conveyed to the voyager from kinder and fairer islands is that Penrhyn
is a place “at the back of God-speed,” a lonely, sultry, windy, eerie
spot, desolate and remote beyond description.
It is an atoll island, consisting merely of a strip of land some couple
of hundred yards in width, enclosing a splendid lagoon nine miles long.
The land is white coral gravel; nothing grows on it but cocoanut and
pandanus and a few insignificant creepers. Fruit, vegetables, flowers,
there are none. The natives live entirely on cocoanut and fish. They
are nominally Christianised, but the veneer of Christianity is wearing
uncommonly thin in places. They are reckless and daring to a degree,
notable even among Pacific Islanders. Any Penrhyn man will attack a
shark single-handed in its own element, and kill it with the big knife
he usually carries. They are, beyond comparison, the finest swimmers in
the world; it is almost impossible to drown a Penrhyn Islander. He
will swim all day as easily as he will walk. You may often meet him out
fishing, miles from shore, without a boat, pushing in front of him a
small plank that carries his bait, lines, and catch. Some of the fish
he most fancies seldom come to the surface. To catch these he baits his
line, dives, and swims about underneath the water for a minute or two at
a time, trailing the bait after him, and rising to the surface as often
as a fish takes it.
[Illustration: 0339]
Of his pearl-diving exploits I shall speak later. The deadly surf that
breaks upon the outer reef has no terrors for him. Among the small boys
of the island there is a favourite feat known as “crossing a hundred
waves,” which consists in diving through ninety-nine great rollers, just
as they are about to break, and rushing triumphantly to shore on the
back of the hundredth. The old warlike, quarrelsome character of the
islanders--no doubt originally due to scarcity of food--still lurks
concealed under an outward show of civility. Penrhyn was the only South
Pacific Island I have visited where I did not care to walk alone in the
bush without my little American revolver. The four or five white traders
all keep firearms ready to hand in their stores. There has been no
actual trouble of recent years, but there are narrow escapes from a
free fight every now and then, and every man must hold himself ready for
emergencies. It is only eight years since there was such an outbreak of
hostilities in Penrhyn that a man-of-war had to be sent up to protect
the traders.
I was kindly offered the use of a house during the week the _Duchess_
spent in Penrhyn lagoon repairing sails and rigging, and generally
refitting after the stormy weather that we had experienced on several
occasions. But Penrhyn is rotten with undeclared leprosy, the water
is not above suspicion, and flies abound in myriads. So I slept on the
ship, and by day wandered about the desolate, thin, sun-smitten woods
of the island, or flew over the green lagoon in one of the marvellously
speedy pearling sloops of the traders. These boats are about a couple
of tons each, with a boom as big, in proportion, as a grasshopper’s leg.
They are as manageable as a motor car, and faster than most yachts.
It is a wonderful sight to see them taking cargo out to the schooners,
speeding like gulls over the water, and turning round in their tracks to
fly back again as easily as any gull might do. Pearling was almost “off”
at the time of the _Duchess’s_ visit, since a good part of the lagoon
was tabooed to allow the beds to recover.
The pearls are rather a minor consideration at Penrhyn. The shell is of
beautiful quality, large and thick, with the much-valued golden edge;
but pearls are not plentiful in it, and they are generally of moderate
size. Some very fine ones have been found, however; and gems of ordinary
value can always be picked up fairly cheaply from the divers. The
Penrhyn lagoon is the property of the natives themselves, who sell the
shell and the pearls to white traders. Christmas Island and some other
Pacific pearling grounds are privately owned, and in these places there
is a great deal of poaching done by the divers. The great buyers of
pearls are the schooner captains. There are three or four schooners that
call at Penrhyn now and then for cargo; and every captain has a nose for
pearls like that of a trained hound for truffles. In the Paumotus, about
Penrhyn, Christmas Island, and the Scillies (the Pacific Scillies, not
those that are so familiarly known to English readers), they flit from
island to island, following up the vagrant rumours of a fine pearl with
infinite tact and patience, until they run it to ground at last, and
(perhaps) clear a year’s income in a day by a lucky deal. San Francisco
and Sydney are always ready to buy, and the typical Pacific captain, if
he is just a bit of a buccaneer, is also a very keen man of business in
the most modern sense of the word, and not at all likely to be cheated.
Three native divers, famous for their deepwater feats, came out in a
pearling sloop with us one afternoon, and gave a fine exhibition.
The bed over which we halted was about ninety feet under the surface.
