exhausted. Refreshment of some kind at 11 A.M. is surely a need of
human nature; and the New Zealanders have done well to crystallize the
need into a tradition and a habit.
Tea and whisky seem to be the national drinks of New
Zealand--especially whisky. But tea is often drunk at meals.
The impression that prevails in England that New Zealand is a place
where you can’t get anything to drink, is a false one. Of course, some
of the cities in the country are under the ban of prohibition, and so
are certain portions of Wellington itself: from these you have to cross
the street into such territory as lies outside the ban. The railway
cars are teetotal.
The people here often tell you that they are being over-legislated. And
one notable New Zealander told me that what the country most needed was
improvement in higher education. The people, he said, did not care for
higher education. Their point of view was material. They wouldn’t do
things unless there was something to show for it.
In Wellington there are four large, long streets full of shops, tall
stone buildings, English in character, hotels, banks, etc., with
verandahs covering the pavement the whole way, and cars running through
them. Outside of these streets, the houses are mostly built of wood,
and resemble, as I have already said, those of a Russian provincial
town.
The prices strike an Englishman as high, and the cost of living in New
Zealand is undoubtedly high. The wages are, from our point of view,
enormously high. A good chauffeur (I know of a case in point) can get
£4 a week, and a house. From the English point of view such wages are
very high indeed.
The New Zealanders strike me as being much more like English people
than the Australians. Of course they have characteristics of their own.
One thing is certain--a more friendly, hospitable people does not exist.
To go into the matter of their institutions, life, etc., would need
a far more prolonged study and stay than I have been able to make,
and I have already said, three or four times, that I don’t believe in
pronouncing judgments on a country before you know it thoroughly.
One of the most interesting people I have met here is a French lady of
the highest culture and education, Sœur Marie Joseph, who is at the
head of a Home of Compassion for derelict children. She went out to the
Crimean War under Florence Nightingale and looked after the wounded on
the battlefields that knew nothing of anæsthetics. She told me that
sometimes the doctors, after a day of surgical operations, would be
drunk with the fumes of the blood. The wounded had to be tied down to
be operated on, and sometimes, where this was not practicable, people
had to sit on them to hold them down.
Sœur Marie Joseph is very fond of New Zealand. She came out, attracted
by what she heard of the Maoris, and she knows the Maoris with an
intimate thoroughness. She has a great admiration for them; and she
gave me many instances of their chivalry and nobility of character.
She has seen great changes since she has been in New Zealand. When she
first came, she told me, New Zealand was covered with bush--that is to
say, with magnificent forests; and the population, then, she says, was
like one large family.
* * * * *
This morning at one of the Catholic churches here the priest preached
a most interesting sermon. Among other things he told the following
story. He said, “The other day I met a man who said, ‘I am a better
Catholic than you are; because I go to all the churches: the Catholic,
the Anglican, the Presbyterian, etc.’” On the following Sunday the
priest passed this same man as he was working in his garden, and he
said to him, “You may go to all the churches, but you don’t obey the
precepts of any of them; for they all tell you not to work on Sunday.”
The man laughed.
A few days after the priest met the man again in the town, and the man
said to him: “I have just had the narrowest escape. I fell off a car
and my legs were underneath it, and I was within an ace of being run
over, when mercifully it stopped just in time.”
“Well,” said the priest, “I think that was due to me, because, when I
saw you working last Sunday, I prayed for the salvation of your legs.”
_Roratonga and Tahiti: September_
I left Wellington on September 13 on the steamship Moana, one of the
steamers belonging to the Union Steamship Company.
There was a great deal of excitement at the send-off, because the Rugby
Union Football Team from Australia were on board. They had come from
Sydney and were on their way to San Francisco, in order to play against
the local teams there. These football boys had arrived the day before,
and had had a respite of twenty-four hours from the inclemency of the
sea, which they had greatly enjoyed (the respite, I mean, not the
sea). Some of them had never been away from Australia before. Several
of them, or, indeed, nearly all of them with the exception of about
seven, were indifferent sailors. They remained on shore as long as they
possibly could, one of them climbing up the gangway as it was actually
being pulled up. The ship sailed amidst cheering and singing.
