Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 39

Two Spanish priests, they learned, had lived in the village between the arrival and return of the Spanish s.h.i.+ps from Peru. They left no imprint of their Catholic religion except the cross and a memory of kindness; and why they resigned their mission to Tahiti is not known. The British missionaries did not come until 1797, on the Duff. They planted gardens and worked diligently and prayed. They had vast patience, and confidence in their all-powerful and avenging G.o.d, and a rapt devotion to his son, who forgave the sins of those who adopted His faith. Their ideals were as fixed as the stars, and their courage superior to the daily discouragements of their lives and continuous hards.h.i.+ps of separation from home. But they could not break the strength of the superst.i.tions of the pagans. A dozen years these English ecclesiastics delved in their gardens, built their houses, and begged Jehovah and Jesus to give them victory. Five years they mourned without message or aid from England. Their clothes were in tatters, and as covering their whole bodies with European garments from feet to scalp, except face and hands, was a rigid prescription of their own morals' and an example to the almost nude Tahitians, they suffered keenly from shame. When, after half a decade, a brig arrived, its supplies were found ruined by salt water and mold. The poor clerics, in an earthly paradise, but hostile atmosphere, with little to report to an unheeding England save the depths of the untilled field of heathenry and depravity, might not have been blamed if they, too, had given up their mission. The fruits of twelve years of gardening and horticulture were destroyed in a day by ravaging parties. The fact that their lives were spared and their persons not attacked, except in a rare instance of an individual piece of villainy, is proof of the mild dispositions of the infidels. The Tahitians wors.h.i.+ped their G.o.ds with a superst.i.tious awe not exceeded anywhere, and the outlandish white men proclaimed openly that these G.o.ds were dirty lumps of wood and stone and fiber, and to be despised in comparison with the Christian G.o.ds, Father and Son, which they implored them under pain of eternal punishment to adopt. Imagine the fate of strangers who settled in New England or Spain a hundred and twenty years ago and who announced daily year in and year out that all the ancestors of the people there were in h.e.l.l, that their G.o.d and their angels, saints, priests, and images were demons, or doing the work of demons, and that only by acknowledging their belief in a deity unheard-of before, by having water sprinkled on their heads, and ceasing the customs and thoughts taught as most moral and divine by their own revered priests, could they escape eternal misery as a consequence of a mistake made by a man and a woman named Atamu and Ivi six thousand years earlier! In Spain at that date the king whose name had been coupled with Christ's on the cross near my house at Tautira was expelling the Jesuits from his kingdom, and the Holy Office recorded its thirtieth thousand human being burned at the stake in that country in the name of Jesus Christ.

The incredulous Tahitians tolerated the queer white men who wore long, black coats and who had learned their language, and who, except as to religion, spoke gently to them, healed their wounds, patted their children on the head, and taught them how to use iron and wood in unknown fas.h.i.+ons. They saw that these men drank intoxicants in great moderation, lived in amity, and did not advantage themselves in trade or with the native women, as did all the other white men. And they wondered.

But they were convinced of the truth of their own religion. Their chiefs and priests replied:

"If your first man and woman took the lizard's word and ate fruit from the tabu tree, they should have been punished, and if their children killed the son of your G.o.d, they should have been punished; but why worry us about it? We have not killed you, and our first man and woman respected all tabu trees."

They disdained the cruel message that their forefathers were in the perpetually burning umu, the oven, as did that Frisian king, Radbod, who with one leg in the baptismal font, bethought him to ask where were his dead progenitors, and was answered by the militant bishop, Wolfran, "In h.e.l.l, with all unbelievers."

"Then will I rather feast with them in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little, starveling Christians in heaven" said the pagan, and withdrew his sanctified limb to walk to an unblessed grave in proud pantheism.

