IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS
By Beatrice Grimshaw
Author Of “From Fiji To The Cannibal Islands,” Etc.
London: Hutchinson & Co. Paternoster Row
1907
IN THE STRANGE SOUTH SEAS
In desire of many marvels over sea,
When the new made tropic city sweats and roars,
I have sailed with young Ulysses from the quay,
Till the anchor rattled down on stranger shores.
Kipling.
MOST men have their loves, happy or hopeless, among the countries of the earth. There are words in the atlas that ring like trumpet calls to the ear of many a stay-at-home in grey northern cities—names of mountains, rivers, islands, that tramp across the map to the sound of swinging music played by their own gay syllables, that summon, and lure, and sadden the man who listens to their fifing, as the music of marching regiments grips at the heart of the girl who loves a soldier.
They call, they call, they call—through the long March mornings, when the road that leads to everywhere is growing white and dry—through restless summer nights, when one sits awake at the window to see the stars turn grey with the dawn—in the warm midday, when one hurries across the city bridge to a crowded eating-house, and the glittering masts far away down the river must never be looked at as one passes. Of a misty autumn evening, when steamers creeping up to seaport towns send long cries across the water, one here, and another there, will stir uneasily in his chair by the fire, and shut his ears against the insistent call.... Why should he listen, he who may never answer?
(Yokohama, the Golden Gate, Cape Horn, the Rio Grande, Agra, Delhi, Benares, Bombay, the Amazon, the Andes, the South Sea Islands, Victoria Nyanza, the Pyramids, the Nile, Lhassa, Damascus, Singapore, the tundras, the prairies, trade-winds, tropics, and the Line—can’t you hear us calling?)
Love is not stronger than that call—let sweetheartless girls left alone, and the man of cities who has loved the woman of the wandering foot, give bitter witness. Death is not stronger—those who follow the call must defy him over and over again. Pride of country, love of home, delight in well-known faces and kindly hearts that understand, the ease of the old and well-tried ways, the prick of ordinary ambitions hungering for the showy prizes that every one may see—these are but as dead leaves blown before the wind, when the far-off countries cry across the seas. Not one in a hundred may answer the call; yet never think, you who suppose that love and avarice and the lust of battle sum up all the great passions of the world, that scores out of every hundred Englishmen have not heard it, all the same. “In the heart of every man, a poet has died young”; and in the heart of almost every Briton, a wanderer once has lived. If this were not so, the greatest empire of the world had never been.
So, to The Man Who Could Not Go, I address this book—to the elderly, white-waistcoated city magnate, grave autocrat of his clerkly kingdom (never lie to me, sir—what was your favourite reading in the sixties, and why were you a very fair pistol shot, right up to the time when you were made junior manager?)—to the serious family solicitor, enjoying his father’s good old practice and house, and counting among the furnishings of the latter, a shelf of Marryats, Mayne Reids, and Michael Scotts, wonderfully free of dust—to the comfortable clergyman, immersed in parish cares, who has the oddest fancy at times for standing on dock-heads, and sniffing up odours of rope and tar—to all of you, the army of the brave, unwilling, more or less resigned Left Behinds, who have forgotten years ago, or who will never, forget while spiring masts stand thick against blue skies, and keen salt winds wake madness in the brain—to all I say: Greeting! and may the tale of another’s happier chance send, from the fluttering pages of a book, a breath of the far-off lands and the calling sea.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Fate and Her Parcels—How It All came true—The First South Sea Island—Coleridge and the Tropics—The Spell of the Island Scents—What happens to Travellers—Days in Dreamland—A Torchlight Market—The Enchanted Fei.
LIKE an idle messenger-boy, Fate takes a long while about her rounds, but she will get through with them and deliver all her parcels, if you give her time enough.
She has so much business that she confuses orders very often, and you are never sure of getting what you sent for. Still, you will certainly get something, if you wait, and it may even be the thing you demanded.
The morning she called at my door, with a very full basket, she had already been to my neighbours, and given them, in a big assortment of goods—a failure on the Stock Exchange, a hunting accident, and a broken engagement. What they had ordered was a seat in Parliament, and a winter at Monte Carlo, with anything good that might come in in the way of new-laid motor-cars. But Fate was, as usual, in a hurry, and she never changes any goods, once delivered. So they had to take them in.
I had given up expecting her when her knock came to my door, because my order had been sent in some years ago, and so far had remained unacknowledged. But she fairly emptied her basket into my hands, once she was admitted.