The southern Pacific, especially that part of it which is near New
Zealand, is not a pleasant sea. The steamer pitched, and altogether
the comfort of passengers was considerably interfered with during
the first two days of the voyage. We started on Friday, and owing to
the change of time we had two Saturdays running. (Let mathematicians
explain that if they can.) It was not until the Sunday which followed
the two Saturdays that the sea began to be smooth enough to allow the
passengers to behave like human beings instead of like half-inanimate
corpses.
On Sunday most of the football boys emerged from their cabins and began
training on the upper deck. They boxed, they wrestled, they ran, they
played leap-frog, they formed scrimmages; in fact, they displayed every
form of energy which human bones and muscles are capable of.
The weather grew warmer, and on the Tuesday we got to the southeast
trade winds. The day after this the steamer called at the island of
Roratonga. Roratonga is an island which consists of sharp and jagged
little hills entirely covered with a riotous green vegetation.
In thinking of the South Sea Islands, and of tropical islands in
general, if you have never seen them, one may not realise that the
general appearance of them must necessarily be green, since they
are entirely covered with vegetation. One imagines a few palm-trees
sticking up out of the sea, instead of a range of mountains covered
with trees. As you first catch sight of Roratonga, you realise what
New Zealand must have been like when it was covered with bush, only,
of course, the climate of Roratonga is far milder and far warmer. The
moment the steamer reaches Roratonga a great quantity of natives set
out in boats from the shore and swarm on board. They are not black;
they are not copper-coloured; they are a sort of dull almond colour,
with very black hair and very dark brown eyes. They wear large straw
hats; some of them have flowers in their hair and behind their ears.
[Illustration: NATIVES SWARMING ON BOARD]
As soon as you reach the shore the aspect of the island, which you
might think disappointing at a distance, changes entirely. You are
caught in a sort of warm embrace of aromatic deliciousness. Hibiscus
bushes, with great scarlet blossoms, surround you on every side; cocoa
palms, and all vegetation which you expect to see in a tropical island,
are there before your eyes. But you will say, “If it is just the same
as any other tropical island, what is the use of describing it--if
it is merely what one sees in the East? You have already spoken of
Ceylon.” Well, Roratonga and the islands of the South Seas are not in
the least like Ceylon, and they are not in the least like anything in
the Near or Far East. They have a peculiar charm which is completely
individual, and totally unlike anything else. The sights and the people
of these Southern places are utterly unlike the sights and people
you see in the East--in Ceylon, for instance. There is nothing here
of that hard, metallic element which you get in the East; nothing of
that inscrutable mystery, that shadow of cruelty, which you feel in
the Orient. The people are like the climate--soft and gentle; and
they talk in musical tones, like the twittering of birds; and their
speech is careless as the laughing talk of children. They reminded me
of that race of people whom H. G. Wells describes in his book “The
Time Machine,” that same people whom he imagines as living aboveground
in the far, far distant future, when the industrial population of
the world had grown into a sort of human flesh-eating lemur, which
could only live underground and could only see in the dark. Mr. Wells
represents the other and the civilized half of the population as
having progressed or degenerated, whichever you like, into a race of
childlike, amiable, and playful little people, who live on fruit
in tumble-down houses, and who are as careless and irresponsible as
butterflies. The people of Roratonga reminded me of this fancy of Mr.
Wells’s.