Otu, the son of King Pomare, had a revelation that the G.o.d Oro wished to be removed to Tautira from Atehuru. The chiefs of that district protested, and Otu's followers seized the idol, and went to sea with him. They landed as soon as it was safe, and mollified the G.o.d by a sacrifice; and having no victim, they killed one of Pomare's servants. The island then divided into hateful camps, and Moorea joined the fray. The mission sided with the king, and the crews of two English vessels fortified the mission, and with their modern weapons helped the royal party to whip the other faction. Wars followed, the mission was again invaded, the houses burned, and the missionaries, not desiring martyrdom, fled to Australia, thousands of miles away. But two remained, and kept at their preaching, and finally the genius of the Clapham clerics triumphed. Pomare ate the tabu turtle of the temple, and a Christian nucleus was formed, headed by the sovereign. For years a b.l.o.o.d.y warfare over Christianity distracted the islands, comparable in intensity of feeling to that between Catholics and Huguenots in France. The Christian converts were slaughtered by the hundreds, and the pagans drove all the survivors to Moorea. After a season the conquerors grew lonesome, and invited them to return and abjure their false G.o.d, Ietu Kirito, whom they had defeated, and who by the Christians' own statement had been hanged on a tree by the Ati-Iuda, the tribe of Jews. Pomare and eight hundred men landed from Moorea, and with the missionaries began a song service on the beach, and "Come, let us join our friends above," and "Blow ye the trumpets, blow!" echoed from the hills.

Couriers carried all over Tahiti word of the outrage to the G.o.ds, and the incensed heathens rose in immense numbers and attacked the hymners. Fortunately, says the missionary chronicle, the Christians had their arms with them, and after prayers and exhortations by the clergy, Pomare led his cohorts, men and women; and by the grace of G.o.d and the whites, with a few muskets, they smote the devil-wors.h.i.+pers hip and thigh, and chased them to the distant valleys.

Pomare, directed by the now militant missionaries, sent a body of gunmen to Tautira to capture the G.o.d Oro, whose princ.i.p.al temple was very near where stood my kitchen. The iconoclasts, with the zeal of neophytes, destroyed every vestige of the magnificent marae, and, unwinding the many coverings of Oro, carried to the king the huge log which had been the national G.o.d for ages. The king first used it in his cook-house as a shelf, and finally for firewood.

From then on the cross hecame the symhol of the new religion, and those who had been most faithful to the old were the strongest disciples. Until the French expelled the missionary-consul of England, Pritchard, the missionaries virtually governed Tahiti; but with the conflict of sects and the growing claims of trade, piety languished, until now church-going was become a social pastime, and of small influence upon the conduct of the Tahitians. The pastors were no longer of the type of the pioneers, and with the fast decrease of the race, the Tahitians were left largely to their own devices. Half a dozen religions supported ministers from America and Europe in Papeete; but there was no longer a fire of proselytizing, as all were nominally Christians. In Tautira everybody went to the Protestant or the Catholic church, the latter having a fifth as many attendants as the former. A reason for this may have been that there was no French priest resident at Tautira, and no Tahitian priests, whereas Tahitian preachers abound. Also the chiefs were Protestants, and their influence notable.

Ori-a-Ori, though busied in his official duties, and by nature a silent man, a.s.sumed of me a care, and in time gave me a friends.h.i.+p beyond my possible return to him. I sent to Papeete for a variety of edibles from the stores of the New-Zealand and German merchants, and spread a gay table, to which I often invited Choti and T'yonni, who were my hosts as frequently. Ori-a-Ori every evening sat with me, and numbers of times we read the Bible, I, first, reciting the verse in French, and he following in Tahitian. His greatest liking was for the chapters in which the Saviour's life on the seaside with the fishermen was described, but the beat.i.tudes brought out to the fullest his deep, melancholy voice, as by the light of the lamp upon the low table the chief intoned the thrilling gospel of humility and unselfishness.

Never before had I appreciated so well the divine character of Jesus or conjectured so clearly the scenes of his teaching upon the sh.o.r.es of the Lake of Galilee. Excepting the tropical plants and the eternal accent of the reef, the old Tahitian and I might have been in Palestine with Peter and the sons of Zebedee and the disciples. They were people of slender worldly knowledge, the carpenter's son knew nothing of history, and ate with his fingers, as did Ori-a-Ori; but their open eyes, unclouded by sophistication and complex interests, looked at the universe and saw G.o.d. They lived mostly under the open sky in touch with nature, dependent on its manifestations immediately about them for their sustenance, and with its gifts and curses for their concerns and symbols.

