Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 29

I was happy that I had pulled up anchor in Papeete, and as contrast is, after all, comparative, I felt like a New-Yorker who finds himself in Arcadia, though I had thought Papeete, on first sight, the garden of Allah. In Mataiea I realized the wonder of the Polynesian people, and found my months with the whites of the city a fit background for study of and ardent delight in the brown islanders I was to know so well.

Chapter XVII

My life in the house of Tetuanui--Whence came the Polynesians--A migration from Malaysia--Their legends of the past--Condition of Tahiti when the white came--The great navigator, Cook--Tetuanui tells of old Tahiti.

Happiness in civilization consists in seeing life other than it really is. At Mataiea the simple truth of existence was joy. In the house of the chief, Tetuanui, I knew a peace of mind and body as novel to me as my surroundings. For the first time since unconcerned childhood I felt my heart leap in my bosom when the dawn awoke me, and was glad merely that I could see the sun rise or the rain fall. All of us have had that feeling on certain mornings; but was it not interwoven with the affairs of the day--a picnic, a rendezvous, our wedding, a first morning of the vacation encampment? In Mataiea it was spontaneous, the harking back to a beneficent mood of nature; the very sense of being stirring the blood in delight, and girding up the loins instantly to pleasurable movement.

I slept without clothing, and in a bound was at the door, with my pareu about me. Already the family had begun the leisurely tasks of the day. The fowls were on the sward under the breadfruit and papaya-trees, and the mina-birds were swooping down on the gra.s.s near them to profit by their uncovering of food. Those discriminating birds are like the j.a.panese, seldom pioneering in wild places, but settling on developed lands to gain by the slower industry of other peoples. "Birds that live on cows," the Tahitians call the minas, because where there are enough ruminants each bird selects one, and spends the day upon its back, eating the insects that infest its skin.

The sun at six barely lit the beach and revealed the lagoon, into which a stream from the mountains poured within Tetuanui's confines. I threw off my garment and plunged into a pool under a clump of panda.n.u.s-trees. It was cool enough at that hour to give the surface nerves the slight shock I craved, but warmed as I lay in the limpid water and watched the light sweeping past the reef in the swift way of the tropics.

I danced upon the beach and pursued the land crabs to their burrows. I hoped to see one wrench off a leg to prove what I had been told--that if one in its movement to the salt water through the tall gra.s.s beyond the sand, touched any filth, it clawed off the polluted leg, and that a crab had been seen thus to deprive itself of all its eight limbs, and after a bath to hobble back to its hole with the aid of its claws, to remain until it had grown a complement of supports. I wondered why it did not content itself with was.h.i.+ng instead of mutilation. To the biblical expounder it was an apt ill.u.s.tration of "cutting off an offending member," as recommended in the Book.

At the house the family were preparing their first meal, and I shared it with them--oranges, bananas, coffee, and rolls. The last, with the New Zealand tinned b.u.t.ter, came from the Chinese store. We sat on mats, and we drank from small bowls. The coffee was sweetened with their own brown sugar, and the juice of nearly ripe cocoanuts, grated and pressed, made a delicious subst.i.tute for cream. Over the breakfast we talked, Tetuanui and Haamoura answering my questions and taking me along the path of my inquiry into far fields of former customs and ancient lore. They were, as their forefathers, gifted in oral tradition, with retentive memories for their own past and for the facts and legends of the racial history. We who have for thousands of years put in writing our records cannot grasp the fullness of the system by which the old Polynesian chiefs and priests, totally without letters, or even ideographs, except in Easter Island, kept the archives of the tribe and nation by frequent repet.i.tion of memorized annals. So we got Homer's Odyssey, and the Song of Solomon.

What Tahiti was like before the white? That was to me a subject of intense interest, now that I was fully aware of the situation after a hundred and fifty years of exploitation, seventy-five years of French domination, and thirty years of colonialism. The nature of the people was little changed. The Tahitian was still naf, hospitable, gentle, indolent except as to needs, valuing friends.h.i.+p above all things, accepting the evangelism of many warring Christian sects as a tumult among jealous G.o.ds and priests, and counting s.e.x manifestations free expressions of affection, and of an appet.i.te not more sacred nor more shameful than hunger or thirst.

These were the qualities and rules of conduct ascribed to the Tahitians by the first discoverers, especially by those who were not narrowed in judgment by inexperience and religious fanaticism, as were the British and French missionaries of early days, peasants and apprentices who had forsaken the fields and workshops for the higher sphere of devoteeism and freedom from manual labor. These clerics, though often self-sacrificing and yearning for martyrdom, attributed all differences from their standards or preachments to inherent wickedness or diabolism.