At a little hotel where I stopped to eat some fresh bananas (and, oh,
the difference between the fresh bananas and those which one buys at a
store in Europe!) the woman who kept the hotel, and who had come from
South Africa, talked of the natives. She said: “It is impossible to get
them to work. If you find any fault with them they go away. It is we
poor white people who have to do all the work. I would like,” she said,
“to shambok them as they do in South Africa, so lazy and impossible
they are sometimes, but we are not allowed to touch them. But then,”
she added, “of course one can’t blame them, because they are quite well
off without working. They have got enough to live on without doing any
work.” I thought that it would, indeed, be unreasonable to blame these
natives for not slaving for white people if they were not obliged to
do so. The fact is that in these islands work for the natives is not a
necessity; it is a hobby. It is to them what gardening must have been
to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in the days before the Fall. If
Adam and Eve gardened then, they gardened for fun. After the Fall of
Man, they had to garden for a living and not from choice. Well, the
native inhabitants of the South Sea Islands seem to have escaped or to
be exempted from the primal curse; in fact, I believe that the islands
of Tahiti and Roratonga are two bits of the Garden of Eden which were
allowed to remain in the world so as to show mankind what they had lost
by Eve’s curiosity, Adam’s disobedience, and the Devil’s spite.
We walked along the coast of this island up to the house of the
missionary, where there was a large field. The football boys wanted to
practise. We certainly envied the missionary his house. It stood under
a huge shelving hill covered with palm-trees, in a perfect labyrinth
of flowers. When the boys began to play football, the natives came in
great crowds and stood round chirping with delight like birds; and
when the boys had finished practising, they threw the football to the
natives and told them they might play. At first, the natives fought shy
of the football,--I imagine that they thought they would have to play
against these terrifically efficient and muscular representatives of
New South Wales; but when they realised that the boys did not want to
play with them, and that they could play among themselves, they took
to the game with great eagerness, and were soon enjoying themselves
greatly. It was curious that by just looking on they had picked up a
very good idea of the game, the main features of which they mimicked
with some skill; one little boy was an excellent tackler.
One was struck by the extraordinarily musical quality of their voices
and their language, which consists almost entirely of soft open
vowels, and which is, I suppose, the most melodious of all human
languages.
Before going back to the steamer, which was to sail in a few hours, I
bathed in the sea, in a warm azure sea, and then, after eating more
bananas and a delicious bitter fruit called “Brazilian cherries,” I
went on board once more.
From Roratonga it only takes two days to get to the island of Tahiti,
and the steamer anchored at Papeete on Friday, the 20th September.
Roratonga gives you a kind of foretaste of the whole charm and beauty
of the South Seas. It is the appetizer, the _hors-d’œuvre_, not the
whole meal. Tahiti is the whole thing; the real thing; the thing one
has dreamt about all one’s life; the thing which made Stevenson leave
Europe forever. All tellers of fairy tales, and all poets from Homer
downwards, have always imagined the existence of certain islands which
were so full of magic and charm that they turned man from his duty and
from all tasks, labour, or occupation in which he was engaged, and held
him a willing captive, who would not sell his captivity for all the
prizes of the busy world.
Stevenson in one of his books--“The Wrecker,” I think--says that
if a man who was toiling in some English town were to be suddenly
transported to one of the South Sea Islands, in the neighbourhood of
Tahiti, and had a vision of the beauty that is there, and then were
to be transported back again to his prosaic and ugly surroundings, he
would say, “At any rate, I have had my dream.” That is how one feels
when one has seen Tahiti. One feels one has had one’s dream.
The Bay of Papeete curves inward. As you sail into it you are sure
to see several white schooners at anchor. At one side is a range of
light-blue volcanic hills stretching out into the crystalline sea,
reminding one of Naples, Capri, and Sorrento, and in the middle of the
bay there is a tiny little island, consisting of a few cocoa palms.
The sea is a transparent azure; little white houses are dotted all
along the line of the beach, nestling in greenery. We got there in the
afternoon and landed at once. We walked along the beach into the little
town, and into the suburbs of it. It was spring in Tahiti, and every
kind of imaginable blossom was flaunting its reckless and extravagant
beauty. Everything grows wild in Tahiti. Nobody seems to bother about
gardening or anything of that kind. It is not only the lilies who do
not toil and spin, but the gardeners also. The unaided results of
nature are so prodigious that the imagination is staggered to think of
what might be done supposing an energetic gardener were let loose in
these islands and allowed to try experiments. He would produce such a
garden as the world has never seen.