Occidentals, who seldom muse, to whom contemplation is waste of time, do not enjoy the oneness with nature shared by these Polynesians with the sacred Commoner whose beat.i.tudes were to bring anarchy upon the Roman world, and destroy the effects of the philosophies of the ablest minds of Greece. The fishermen of Samaria were gay and somber by turn, as were the Tahitians, doing little work, but much thinking, and innocent and ignorant of the perplexing problems and offensive indecencies of striving and luxury. The air and light nurtured them, and they confidently leaned upon the hand of G.o.d to guide and preserve.

Th.o.r.eau's "Cry of the Human" echoed in the dark as the chief and I chanted the idealistic desires of the friend of man:

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native G.o.ds and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling and shortlived blaze of candles.

One evening when we had walked down to the beach to gaze at the heavens and to speculate on the inhabitants of the planets, we sat on our haunches, our feet lapped by the warm tide, and for the first time I drew our conversation to a man who in a brief friends.h.i.+p had won the deep affection of this n.o.ble islander.

"Ori-a-Ori," I began, "in America, in the city where I lived, my house was near a small aua, a park in which was a tii, a monument, to a great writer, a teller of tales on paper. On a tall block of stone is a s.h.i.+p of gold, with the sails spread; so she seems to be sailing over the ocean. The friends of the teller of tales built this in in his honor after he died. Now that writer was once here in Tautira--"

Ori-a-Ori leaned toward me, and in a voice laden with memories, a voice that harked back over a quarter of a century, said slowly and meditatively, but with surety:

"Rui? Is the s.h.i.+p the Tatto?"

I had awakened in his mind recollections, doubtless often stirred, but very vague, perhaps, almost mythical to him, after so long a time in which nothing like the same experience had come to him. Yet that they were dear to him was evident. They were concerned with his vigorous manhood, though he was a youthful grandfather when the Cas...o...b..ought Robert Louis Stevenson to Tahiti to live in the house of Ori. I reminded him of their exchanging names in blood brothers.h.i.+p, so that Stevenson was Teriitera, and Ori was Rui. Rui was his p.r.o.nunciation of Louis, as all his family in Tautira called the Scotch author. Ori-a-Ori had known them all, his mother, his wife, and his loved stepson, Lloyd Osborne. Nine weeks they had stayed in his house, which the Princess Moe, Pomare's sister-in-law, had asked Ori to vacate for the visitors before he knew them, but which he was glad he had done when they became friends. Ori and his family had retained only one room for their intimate effects, and had slept in a native house on the site of my own. On the wild lawn across the road, before his home, Rui had given his generous feast, costing him eighty dollars at a time when he was most uncertain of funds, and gaining him the reputation of the richest man known to the Tautirans, the owner of the Silver s.h.i.+p, as the Casco was called by the Paumotuans, and by Stevenson afterward. There were four or five Tahitians I knew here who remembered the amuraa maa of the sick man, who had his own schooner, his pahi tira piti; but only Ori retained the deep, though misty, impression made by a meeting of hearts in warmest kins.h.i.+p.

"Rui gave me knives and forks and dishes from the schooner to remember him by," said the chief, abstractedly. "Tati, my relation, has them. I have not those presents Rui handed me. Tati said that I ate with my fingers, and that he was the head of the Teva clan; so I gave them to him. Many papaa visit Tati at Papara. He is rich. Aue! I have not the presents Rui put down on my table."

I said over for him what Rui had written:

I love the Polynesian; this civilization of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast ... if you could live, the only white folk, in a Polynesian village, and drink that warm, light vin du pays of human affection, and enjoy that simple dignity of all about you....

Paiere, the adopted son of Ori, who was a boy when the Casco was at Tautira, claimed a vivid remembrance of many incidents. He especially had been impressed by the numbers of corks that flew in the house and on the green; and when I invited him to a bottle of champagne, he made hissing sounds and a plop to indicate that Rui had a penchant for that kind of wine.