Our three divers stripped to a “pareo” apiece, and then, squatting down
on the gunwale of the boat with their hands hanging over their knees,
appeared to meditate. They were “taking their wind,” the white steersman
informed me. After about five minutes of perfect stillness they suddenly
got up and dived off the thwart. The rest of us fidgeted up and down the
tiny deck, talked, speculated, and passed away the time for what seemed
an extraordinarily long period. No one, unfortunately, had brought a
watch; but the traders and schooner captains all agree in saying that
the Penrhyn diver can stay under water for full three minutes; and it
was quite evident that our men were showing off for the benefit of that
almost unknown bird, the “wahiné papa.” At last, one after another, the
dark heads popped up again, and the divers, each carrying a shell or
two, swam back to the boat, got on board, and presented their catch to
me with the easy grace and high-bred courtesy that are the birthright of
all Pacific islanders--not at all embarrassed by the fact that all the
clothes they wore would hardly have sufficed to make a Sunday suit for
an equal number of pigeons.
As a general rule, the divers carry baskets, and fill them before coming
up. Each man opens his own catch at once, and hunts through the shell
for pearls. Usually he does not find any; now and then he gets a small
grey pearl, 01 a decent white one, or a big irregular “baroque” pearl of
the “new art” variety, and once in a month of Sundays he is rewarded
by a large gleaming gem worth several hundred pounds, for which he will
probably get only twenty or thirty.
Diving dresses are sometimes used in Penrhyn; but in such an irregular
and risky manner that they are really more dangerous than the ordinary
method. The suit is nothing but a helmet and jumper. No boots are worn,
no clothing whatever on the legs, and there are no weights to
preserve the diver’s balance. It sometimes happens--though wonderfully
seldom--that the diver trips, falls, and turns upside down, the heavy
helmet keeping him head-downwards until the air all rushes out under
the jumper, and he is miserably suffocated. The air pump above is often
carelessly worked in any case, and there is no recognised system of
signals, except the jerk that means “Pull up.”
“They’re the most reckless devils on the face of the earth,” said a
local trader. “Once let a man strike a good bed of shell, and he won’t
leave go of it, not for Father Peter. He’ll stick down there all day,
grabbin’ away in twenty fathom or more till he feels paralysis cornin’
on----”
“Paralysis?”
“Yes--they gets it, lots of’em. If you was to go down in twenty
fathom--they can do five and twenty, but anything over is touch and
go--and stay ’alf the day, you’d come up ’owling like anything, and
not able to move. That’s the way it catches them; and then they must get
some one to come and rub them with sea water all night long, and maybe
they dies, and maybe they’re all right by morning. So then down they
goes again, just the same as ever. Sometimes a man’ll be pulled up dead
at the end of a day. How does that happen? Well, I allow it’s because
he’s been workin’ at a big depth all day, and feels all right; and then,
do you see, he’ll find somethin’ a bit extra below of him, in a holler
like, and down he’ll go after it; and the extra fathom or two does the
trick.
“Sharks? Well, I’ve seen you poppin’ at them from the deck of the
_Duchess_, so you know as well as I do how many there are. Didn’t ’it
them, even when the fin was up? That’s because you ’aven’t greased
your bullet, I suppose. You want to, if the water isn’t to turn it
aside. But about the divers? Oh! they don’t mind sharks, none of them,
when they’ve got the dress on. Sharks is easy scared. You’ve only got to
pull up your jumper a bit, and the air bubbles out and frightens them
to fits. If you meet a big sting-ray, it’ll run its spine into you, and
send the dress all to--I mean, spoil the dress, so’s the water comes
in, and maybe it’ll stick the diver too. And the big devilfish is nasty;
he’ll ’old you down to a rock but you can use your knife on him. The
kara mauaa is the worst; the divers don’t like him. He’s not as big as
a shark, but he’s downright wicked, and he’s a mouth on him as big as
’alf his body. If one comes along, he’ll bite an arm or leg off
the man anyways, and eat ’im outright if he’s big enough to do it.
Swordfish? Well, they don’t often come into the lagoon; it’s the fishing
canoes outside they’ll go for. Yes, they’ll run a canoe and a man
through at a blow easy enough: but they don’t often do it. If you wants
a canoe, I’ll get you one; and you needn’t mind about the swordfish. As
like as not they’ll never come near you.
“About the divin’?--well, I think the naked divin’ is very near as safe
as the machine, takin’ all things. Worst of it is, if a kara mauaa comes
along, the diver can’t wait his time till it goes. No, he doesn’t stab
it--not inside the lagoon, because there’s too many of them there, and
the blood would bring a whole pack about. He gets under a ledge of rock,
and ’opes it’ll go away before his wind gives out. If he doesn’t, he
gets eat.”