“Goods all right, and none the worse for keeping; couldn’t find time to see to you before, I’ve been so busy attending to an order from Japan for a new army and a gross of assorted victories,” she panted. “Had to serve the Czar of Russia with a lot of old defeats I’ve had lying by since the Crimea, instead of the new empire he sent for; and can’t get time to fill more than half the German Emperor’s order for fireworks. You private people are lucky to get anything at all. Count the goods, please—one journey round the world, two-and-a-half years of mixed adventures, a hundred South Sea Islands, threescore new friends, first quality, one large package luck. That’s all, I think—sign the book, and let me go; I’ve got seven attacks of appendicitis, a foreclosed mortgage, two lawsuits, and a divorce, to deliver in this square before lunch.”
So, like the fairy tales, “it all came true,” and one bright winter afternoon a Cunard liner bore me away from the streets and shops and drab-coloured, huddled houses of Liverpool, down the muddy Mersey—off round the world.
There were thousands of people on the quay, come to see the famous boat away, for it was Saturday afternoon, and the town took holiday. They had a few hours of freedom before them—then, the airless office room, the stuffy shop, the ledger and the copying-press, and the clattering typewriter, the grim window giving on the dark wet street, for six long days again. Next year, and the year after,-just the office, the frowsy lodging, the tram car, the pen in the strong young fingers, the desk to stoop the broad young shoulders, the life foreseen, eventless, grey for ever and for ever. And I was going round the world.
It is three weeks later, and the big “A and A” steamer is ploughing along in the midst of a marvellous dazzle of diamond-spangled, pale-blue tropic sea and scorching, pale-blue tropic sky. The passengers, in cool white suits and dresses, are clustered together on the promenade deck, looking eagerly over the port railing, while the captain, telescope in hand, points out something lying only a mile away, and says: “That’s Tiki-Hau, so now you’ve seen a South Sea Island.”
We are on our way to Tahiti, a twelve-day run from San Francisco, and are not stopping anywhere, but as Tiki-Hau is the only glimpse of land we shall get until we cast anchor in Papeete, every one wants to look at it. Not one of us has ever seen a South Sea Island, and, we are all eager to realise this little fragment of our rainbow-coloured childish dreams.
Is it as good as we dreamed it? we ask ourselves and each other. The verdict, given unanimously, is: “Yes—but not the same.”
Here is no high green palmy peak, overhanging a waveless sea, with sparkling waterfalls dashing down from crag to crag, like the coloured illustrations in our old school prize books. There are, indeed, just such islands in the Pacific, we are told—many hundreds of them—but there are still more of the kind we are now looking at, which is not half so often mentioned. All South Sea Islands are either high or low; the high island, with lofty mountains and dark, rich volcanic soil, is the familiar island of the picture book, while the low type, composed only of coral, is the variety to which Tiki-Hau belongs.
What we can see of the island, however, is enough to set at rest any tendency to comparison. None of us want anything better; none of us think there can be anything better, among the wonders that the Great South Seas yet hold in store.
Tiki-Hau is an island of the atoll or ring-shaped type, a splendid circle of seventy and eighty-foot palms, enclosing an inner lagoon clear and still as glass. Outside the windy palms, a dazzling beach runs down to the open sea all round the island—a beach that is like nothing the travellers ever have seen before, for it is made of powdered coral, and is as white as salt, as white as starch, as white as the hackneyed snow-simile itself can paint it. All the island—the whole great ring, many miles in length—is coral too, white, branching, flowering coral under water, white, broken-coral gravel above, with here and there a thin skin of earth collected by a century or two of falling palm-leaves and ocean waste. Outside the magic ring the sea-waves tumble, fresh and blue, upon-the cloud-white sand; within, the still lagoon glows like a basin of molten emerald. Above, the enormous palm-trees swing their twenty-foot plumes of gaudy yellow-green to the rush of warm trade-wind, high in the burning sky. A glorious picture indeed—but one before which the painter well might tremble.
Here, for the first time, we begin to understand why pictures of tropical scenes are so few and so unsatisfactory. Paint! what combination of coloured grease that ever came out of a box could hope to suggest the pale green fire of those palm-tree plumes, the jewel-blaze of the lagoon, the sapphire flame of the sea, the aching, blinding whitenesses of spray and sand? Who could paint the sun that is literally flashing back from the light dresses of the passengers, making of every separate person a distinct conflagration, and darting lightning rays out of the officers’ gold shoulder-straps and buttons? Does any dweller in the dim grey North really know what light and colour are? did we know, with our tinselled April days, and gentle blue-and white August afternoons, that we were so proud of once? Well, we know now; and, alas, in the dim, prosaic years that are yet to come, we shall remember!
The ship steams on, the atoll fades away in the distance, and once more comes the changeless level of long blue empty sea. But we have seen a coral island, and the picture is ours for ever.