One of the ablest of them had regretted sorrowfully his having to inform the Tahitians that all their ancestors were in h.e.l.l. Some clerics had made wearing bonnets the test of decency, and all had taught that G.o.d hated any open ardor of attraction for the opposite s.e.x. Yet it was almost entirely to them that the far-away student had to turn to learn any of the details of native life undefiled. The mariners had stayed too brief a time to enter into these, and could not speak Tahitian.

I knew that Tahitian life, political and economic, social and religious, had been utterly changed, but I longed for an understanding of what had been; a panorama of it before my eyes. I set out to obtain this by constant interrogations of every one I thought might have even a sc.r.a.p of enlightenment for me.

On rainy days, when Chief Tetuanui did not oversee the making or repair of roads in his district, and always when we were both at leisure, I sat with him, and the elders of the neighborhood, and queried them, or repeated for correction and comment my notes upon their antiquities--notes founded on reading and my observation.

Whence had come these Polynesians or Maoris who peopled the ocean islands from Hawaii to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to the eastern Fijis? A race set apart by its isolation for thousands of years from all the rest of the world, distinguished in all its habitats-- Hawaii, Samoa, the Marquesas, Tonga, the Paumotus, and the Society archipelago, and New Zealand--by beauty of form, tint and uniformity of color, height, and soft expression--an expression they vainly sought to make terrible by tattooing?

The legends and chants of the race unfolded much of the mystery; its language's relation to others, more. These Tahitians and all their kind were ancient Aryans who in the dim past were in India, and afterward in the Indian archipelago. They were in Sumatra, in Java, in the Philippines long before the Malays. Certainly their blood brothers, changed by millenniums of a different environment, remain in Malaysia, known there as the aborigines (Orang-Benoa), by the majority races. D'Urville said the Harfouras of Celebes were identical physically with the Polynesians. At some unfixed date the first of the Polynesians pushed out in their insecure craft for this sea, driven away by the Malay-Hindu invasion or by interracial feuds.

The pioneer, according to the legend, was Hawaii-uli-kai-oo, Hawaii and the Dotted Sea, a great fisherman and navigator. He sailed toward the Pleiades from his unknown home in the far West, and arrived at eastern islands. So pleased was he with them, that he returned to his western birthplace for his family, and brought them to Polynesia.

Other Polynesians left the Asiatic archipelago about the end of the first century, and went to many islands. Finally they reached the Samoan, Tongan, Marquesan, Paumotuan, and Society groups, and Easter Island and New Zealand. In pus.h.i.+ng eastward they skirted Papua, but were unable to stay, because the Papuans, whom the Polynesians had long ago driven out of the Asiatic archipelago, were stronger than the emigrants. They next tried Fiji, and tarried there longest, leaving those powerful imprints on the Papuans in appearance and language that make Fiji the anomaly of Melanesia. But the Fiji-Papuans at last drove them out, and they left with blood in their eyes. When the whites found the Marquesans in the sixteenth century, they were building at Vaitahu great war-canoes to "attack the black people who used bows and arrows." No living Marquesan had ever seen them nor could they have attained Fiji in any strength, yet the historical hate persisted.

The Marquesans of the north said their race came from Hawaii, and those of the south from Vavao. Seventeen places they had stopped at in their great migration eastward, they said.

Pu te metani me Vevau A anu te tai o Hawa-ii!

Pu atu te metani me Hawa-ii A anu te ao e Vevau!

Blow winds from Vavao And cool the sea of Hawaii!

Blow back, winds from Hawaii, And cool the air of Vavao!

That was the Marquesan legendary chant, the primal command of their G.o.d after creation. Vevau and Hawaii were placed in their former abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and when they reached the present American territory, of which Honolulu is the capital, they called it Hawaii, as they had an island of the Samoan group, Sawaii. It was in the fifth century they peopled the now American Hawaii, and they remained unknown there until the eleventh, when Marquesans, Tahitians, and Samoans began to pour in on them, and continued to do so for a few generations. Then the present Hawaiians were isolated and forgotten for twenty-one generations until rediscovery by Captain Cook in 1778.

They gave the old names to Polynesia that they knew in Asia, as all over the world emigrants carry their home names, not only Hawaii, or Savaii, for Java, but Moorea, a Javan place, to the island near Tahiti; Bora-Bora from Sumatra to a Society island; Puna of Borneo to places in Tahiti, Kauai, and Hawaii; Ouahou of Borneo to Oahu, on which Honolulu is; and Molokai, from the Moluccas, to another island of Hawaii. One might cite hundreds of examples, all going to prove their far-away origin, as Florida, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, New England, New York, and Albany, indicate theirs.