Did Schiller, or Edgar Allan Poe ever conjure up a picture more ghastly
than that of a Penrhyn diver, caught like a rat in a trap by some huge,
man-eating shark, or fierce kara mauaa--crouching in a cleft of the
overhanging coral, under the dark green gloom of a hundred feet of
water, with bursting lungs and cracking eyeballs, while the threatening
bulk of his terrible enemy looms dark and steady, full in the road to
life and air? A minute or more has been spent in the downward journey;
another minute has passed in the agonised wait under the rock. Has he
been seen? Will the creature move away now, while there is still time to
return? The diver knows to a second how much time has passed; the third
minute is on its way; but one goes up quicker than one comes down, and
there is still hope. Two minutes and a half; it is barely possible
now, but------ The sentinel of death glides forward; his cruel eyes,
phosphorescent in the gloom, look right into the cleft where the
wretched creature is crouching, with almost twenty seconds of life still
left, but now not a shred of hope. A few more beats of the labouring
pulse, a gasp from the tortured lungs, a sudden rush of silvery air
bubbles, and the brown limbs collapse down out of the cleft like wreaths
of seaweed. The shark has his own.
There is a “Molokai,” or Leper Island, some two miles out in the
lagoon, where natives afflicted with leprosy are confined. The Resident
Agent--one of the traders--broke the rigid quarantine of the Molokai one
day so far as to let me land upon the island, although he did not allow
me to approach nearer than ten or twelve yards to the lepers, or to
leave the beach and go inland to the houses that were visible in the
distance. Our boatmen ran the sloop close inshore, and carried the
captain and myself through the shallow water, carefully setting us down
on dry stones, but remaining in the sea themselves. A little dog that
had come with the party sprang overboard, and began swimming to the
shore. It was hurriedly seized by the scruff of its neck, and flung
back into the boat. If it had set paw on the beach it could never have
returned, but would have had to stay on the island for good.
Very lovely is the Molokai of Penrhyn; sadly beautiful this spot where
so many wretched creatures have passed away from death in life to life
in death. As we landed, the low golden rays of the afternoon sun were
slanting through the pillared palm stems and quaintly beautiful pandanus
fronds, across the snowy beach, and its trailing gold-flowered vines.
The water of the lagoon, coloured like the gems in the gates of the
Heavenly City, lapped softly on the shore; the perpetual trade wind
poured through the swaying trees, shaking silvery gleams from the
lacquered crests of the palms. In the distance, shadowed by a heavy
pandanus grove, stood a few low brown huts. From the direction of these
there came, hurrying down to the beach as we landed, four figures--three
men and a woman. They had put on their best clothes when they saw the
sloop making for the island. The woman wore a gaudy scarlet cotton
frock; two of the men had white shirts and sailor’s trousers of blue
dungaree--relics of a happier day, these, telling their own melancholy
tale of bygone years of freedom on the wide Pacific. The third man wore
a shirt and scarlet “pareo,” or kilt. Every face was lit up with
delight at the sight of strangers from the schooner; above all, at the
marvellous view of the wonderful “wahiné papa.” Why, even the men who
lived free and happy on Penrhyn mainland did not get the chance of
seeing such a show once in a lifetime! There she was, with two arms, and
two legs, and a head, and a funny gown fastened in about the middle, and
the most remarkable yellow shoes, and a ring, and a watch, which showed
her to be extraordinarily wealthy, and a pale smooth face, not at
all like a man’s, and hair that was brown, not black--how odd! It was
evidently as good as a theatre, to the lonely prisoners!
Bright as all the faces of the lepers were at that exciting moment, one
could not mistake the traces left by a more habitual expression of heavy
sadness. The terrible disease, too, had set its well-known marks upon
every countenance. None of those who came out to see us had lost any
feature; but all the faces had the gross, thickened, unhuman look that
leprosy stamps upon its victims. The woman kept her arm up over her
head, to hide some sad disfigurement about her neck. One of the men
walked slowly and painfully, through an affection of the hip and leg.
There were nine lepers in all upon the island; but the other five either
could not, or did not, wish to leave their huts, and the agent refused
to break the quarantine any further than he had already done. What care
the wretched creatures are able to give one another, therefore, what
their homes are like, and how their lives are passed, I cannot tell.
Three of the lepers were accompanied by their faithful dogs. They are
all fond of pets, and must have either a dog or a cat. Of course the
animals never leave the island. We exchanged a few remarks at the top of
our voices, left a case of oranges (brought up from the Cook Islands, a
thousand miles away), and returned to our boat. The case of oranges was
eagerly seized upon, and conveyed into the bush.
“They will eat them up at once,” I said.
“Not they,” said one of our white men. “They’ll make them into orange
beer to-night, and get jolly well drunk for once in their miserable
lives. Glad to see the poor devils get a chance, say I.” And so--most
immorally, no doubt--said the “wahiné papa” as well.
The lepers are fed from stores furnished by a small Government fund;
and the trader who fulfils the very light duties of Resident Government
Agent generally sends them over a share of any little luxury, in the way
of oranges, limes, or yams, that may reach the island. None the less,
their condition is most miserable, and one cannot but regard it as a
crying scandal upon the great missionary organisations of the Pacific
that nothing whatever is done for the lepers of these northern groups.