I scarcely knew the names of any of the fruits or any of the blossoms
which I saw. There were mango-trees, laden with mangoes which were not
yet ripe; bamboo-trees, breadfruit-trees, cocoa palms, banana-trees,
hibiscus bushes, a tree with a bright pink blossom which looked like
a Judas-tree, but which was not one, bushes with intense mauve- and
deep lilac-coloured flowers, and broad avenues of large green trees
which shaded the road from the hot sun with great fanlike branches. As
we walked along this avenue, on both sides of which there are little
houses, we caught glimpses of wonderfully luxuriant and untrained
gardens.
There seemed to be no birds except blackbirds and mina birds, which
were hopping about in great quantities.
The people seem extraordinarily contented and invincibly indolent.
I was walking along the main street and I wanted to get to the
post-office, which I knew was somewhere along that street. I
stopped at a store and asked whether I was going the right way. The
storekeeper--who was a Frenchman--said, yes, I was going right. I then
asked if it was far. The storekeeper said, oh, yes, it was very far;
indeed, it would take me a good quarter of an hour or twenty minutes
to walk there. I asked him if I could hire a conveyance, as I was in
a hurry. He shook his head and thought it unlikely. I then went on my
way. I thought I would just time myself and see how long it did take
to reach the post-office. I walked fast; but I found, to my amazement,
that it took me exactly three minutes to get there. Doubtless it would
have taken a native of Tahiti twenty minutes. There is no such thing as
hurry and no such thing as energy in these islands.
At five o’clock in the evening the football boys gave a display in
front of the Governor’s house, and crowds of natives witnessed it.
After that we all went to bathe in the bay, where sharks rarely come,
although they do come sometimes.
In the evening we went to a picture-show, where there was a
boxing-match between some native champions.
The people say that if you once drink of the water of Tahiti you
will be bound to go there again, and I do not wonder at this. It is
certainly the most fascinating and most beautiful spot I have ever
seen. Its fascination lies not so much in the profusion and wealth
of luxuriant vegetation and exotic colouring as in its subtle and
indescribable charm. You do not feel as if you were in a hothouse. You
feel as if you were in a most delicious country. You walk along by the
side of streams where you see people doing their washing; you hear the
cry of poultry; you see people driving oxen along the shady road. There
is a wonderful fragrance in the air. Schooners come into the harbour
from the other islands: the Marquesas Islands, etc. The Europeans
walking about in their white clothes do not look like the Europeans you
see in Ceylon, all washed out and wearied from the heat and strain;
they look as if they were enjoying life, as if they were happy where
they were.
There is a large Chinese population in Tahiti, but they busy themselves
for the most part with agriculture. They do not do much work for
the white people. The labour problem in Tahiti is consequently very
vexatious for the white people. It is difficult to get work done at
all; therefore, life in Tahiti is expensive. Often, for instance, the
natives on market-day will bring no meat to the market, because it
bothers them to do so. Of course, if white people consented to live
entirely on fruit, as the natives do, the question would be solved,
and certainly the fruit there is excellent. But man cannot live by
breadfruit alone. He insists on sucking-pig and other more substantial
delicacies; and to get these, in Tahiti, he has to pay money.
There is practically only one small hotel in Tahiti, a little
two-storied house with a verandah. There are many French stores; the
Governor’s House; the post-office; and a theatre. When the Panama
Canal is opened, steamers, I suppose, will call at Tahiti in greater
numbers than they do now, and that will be the time for speculators
to build a larger hotel there. I have no fears of Tahiti ever being
spoiled. It is the kind of place that will conquer civilization rather
than be conquered by it. It was, at present,--I was told by people who
had visited all the islands in the Pacific,--the most unspoiled of all
of them. That is why I chose that route. Fiji is far more progressive,
and I dare say far more satisfactory from a business and European point
of view, but it is less interesting from a picturesque point of view.
I cannot imagine anything more ideal than to possess a schooner fitted
with a small motor, in case of calm, and to cruise about the waters
between Tahiti and the Marquesas, which, one is told, are indescribably
beautiful.