"I used to fetch him oranges and mangoes, and climb for drinking nuts, of which Rui was fond," said Paiere.

Paiere was a deacon or functionary of the Protestant church, as was Ori-a-Ori, and I went with the entire family to the Sunday evening service. For weeks preparations and rehearsals for a himene nui, a mammoth song service, had been agitating the village. Under my trees the children gathered of late afternoons and imitated the grown-up folk in their melodies. From the verandas and from the church at night issued the peculiar strain of the himene, somehow bringing to me, lying on my mat under the stars, a sense of fitness to the prospect--the clear heavens, the purple lagoon, the wind in the groves, and the low rumble of the surf.

On the Sunday of the himene nui, I met the French priest as he tied his horse by the door of the Catholic church. He was in a dark ca.s.sock or gown, his long, black beard and a flat, half-melon shaped hat giving him a distinctive appearance in the simple settlement. He was old, and weary from his hot ride, but courteous as world-wide travelers are, and at his request I dropped in on his service before the other. He sat by the middle door, and the twenty or thirty of the congregation on the floor at one end. They sang a himene, and he followed and corrected them from a book, so that their method was formal. Congregational singing not being customary in Catholic churches, it was probable that in Tahiti they had had to meet the compet.i.tion of the Protestants, who from their beginnings in Polynesia had made a master stroke by developing this form of wors.h.i.+p in extraordinary consonance with the native mind.

The Protestant temple held a hundred and fifty people. It was a plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half a dozen deacons. The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered, he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats. He had a white s.h.i.+rt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool, and were barelegged. All wore solemn faces of a jury bringing in a death-verdict. Paiere nodded to a volunteer janitor, who insisted upon my occupying a chair he brought.

Every one else was on the floor on mats, in two squares or separate divisions. Babies lay at their mothers' extended feet, and others ran about the room in silence. The pastor's sermon was about Ioba and his tefa pua, which he sc.r.a.ped with poa, the sh.e.l.ls of the beach. He pictured the man of patience as if in Tautira, with his three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, and Tofari, urging him to deny G.o.d and to sin; and the speaker struck the railing with his fist when he enumerated the possessions taken from Ioba by G.o.d, but returned a hundredfold. After he had finished, wiping the sweat from his brow with a colored kerchief, the himene began.

The only advance we have made since the Greeks is, in music. Possibly in painting we have better mediums; but in philosophy, poetry, sculpture, decency, beauty, we have not risen. We cure diseases more skilfully, but we have more; in health we are crippled by our cities and our customs. Our violins and pianos, our orchestras, and symphonies, are our great achievements; but in these South Seas, where they do not count, the people had evolved a ma.s.s utterance of canticles more thrilling and, more enjoyable than the oratorios of Europe. In these himenes one may see transfigured for moments the soul of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, which smothers his articulation.

A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a high note, beginning a few words from a hymn, or an improvisation. She sang through a phrase, and then others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens, without any apparent rule except close harmony. These voices burst in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming ba.s.s. The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees, entered into the volume of sound, and were mingled in the emmeleia, a resulting magnificence of accord that reminded me curiously of a great pipe-organ.

The himene was the offspring of the original efforts of the Polynesians to adapt the songs of the sailormen, the national airs of the adventurers of many countries, the rollicking obscenities and drinking doggerel of the navies, and the religious hymns drilled into their ears by the missionaries, English and French. Now the words and the meanings were inextricably confused. A leader might begin with, "I am washed in the blood of the Lamb," or, "The Son of Man goes forth to war, a golden crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar--who follows in his train?" But those striking in might prefer such a phrase as, "The old white pig ran into the sea," or, "Johnny Brown, I love your daughter," or something not possible to write down. It was mostly in the old Tahitian language, almost forgotten, and thus unknown to the foreign preachers. s.e.x and religion were as mingled here as in America.