The noble example of the late Father Damien, of Hawaii, and of the
Franciscan Sisters who still live upon the Hawaiian Molokai, courting a
martyr’s death to serve the victims of this terrible disease, seems to
find no imitators in the islands evangelised by British missionaries.
Godless, hopeless, and friendless, the lepers live and die alone. That
their lives are immoral in the last degree, their religion, in spite of
early teaching, almost a dead letter, is only to be expected. Penrhyn
is not alone in this terrible scourge. Rakahanga, Manahiki, and
Palmerston--all in the same part of the Pacific--are seriously affected
by the disease. Palmerston I did not see; but I heard that there is one
whole family of lepers there, and some stray cases as well.
The island belongs to the half-caste descendants (about 150 in number)
of Masters, a “beachcomber” of the early days, who died a few years ago.
These people are much alarmed at the appearance of leprosy, and have
segregated the lepers on an island in the lagoon. They are anxious
to have them removed to the Molokai at Penrhyn, since the family came
originally from that island; but no schooner will undertake to carry
them. In Rakahanga, the lepers are not quarantined in any way, but
wander about among the people. There are only a few cases as yet; but
the number will certainly increase. This may also be said of Manahiki,
for although very serious cases are isolated there, the lepers are
allowed, in the earlier stages, to mix freely with every one else, and
even to prepare the food of a whole family. The New Zealand Government,
it is believed, will shortly pass a law compelling the removal of all
these cases to the Molokai at Penrhyn. No Government, however, can
alleviate the wretched condition of these unfortunate prisoners, once
sent to the island. That remains for private charity and devotion.
A God-forsaken, God-forgotten-looking place is Penrhyn, all in all. When
sunset falls upon the great desolate lagoon, and the tall cocoanuts
of the island stand up jet black against the stormy yellow sky in one
unbroken rampart of tossing spears, and the endless sweep of shadowy
beach is empty of all human life, and clear of every sound save the
long, monotonous, never-ceasing cry of the trade wind in the trees, it
needs but little imagination to fancy strange creatures creeping through
the gloom of the forest--strange, ghastly stories of murder and despair
whispering in the gathering night. Death in every form is always near
to Penrhyn; death in the dark waters of the lagoon, death from the white
terror of leprosy, and death at the hands of men but quarter civilised,
whose fingers are always itching for the ready knife. And at the lonely
sunset hour, when old memories of the life and light of great cities,
of welcoming windows shining red and warm through grey, cold northern
gloamings come back to the wanderer’s mind in vivid contrast, the very
wings of the “Shadow cloaked from head to foot” seem to shake in full
sight above these desolate shores. Yet, perhaps, the intolerable blaze
of full noon upon the windward beaches strikes a note of even deeper
loneliness and distance. The windward side of Penrhyn is uninhabited;
the sea that breaks in blinding white foam upon the untrodden strand,
wreathed with trailing vines of vivid green, is never broken by a sail.
The sun beats down through the palm and pandanus leaves so fiercely that
the whole of the seaward bush is but a shadeless blaze of green fire.
Nothing stirs, nothing cries; the earth is silent, the sea empty; and a
barrier of thousands of long sea miles, steadily built up, day by day,
through many weeks, and only to be passed again by the slow demolishing,
brick by brick, of the same great wall, lies between us and the world
where people live. Here there is no life, only an endless dream; not as
in the happy southern islands, a gentle sunrise dream of such surpassing
sweetness that the sleeper asks nothing more than to dream on thus
forever; but a dark-hour dream of loneliness, desolation, and utter
remoteness, from which the dreamer cannot awaken, even if he would. Why
do men--white men, with some ability and some education--live in these
faraway infertile islands? There is no answer to the problem, even from
the men themselves. They came, they stayed, they do not go away--why?
they do not know. That is all.
The land extent of Penrhyn is only three square miles, though the
enclosed lagoon is a hundred. The population is little over four hundred
souls; there are three or four white traders, as a rule. There is no
resident white missionary. The island is one of those that have been
annexed by New Zealand, and is therefore British property. It is
governed by the Resident Commissioner of the Cook group, who visits it
about once a year.