I understand why Stevenson liked the South Seas above all things.
I also understand why he was so loath to write descriptive articles
about them. They are things to be seen; they are places to be seen and
lived in; not to be written about. The pen can give no idea of their
charm. Stevenson does it in his stories, and so does another well-known
author, Louis Becke, who is rightly supposed to be the best writer of
fiction on the South Seas.
It is possible now to take trips to the Marquesas from Tahiti in
trading schooners, but I believe that is not a comfortable manner of
transport. The thing would be to have a schooner of one’s own,--not an
auxiliary schooner, because a schooner which is provided with steam
ceases to be a sailing-vessel: the sails are never used; but a schooner
fitted with a motor would ensure one against being becalmed, and, at
the same time, the motor would not compete with and finally defeat the
sails.
Lying at anchor in Papeete Harbour, there was a magnificent
sailing-vessel which had come from San Francisco. It may not be
very long before such vessels cease to exist altogether. Every day
wind-jammers are being turned into steamers, and sailing-vessels become
fewer and fewer. It is a melancholy fact for those who love the sea.
We stayed at Papeete only twenty-four hours. If you stay longer than
that, you have to stay there a month, because the steamers only call
there once a month. Tahiti is not connected by cable with any other
country. Loath as I was to go, at the end of the twenty-four hours I
felt it was a good thing that I was doing so; otherwise I should have
been tempted to remain there for the rest of my life. Apart from other
things, the climate is intoxicatingly pleasant; hot, but not too hot;
prodigal, at sunset, of the most gorgeous effects of color and light;
indescribably wonderful in the night-time.
The most beautiful spots in Tahiti are inland in the island, and it
would take about a month to see the place properly. Papeete possesses
three public automobiles for hire. I tried the whole of the morning on
the day we left to get one of them, but they had all gone out. Apart
from this, there are a few little carriages which act as cabs, driven
by Chinamen, but they appear to go to sleep in the daytime, and only
appear in the evening. The result was one had to walk about on one’s
feet the whole time, and at the end of the morning I did not wonder
that the inhabitants of this island are disinclined to make strenuous
efforts. It is the kind of place where you are perfectly satisfied to
do nothing. That morning, nevertheless, was one of the most enjoyable
I have ever spent. I walked up and down the streets, looking again and
again at the gorgeous-coloured blossoms and the wonderful green trees.
Between the hours of eleven and one o’clock the stores shut, and the
business of life is interrupted for the midday meal and subsequent
repose.
We left Tahiti in the afternoon, when the greater part of the
population came down to the wharf to see us off. We left feeling like
Ulysses when he was driven by force from the island of Calypso. And I
for one, in any case, felt that come what might, I had had my dream. I
had had a glimpse of Eden, a peep into the earthly paradise.
I have seen many of the beautiful corners of the world. A lake in
Manchuria covered with large pink lotus flowers, as delicate as the
landscape on a piece of Oriental china.
I have seen Linfa, the deserted ruin of the Roman Campagna, rising from
waters thick with water-lilies, and a wilderness of leaves, like a
castle which an enchanter has bade go to sleep for hundreds of years.
I have seen, in the Scilly Isles, that island which is a white garden
set in the bluest of seas. I have seen Capri, and the Greek Islands,
and Brusa in Asia Minor in the spring, when the nightingales sing all
day, and the roses are in full bloom, and the noise of running water is
forever in your ears.
But never have I seen anything so captivating as Tahiti, as those long
shady walks, those great green trees, that reckless, untutored glory of
blossom and foliage, those fruits, those flowers, and the birdlike talk
of those careless natives, who wreathe themselves with flowers, and are
happy without working, and who put scarlet flowers behind their ears
to signify they are going to enjoy themselves: to have a good time; to
paint the town red.
In Tahiti there are no snakes, and in this respect at least Tahiti is
superior to the Garden of Eden, equal to Ireland.
_Across the Pacific: September 21-- October 3_