That there were any inhabitants in the South Sea islands occupied by the Polynesians is improbable but a race of mighty stone-carvers had swept through that ocean, perhaps many thousands of years before, and had left in the Ladrones and in Easter Islands monuments and statues now existing which are a profound mystery to the ethnologist, the archaeologist, and the engineer. If the Polynesians came upon any of the stone builders, they had killed or absorbed them.

The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved on wood in Easter Island by some of the Polynesians there half a century ago would denote there had been intercourse with the people who had made them, and who were not the Polynesians.

Once in Samoa, and finally at home there, after their Fiji disaster, they had gone adventuring, or the canoe drift of unfortunates caught by wind and tide had brought populations to all the other Polynesian islands, and princ.i.p.ally to Tahiti. This island in the center of Polynesia, and especially favored by nature, had been a source of growth and distribution of the race, the Paumotus, New Zealand, and probably the Marquesas, and Hawaii having been stocked from it, the language developing furthest in it, and customs, refinements, and leisure reaching their highest pitch in the marvelous culture, savage though it was, which astounded the Europeans. Yet all these people remained curious as to what might be beyond the distance, and a hundred years ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to search for Utupu, a Utopia from which the G.o.d Tao introduced the cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for the mystic land of their forefathers, as from Ireland to India the happy isles of the west was a myth. The mariners of Erin had long seen the Tir-n'an-Oge just beyond the horizon.

The Tahitians had a legend of the G.o.d Maui, that "he brought the earth up from the depths of the ocean, and when mankind suffered from the prolonged absence of the sun and lived mournfully in obscurity, with no ripening fruits, Maui stopped the sun and regulated its course, so as to make day and night equal, as they are in Tahiti."

Does not this hark back to a clime where the inequality of day and night was greater than in the tropics?

Lieutenant Bovis of the French navy, who seventy years ago, after ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his conclusions, said that after him it would be useless to hunt in the memories of the living for anything of the past, for the old men were dead or dying, and those now in middle age did not even speak or understand the old language in which the records were told. He had, he said, arrived in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti of the true native, the Tahiti unspoiled by European civilization, was only a memory, but by years of labor he had taken from the lips of the venerable their recollections of conditions in their childhood and early manhood, and what their fathers had told them, and by comparison he had been able to write intelligently of former times.

If Bovis found the real Tahiti no longer existent seventy years ago, what must I look for when two generations or three had died since, and swift steams.h.i.+ps coursed where only the clipper had sailed? Yet Tahiti was the least spoiled of islands on liner routes, because France being so far from it, and the French such poor business men, they had not exploited the natives except in the way of taxes. The bureaucracy lived on the imposts, but they had not reformed the people by laws and punishments, and made them see the wisdom of acquiescence in a scheme of regular work, as had the British missionary government in Tahiti and the American missionary government in Hawaii, in the name of an avenging and critical Lord. No people believed in the dignity of labor more than the Tahitians, because they refused to do any more than was requisite for health, cleanliness, comfort, and pleasure, and saw no more dignity or greater indignity in helping me on with my boots or bringing me my dinner or ma.s.saging my body than in listening to a sermon or catching fish.

They thought absurd and artificial the ideas foisted by politicians, merchants, and lawyers that it was dignified to sit in an office, to sell goods, or to draw up agreements, or undignified to disembowel a pig, make a net, or dig an oven. They saw governors and bankers spend all day chasing a boar or angling for a fish which they did not eat when they possessed it. They thought them queer, and that their own regimen of work and play was more sensible.

"What land is this?" asked Cook, and understanding him, the Tahitians answered, "Otaiti oia" or, "This is Tahiti."

Cook put it down as Otaheite, p.r.o.nounced by him Otahytee. It was Cook's carpenter who was building a house for a chief, a friend of Cook's, and lost all his tools during the visit of the high priest of the G.o.d Hiro and his acolytes. Hiro was the first king in their myths, and, until Christianity came, the G.o.d of business. When Cook sailed away, the tools were taken to the marae, or temple of Hiro, where the priest said he would cause the prized tools to reproduce their kind, like fruit. He planted them in a field near by and watched for results. The lack of any result except rust was an able argument for the Christian missionaries, when they came, to destroy his cult by laughing at the foolishness of his ideas and the weakness of his G.o.d.