Until two or three years ago, the Penrhyn Islanders used to keep their
dead in the houses, hanging up the corpse, wrapped in matting, until it
was completely decayed. This hideous practice was put an end to by the
Representatives of British Government, much to the grief of the natives,
who found it hard to part with the bodies of their friends, and leave
them away in the graveyard they were bidden to choose. As the best
substitute for the old practice, they now build little houses, some four
feet high, over the tombs of their friends, and live in these houses for
many months after a death, sitting and sleeping and even eating on the
tomb that is covered by the thatch or iron roof of the grave-house. The
graveyard is in consequence a strange and picturesque sight, almost like
a village of some pigmy folk. A few plain concrete graves stand above
the remains of white men who have died in the island, and one headstone
is carved with the initials--not the name--of a woman. There is a story
about that lonely grave; it was told to me as I lingered in the little
“God’s Acre” at sunset, with the light falling low between the palms and
the lonely evening wind beginning to wail from the sea.
The woman was the wife of a schooner captain, a man of good family and
connections, who liked the wild roving life of the Pacific, yet managed
to retain a number of acquaintances of his own class in Auckland and
Tahiti. His wife was young and handsome, and had many friends of her
own. On one of the schooner’s visits to Penrhyn, the man was taken
suddenly ill, and died in a very short time, leaving his wife alone. It
seems that at first she was bewildered by her loss, and stayed on in the
island, not knowing what to do, but before many months she had solved
the problem after a fashion that horrified all the whites--she married a
Penrhyn native! good-looking and attractive, but three-quarters savage,
and left the island with him.
Several children were born to the pair, but they were given to the
husband’s people. At last he took a native partner, and deserted his
English wife. She left the islands, and went down to Auckland; but her
story had travelled before her, and Auckland society closed its doors.
To Tahiti, where morals are easy, and no one frowns upon the union,
temporary or permanent, of the white man and the brown woman, she went,
hoping to be received as in former days. But even Papeete, “the sink of
the Pacific,” would have none of the white woman who had married a brown
man. Northwards once more, to lonely Penrhyn, the broken-hearted woman
went, wishing only to die, far from the eyes of her own world that had
driven her out. A schooner captain, who called there now and then,
cast eyes upon her--for she was still young and retained much of her
beauty--and asked her, at last, if she would become his wife, and so
redeem in some degree her position; but she had neither heart nor wish
to live longer, so she sent the kindly sailor away, and soon afterwards
closed her eyes for ever on the blue Pacific and the burning sands, the
brown lover who had betrayed her, and the white lover who came too late.
The traders buried her, and kindly left her grave without a name; only
the initials of that which she had borne in her first marriage, and
the date of her death. So, quiet and forgotten at last, lies in lonely
Penrhyn the woman who sinned against her race and found no forgiveness.
It was a relief to leave Penrhyn, with all its gloomy associations, and
see the schooner’s head set for the open sea and merry Manahiki. But
we seemed to have brought ill-luck away with us, for there was what the
captain called “mean weather” before we came within hail of land again,
and the _Duchess_ got some more knocking about.
It was on account of this that Neo, our native bo’sun, hit an innocent
A.B. over the head with a belaying-pin one afternoon, and offered to
perform the same service for any of the rest of the crew who might
require it. The men had been singing mission hymns as they ran about the
deck pulling and hauling--not exactly out of sheer piety, but because
some of the hymns, with good rousing choruses, made excellent chanties.
They were hauling to the tune of “Pull for the shore, brothers!” when
a squall hit the ship, and out of the fifteen agitated minutes that
followed, the _Duchess emerged minus her jib-boom_. When things had
quieted down, Neo started to work with the belaying-, pin, until he was
stopped, when he offered, as a sufficient explanation, the following:
“Those men, they sing something made bad luck, I think, jib-boom he
break. Suppose they sing, ‘Pull for ‘em shore’ some other time, I break
their head, that I telling them!”
The next time a chanty was wanted, “Hold the Fort!” took the place of
the obnoxious tune, and Neo’s lessons were not called for.
And so, in a day or two we came to Rakahanga and Manahiki (Reirson and
Humphrey Islands), and stopped there for another day or two, before we
spread our wings like the swallows, to fleet southward again.
[Illustration: 0351]
It was certainly globe-trotting, not proper travelling. To flit from
group to group, taking in cargo, and then hurrying off again, is the way
not to understand the places one sees, and I was more than half inclined
to leave the _Duchess_ here, and stop over for a month or two on the
chance of another schooner turning up. But the dinner that the solitary
trader ate when he came on board made me change my mind. He looked like
a man half-famished, and he certainly acted like one. There was hardly
a thing on the island to eat at present, he said; the natives had only
enough fish for themselves, and the turtle weren’t coming and his stores
were almost out, and he had been living on biscuit and cocoanuts for
weeks. There was leprosy in both islands, and one did not dare to touch
native pork or fowl. On the whole, I thought I would be contented to
“globe-trot,” on this occasion, and see what I could in a day or two.
The islands are about twenty-five miles apart, and very much like
one another. They each own an area of about two square miles, and a
population of some four hundred natives. And there is nothing in the
whole Pacific prettier.