The airs were as wild as they were melodious; here a rippling torrent of ra, ra, ra-ra-ra, and la, la, la-la-la breaking in on the sustained verses of the leaders; falsetto notes, high and strident, savage and shrilling, piercing the thrumming diapason of the men; long, droning tones like bagpipes, bubbling sounds like water flowing; and all in perfect time. The clear, fascinating false soprano of the woman leader had a cadence of ecstasy, and I marked her under a lamp. Her head was thrown back, her eyes were closed, and her features set as in a trance. Her throat and mouth moved, and her nostrils quivered, her countenance glorified by her visions which had transported her to the bosom of Abraham.

The atmosphere rang as with the chimes of a cathedral, the echoes--there were none in reality--returning from roof and tree, and I had the feeling of the air being made up of voices, and of whirling in this magic ether. The woman I observed would seem about to stop, her voice falling away almost to no sound, and the prolonged drone of the chorus dying out, when, as if she had come to life again, she sang out at the top of her lungs, and the ranks again took up their tones. I could almost trace the imposition of the religious strain upon the savage, the Christian upon the heathen, like the negro spirituals of Georgia, and I sat back in my chair, and forgot the scene in the thoughts induced by the himene.

The souls of the Tahitians were not much changed by all their outward transformation. Superficial, indeed, are the accomplishments of missionaries, merchants, and masters among these Maoris. The old guard dies, but never surrenders; the boast of Napoleon's soldiers might be paraphrased by the voice of the Maori spirit. Our philosophy, our catechisms, and our rules have not uprooted the convictions and thought methods of centuries. Bewildered by our ambitions, fas.h.i.+ons, and inventions, they emulate us feebly, but in their heart of hearts think us mad. Old chiefs and chiefesses I have had confess to me that they were stunned by the novelties, commands, and demands of the papaa (foreigner), but that their confusion was not liking or belief. In his youth, in the midst of these bustling whites, the Tahitian imitates them and feels sometimes humiliated that he is not one of them. But in sober middle age all these new desires begin to leave him, and he becomes a Maori again. The older he grows, the less attractive seem the white man's ways and ambitions, though pride, habit, and perhaps an acquired fear of the h.e.l.l painted by priests and preachers from the distant lands keep him church-going. G.o.ds may differ, but devils never.

Choti and T'yonni and I spent an hour at my house before they walked home to bed, and Choti read as a soporific, with a few bottles of Munich beer, the "Sermon to the Fishes" of St. Antonius. As he read, we heard the joyous stridence of an accordion in a hula harmony. The upaupahura was beginning in the grove where Uritaata lived. The austere St. Antonius had lectured long to the eels on the folly of wiggling, to the pikes on the immorality of stealing, and to the crabs and turtles on the danger of sloth. But:

"The sermon now ended, Each turned and descended; The pikes went on stealing, The eels went on eeling; Much edified were they, But preferred the old way.

"The crabs are back-sliders, The stock-fish thick-siders, The carps are sharp-set, All the sermon forget; Much delighted were they, But preferred the old way."

Chapter XXV

I meet a sorcerer--Power over fire--The mystery of the fiery furnace--The scene in the forest--Walking over the white hot stones--Origin of the rite.

Walking to the neighboring district of Pueu with Raiere to see the beauties of the sh.o.r.e, we met a cart coming toward Tautira, and one of the two natives in it attracted my interest. He was very tall and broad and proud of carriage, old, but still unbroken in form or feature, and with a look of unconformity that marked him for a rebel. Against what? I wondered. Walt Whitman had that look, and so had Lincoln; and Thomas Paine, who more than any Englishman aided the American Revolution. Mysticism was in this man's eyes, which did not gaze at the things about him, but were blinds to a secret soul.

Raiere exchanged a few words with the driver of the cart, and as they continued on toward Tautira, he said to me in a very serious voice:

"He is a tahua, a sorcerer, who will enact the Umuti, the walking over the fiery oven. He is from Raiatea and very noted. Ten years ago, Papa Ita of Raiatea was here, but there has been no Umuti since."

"What brings him here now?" I asked. "Who pays him?"

Raiere answered quickly:

"Aue! he does not ask for money, but he must live, and we all will give a little. It is good to see the Umuti again."

"But, Raiere, my friend," I protested, "you are a Christian, and only a day ago ate the breadfruit at the communion service. Fire-walking is etene; it is a heathen rite."