The discoverers reported that the Tahitians and all other Polynesians were thieves and liars, for the reason that they often seized pieces of iron, tools, and firearms that they saw on the s.h.i.+ps or ash.o.r.e in the houses occupied by the first whites, and then lied about their actions. The whites killed scores for these crimes, one of the initial murders of Cook's crew being the shooting of Chief Kapupuu as he departed in his canoe from their s.h.i.+p with some bits of metal he had taken. Malo, the native historian, who heard the account from eye-witnesses, explained the incident as follows, first mentioning the sighting of Cook's vessels and the wonder of the natives:

One said to another, "What is that great thing with branches?" Others said, "It is a forest that has slid down into the sea," and the gabble and noise was great. Then the chiefs ordered some natives to go in a canoe and observe and examine well that wonderful thing. They went, and when they came to the s.h.i.+p, they saw the iron that was attached to the outside of the s.h.i.+p, and they were greatly rejoiced at the quant.i.ty of iron.

Because the iron was known before that time from wood with iron [in or on it] that had formerly drifted ash.o.r.e, but it was in small quant.i.ty, and here was plenty. And they entered on board, and they saw the people with white foreheads, bright eyes, loose garments, corner-shaped heads, and unintelligible speech.

Then they thought that the people [on board] were all women, because their heads were so like the women's heads of that period. They observed the quant.i.ty of iron on board of the s.h.i.+p, and they were filled with wonder and delight.

Then they returned and told the chiefs what they had seen, and how great a quant.i.ty of iron. On hearing this, one of the warriors of the chief said, "I will go and take forcible possession of this booty, for to plunder is my business and means of living."

The chiefs consented. Then this warrior went on board of the s.h.i.+p and took away some of the iron on board, and he was shot at and was killed. His name was Kapupuu. The canoes [around the s.h.i.+p] fled away and reported that Kapupuu had been killed by a ball from a squirt-gun.

And that same night guns were fired and rockets were thrown up. They [the natives] thought it was a G.o.d, and they called his name Lonomakua, and they thought there would be war.

Then the chiefess named Kamakahelei, mother of Kaumualii, said, "Let us not fight against our G.o.d; let us please him that he may be favorable to us." Then Kamakahelei gave her own daughter as a woman to Lono. Lelemahoalani was her name; she was older sister of Kaumualii. And Lono [Captain Cook] slept with that woman, and the Kauai women prost.i.tuted themselves to the foreigners for iron.

Cook was one of the best of the navigators of the South Seas, a devout churchman, and a believer in the decalogue of Moses. He thought stealing or lying odious before the Lord and men. But the Polynesians did not so think. Most of their possessions were in common, and telling the truth was unimportant. If one asked them about anything they had no interest in, they might tell the truth or might not. If they had interests, these were served by their replies. This is as in diplomacy to-day, when the interests of one's country allows prevarication, and even in Christian ethics both patriotism and self-preservation, as well as hospitality, permit flat falsehood. Our own spies are honest heroes, and the man who would not deceive a man who sought to kill him or burn his house would be considered a fool and not worth saving.

"There is plenty more in the kitchen," we say to guests out of hospitality and pride, though the kitchen is as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. She could not lie to the dog.

Now, to the native who saw all around him on the s.h.i.+p huge ma.s.ses of the material most precious to him in the world, it was as if an American in Yucatan saw in a native hut heaps of gold and diamonds not valued by the savage. Suppose the savage left the American alone with the treasure!

But the Tahitians did not murder for blood l.u.s.t, had no a.s.sa.s.sination, and virtually no theft. Our own Anglo-Saxon law laid down the maxim, "Caveat emptor!" "Let the buyer beware!" which meant that the truth notwithstanding, the buyer must not let the seller of anything cheat him by failure to state the exact facts or faults, and expect the law to remedy his stupidity.

Chief Tetuanui's word was his bond because he had learned that square-dealing brought him peace of mind, but other natives had found out that to cheat the white man first was the only possible way of keeping even with him. The maxim of the king of Apamama, quoted by Ivan Stroganoff, was pertinent. Hospitality was as sacred to the Tahitians as to the old Irish. It was shameful not to give a guest anything he desired.

"Es su casa, senor!" said the Spaniard, and did not mean it; but the Tahitians literally did mean that the visitor was welcome to all his valuables, and did not reserve his family, as did the don.

The chevalier of the Legion of Honor upon whose mat I sat was emphatic as to the respect of the old Tahitians for their chiefs.