Coming up to Manahiki, one sees first of all a snowy shore and a belt
of green tossing palms, just like any other island. As the ship coasts
along, however, making for the village, the palm-trees break and open
out here and there, and through the break one sees--paradise! There is
a great sheet of turquoise-green water inside, and on the water an
archipelago of the most exquisite little plumy, palmy islets, each
ringed round with its own pearly girdle of coral sand. Every gap in the
trees frames in a picture more lovely than the last--and, as we approach
the village, the dainty little brown island canoes that all the Pacific
wanderers know so well, begin to dot the jewel-bright surface of the
inner lake, and gleams of white and rose and scarlet dresses, worn by
the rowers of the tiny craft, sparkle on the water like gems. At last
the vessel comes to anchor before a wide white, sloping beach, with
brown-roofed huts clustering behind, and we reached merry Manahiki.
The island has long enjoyed a reputation for peculiar innocence and
simplicity, coupled with piety of a marked description. Well, one
does not care to destroy any one’s illusions, so the less said about
Manahiki’s innocence and simplicity the better. The islanders are,
at all events, a kindly and a cheerful people, and their home is the
neatest and best kept island in the Pacific. A palm-bordered road of
finest white sand, beautifully kept, and four miles long, runs without
a bend or break from one end of the island to the other--this portion of
the atoll forming a separate island, and containing most of the scanty
population. The village stands about midway--a collection of quaint
little houses deeply thatched with plaited pan-danus leaf, and walled
with small, straight saplings set side by side and admitting a good deal
of light and air. The houses are unwindowed as a rule. Rakahanga, the
sister island, is extremely like Manahiki in formation and architecture.
It, however, enjoys the additional advantage of a jail, which is built
of crossed saplings, looks much like a huge bird-cage, and certainly
could not confine any one who made the smallest attempt to get out.
But, as criminals are unknown in these islands, and petty offences are
visited by fine instead of imprisonment, the jail is not expected to
do real service, being merely a bit of “swagger,” like the white-washed
stone houses possessed by one or two wealthy natives, who, Pacific
fashion, never think of living in them.
Within, the ordinary houses are extremely simple. The floor of white
coral gravel reflects and intensifies the soft diffused light that
enters through the walls. There may be a native bedstead, laced across
with, “sinnet”--plaited cocoanut fibre--and provided with a gay
patchwork quilt, and a few large soft mats of pandanus leaf,
ingeniously split, dried, and plaited. There will certainly be a pile of
camphor-wood trunks, containing the clothes of the household; a dozen
or so cocoanut shells, for drinking and eating purposes; a few
sheath-knives, and a small quantity of much-cherished crockery. In a
corner, you may find a heap of flying-fish ready cleaned for baking in
the oven-pit outside, and a number of green, unhusked cocoanuts, for
drinking. You may possibly see some ship’s biscuits, too, bought from
the one white resident of the island, a trader and there will also be
some lumps of white, soft pith, shaped like large buns--the “sponge” or
kernel of the old cocoanut, which grows and fills up the shell after the
water has dried away, and the nut commenced to sprout. But there will be
no bananas, no oranges, no mangoes, granadillas, pineapples, yam, taro
or ti root, bread-fruit or maupei chestnuts, as in the fertile volcanic
islands. Manahiki is a coral island, pure and simple, and has no soil at
all, nothing but sand and white gravel, out of which the cocoa-palm
and a few small timber trees spring, in a manner that seems almost
miraculous to those accustomed to the rich, fertile soil of Raratonga or
Tahiti. Cocoanut and fish are the food of the Manahikian, varied by an
occasional gorge of turtle-meat, and a feast of pig and fowl on very
great occasions. There is, therefore, not much work to do in the island,
and there are few distractions from the outside world, since trading
schooners only call two or three times a year at best. Some copra-drying
is done and a few toy canoes, baskets, and other curiosities are made,
to find a precarious sale when a schooner comes in and the captain is
inclined to speculate.
But time never hangs heavy on the Manahikian’s hands. He is the most
accomplished dancer and singer in the whole South Pacific, and the
island is inordinately vain of this distinction. All South Sea islanders
sing constantly, but in Manahiki, the tunes are much sweeter and more
definite than in most other islands; and the impromptu variations of the
“seconds” are really wonderful. The voices, too, are exceptionally good.
The women’s are rather hard and piercing, but those of the men are often
magnificent. The time is as perfect as if beaten out by a metronome, and
false notes are almost unknown.
[Illustration: 0359]
Men and women alike seem incapable of fatigue when singing. The mere
white man will feel tired and husky after going through the choruses
of _The Messiah_ or _The Creation_. A Manahikian, if he were acquainted
with oratorio music, would run through both, and then “take on”
_Tannhauser_, following up with another Wagnerian opera, and perhaps a
cantata thrown in. By this time, it would be dusk, and the chorus would
probably stop to eat a cartload of cocoanuts before beginning on the
whole _Nibelungen Ring_ cycle for the night. About midnight the Resident
Agent, a clever half-caste, who has European ideas about the value of
sleep, would probably send out the village policeman with a stick to
induce the singers to go to bed; and, quite unfatigued, they would rise
up from their cross-legged squatting posture on the ground, and go,
remonstrant, but compelled.
[Illustration: 0360]
Happily for the Resident Agent and the trader, however, European music
is not known in Manahiki, and when a singing fit seizes the people, they
can generally be stopped after about a day, unless somebody has composed
something very new and very screaming. If the two ends of the village
have begun one of their musical competitions, there may also be
difficulty in bringing it to a period; for the rival choruses will sing
against each other with cracking throats and swelling veins, hour after
hour, till both sides are completely exhausted.
Dancing, however, is the Manahikian’s chief reason for existing.
The Manahikian dances are infinitely superior to those of most other
islands, which consist almost altogether of a wriggle belonging to the
_danse du ventre_ family, and a little waving of the arms. The Manahiki
dance has the wriggle for its groundwork, but there are many steps
and variations. Some of the steps are so rapid that the eye can hardly
follow them, and a camera shutter which works up to 1/100 of a second
does not give a sharp result. The men are ranged in a long row, with the
women opposite; there is a good deal of wheeling and turning about in
brisk military style, advancing, retreating, and spinning round. The men
dance very much on the extreme tips of their toes (they are, of course,
barefooted) and keep up this painful posture for an extraordinary
length of time. Every muscle in the whole body seems to be worked in the
“fancy” steps; and there is a remarkable effect of general dislocation,
due to turning the knees and elbows violently out and in.
The women, like Miss Mercy Pecksniff, seem chiefly to favour the “shape
and skip” style of locomotion. There is a good deal of both these, a
great deal of wriggle, and plenty of arm action, about their dancing.
They manoeuvre their long, loose robes about, not at all ungracefully,
and do some neat step-dancing, rather inferior, however, to that of the
men.
Both men and women dress specially for the dance, so the festival that
was organised to greet our arrivals took some time to get up, as all the
beaux and belles of the village had to hurry home and dress. The women
put on fresh cotton loose gowns, of brilliant pink, purple, yellow,
white and green, oiled their hair with cocoanut oil scented with the
fragrant white tieré flower, and hung long chains of red and yellow
berries about their necks. About their waists they tied the dancing
girdle, never worn except on these occasions, and made of twisted green
ferns. The men took off their cool, easy everyday costume, of a short
cotton kilt and gay coloured singlet, and attired themselves in shirts
and heavy stuff trousers (bought from the trader at enormous expense,
and considered the acme of smartness). Both sexes crowned themselves
with the curious dancing headdress, which looks exactly like the
long-rayed halo of a saint, and is made by splitting a palm frond down
the middle, and fastening it in a half-circle about the back of the
head.
The music then struck up and the dancers began to assemble. The
band consisted of two youths, one of whom clicked a couple of sticks
together, while the other beat a drum. This does not sound attractive;
but as a matter of fact, the Manahiki castanet and drum music is
curiously weird and thrilling, and arouses a desire for dancing even
in the prosaic European. On board our schooner, lying half a mile from
shore, the sound of the measured click and throb used to set every foot
beating time on deck, while the native crew frankly dropped whatever
they were at, and began to caper wildly. Close at hand, the music
is even more impressive; no swinging waltz thundered out by a whole
Hungarian band gets “into the feet” more effectively than the Manahiki
drum.
A much-cherished possession is this drum. It is carved and ornamented
with sinnet, and topped with a piece of bladder; it seems to have been
hollowed out of a big log, with considerable labour. The skill of the
drummers is really remarkable. No drumsticks are used, only fingers, yet
the sound carries for miles. While drumming, the hands rise and fall so
fast as to lose all outline to the eye; the drummer nods and beats with
his foot in an ecstasy of delight at his own performance; the air is
full of the throbbing, rhythmical, intensely savage notes. The dancers
at first hesitate, begin and stop, and begin again, laugh and retreat
and come forward undecidedly. By-and-by the dancing fervour seizes one
or two; they commence to twirl and to stamp wildly, winnowing the
air with their arms. Others join in, the two rows are completed, and
Manahiki is fairly started for the day. Hour after hour they dance,
streaming with perspiration in the burning sun, laughing and singing and
skipping. The green fern girdles wither into shreds of crackling brown,
the palm haloes droop, the berry necklaces break and scatter, but on
they go. The children join in the dance now and then, but their small
frames weary soon; the parents are indefatigable.
Perhaps both ends of the settlement are dancing; if that is so, the
competitive element is sure to come in sooner or later, for the feeling
between the two is very like that between the collegers and oppidans at
Eton, each despising the other heartily, and ready on all occasions
to find a cause for a fight. They will dance against each other now,
striving with every muscle to twinkle the feet quicker, stand higher on
the tips of the toes, wriggle more snakily, than their rivals. Evening
comes, and they are still dancing. With the night, the dance degenerates
into something very like an orgy, and before dawn, to avoid scandal, a
powerful hint from the native pastor and the agent causes the ball to
break up.
Do the dancers go to bed now, lie down on their piled up sleeping
mats, and compose themselves to slumber? By no means. Most of them get
torches, and go out on the reef in the dark to spear fish. Cooking fires
are lighted, and there is a hurried gorge in the houses; everywhere,
in the breaking dawn, one hears the chuck-chuck of the husking-stick
preparing cocoanuts, and smells the savoury odour of cooking fish. The
dancers have not eaten for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more. But
this feast does not last long, for just as the sun begins to shoot long
scarlet rays up through the palm trees, some one begins to beat the drum
again. Immediately the whole village pours out into the open, and the
dance is all on again, as energetic as ever. The trading schooner is
three weeks over-due, and the copra on which the island income depends
is not half dried; there is not a fancy basket or a pandanus hat ready
for the trader; the washing of every house is hopelessly behind, and
nobody has had a decent meal since the day before yesterday. No matter:
the Manahikians are dancing, and it would take an earthquake to stop
them.
Late in the second day, they will probably give out and take a night’s
rest. But it is about even chances that they begin again the next
morning. In any case, no day passes in Manahiki or Rakahanga without a
dance in the evening. Regularly at sunset the drum begins to beat, the
fern girdles are tied on (relics, these, of heathen days when girdles
of grass or fern were all that the dancers wore), and palm haloes are
twisted about the glossy black hair, and the island gives itself up to
enjoyment for the evening.
There is a dancing-master in Manahiki, a most important potentate, who
does nothing whatever but invent new dances, and teach the youth of the
village both the old dances and the new.
We stopped overnight at the island, so I had time for a good walk along
the beautiful coral avenue, which is indeed one of the loveliest things
in the island world. It was Sunday, and all the natives were worshipping
in the exceedingly ugly and stuffy concrete church, under the guidance
of the native pastor, so I had the place almost to myself. Far away from
everywhere, sitting in a ruinous little hut under the trees by the inner
lagoon, I found a lonely old man, crippled and unable to walk. He was
waiting until the others came back from church, staring solemnly into
the lagoon the while, and playing with a heap of cocoanut shells.
By-and-by he would probably rouse up, drag himself into the hut, and
busy himself getting ready the dinner for the family against their
return home, for he was an industrious old man, and liked to make
himself useful so far as he could, and his relatives were very glad of
what small services he could render in washing and cooking.
What was the matter with the poor old man? He was a leper!
That is the way of the islands, and no white rule can altogether put a
stop to it. The half-caste who acts as agent for the Government of New
Zealand had hunted out a very bad case of leprosy a year or two before,
and insisted on quarantining it in a lonely part of the bush. This was
all very well, but the leper had a pet cock, which he wanted to take
with him, and the agent’s heart was not hard enough to refuse. Now the
leper, being fed without working, and having nothing to do, found the
time hanging heavy on his hands, so he taught the cock to dance--report
says, to dance the real Manahiki dances--and the fame of the wondrous
bird spread all over the island, and as far as Rakahanga, so that
the natives made continual parties to see the creature perform, and
quarantine became a dead letter. Still the agent had not the heart
to take the cock away, but when he saw the leper’s end was near, he
watched, and as soon as he heard the man was dead, he hurried to the
quarantined hut, set it on fire, and immediately slaughtered the cock.
An hour later, half the island was out at the hut, looking for the
bird--but they came too late.
*****
We have been two days at merry Manahiki, and the cargo is in, and the
Captain has ordered the _Duchess_--looking shockingly cock-nosed without
her great jib-boom--to be put under sail again. As the booms begin to
rattle, and the sails to rise against the splendid rose and daffodil of
the Pacific sunset, Shalli, our Cingalese steward, leans sadly over the
rail, listening to the thrilling beat of the drum that is just beginning
to throb across the still waters of the lagoon, now that evening and its
merrymaking are coming on once more.
“He plenty good place, that,” says Shalli mournfully. “All the time
dancing, singing, eating, no working--he all same place as heaven. O my
God, I plenty wish I stopping there, I no wanting any heaven then!”
With this pious aspiration in our ears, we spread our white wings
once more--for the last time. Raratonga lies before us now, and from
Raratonga the steamers go, and the mails and tourists come, and the
doors of the great world open for us again. So, good-bye to the life of
the schooner.