Flying-fish, skimming and “skittering” over the surface of the waves, we have all become used to now. The first day we met them was a memorable one, all the same—they were so exactly what one had paid one’s money to see. Sharks have disappointed us so far; never a sight of the famous “black triangular fin” have we yet enjoyed, and the passengers have an idea that something ought to be said to the steamship company about it. Nor have the equatorial sunsets quite kept up their stage character. Books of travel, and sea literature in general, have led us to expect that the sun, in the tropics, should go out at sunset as though Poseidon had hold of the switch down below the water line, and turned off the light the instant sun and horizon met.
... The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out.
At one stride comes the dark.
They don’t, Mr. Coleridge, and it doesn’t, and you never were there to see for yourself, or you would not have talked beautiful nonsense and misled countless travellers of all ages who did see, but who have refused to look, save through your illustrious spectacles, ever since. Even on the equator, the sun gives one time to dress for dinner (if the toilet is not a very elaborate one) while it is setting, and after it has set. So dies one more illusion. Yet it can easily be spared, in the midst of a thousand wild dreams and strange imaginings, realised to the very utmost, as ours are to be ere long.
Tahiti comes at last. In the pearly light of a sunrise pure as a dawn of earliest Eden, we glide into the shadow of a tall, rose-painted peak, spiring eight thousand feet up into heaven, and anchor in the midst of a glassy mirror of violet sea. Papeëte, the loveliest, sweetest, and wickedest town of all the wide South Seas, lies before us—just a sparkle of red roofs looking out from under a coverlet of thick foliage, a long brown wharf and a many-coloured crowd. Across the water steals a faint strange perfume, unlike anything I have ever smelled before—heavy, sweet, penetrating, suggestive.... It is cocoanut oil scented with the white tieré flower, and never, from Tahiti to Samoa, from Raratonga to Fiji, Yavau, Manihiki, or Erromanga, will the South Sea traveller lose the odour of it again. Cocoanut oil, and the nutty, heavy smell of copra (dried cocoanut kernel) are charms that can raise in an instant for any old island wanderer, in the farthest corners of the earth, the glowing vision of the wonderful South Sea world.
... Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heartstrings crack,
They start those awful voices o’ nights
That whisper: “Old man, come back!”
(Old island wanderers in all parts of the world—settled down to desks in the E.C. district—tramping through the December glare of Pitt Street, Sydney, for “orders”—occupying a tranquil, well-bred billet, and a set of red-tape harness, in the Foreign Office—do you smell the tierê flower, and hear the crooning of the reef, and feel the rush of the warm trade wind, and the touch of the sun-baked sand, under the utu trees once more?)
So I landed in Papeete, and found myself in the South Sea Islands at last.
All that afternoon, like “Tommy” in Barrie’s Thrums, I kept saying to myself: “I’m here, I’m here!”... There was no mistake about Papeëte. It was not disappointing or disillusioning, it was only more lifelike than life, more fanciful than fancy, infinitely ahead of all past imaginations.
There were the waving palms of picture and story, laden with immense clusters of nuts; there were the wonderful bananas, with broad green leaves ten and twelve feet long, enshrouding bunches of fruit that were each a good load for a man; there were the greenhouse flowers of home—the costly rare stephanotis, tuberose, gardenia—climbing all over the verandahs of the houses, and filling half-cultivated front gardens with stacks and bouquets of bloom. And the dug-out canoes, made from a single hollowed log supported by an outrigger, flitting about the glassy lagoon like long-legged waterflies—and the gorgeous, flamboyant trees, ablaze with vermilion flowers, roofing over the grassy roadway in a series of gay triumphal arches—and above all, beyond all, the fiery-gold sunlight, spilling cataracts of flame through the thickest leafage, turning the flowers to white and red-hot coals, painting the shadows under the houses in waves of ink, and bleaching the dust to dazzling snow—how new, how vivid, how tropical it all was!
The native population was out in full force to see the steamer come in. So, indeed, were the white residents, in their freshest suits and smartest muslins, but they met with small attention from the little band of newcomers.
It was the Tahitians themselves who claimed all our interest—the famous race who had been so well liked by Captain Cook, who had seduced the men of the Bounty from allegiance to King George of England, a hundred and sixteen years ago, who were known all the world over as the most beautiful, the most amiable, and the most hospitable of all the South Sea Islanders.
Some of the passengers, I fancy, expected to see them coming down to the shore clad in necklaces and fringes of leaves, eager to trade with the newcomers and exchange large pearls and thick wedges of fine tortoiseshell for knives, cloth, and beads.... Most of us were better prepared, however, having heard a good deal about Papeëte, the Paris of the South Seas, from the people of the steamer, and having realised, on our own account, that a great deal of water might run under a bridge in a hundred years, even here in the South Pacific.
So the smartness of the native crowd surprised only a few, of whom I was not one. On the contrary, I was surprised to find that here, in this big island group, with its fortnightly steamer, its large “white” town, and its bureaucratic French Government, some kind of a national dress did really still exist. The Tahitian men were variously attired, some in full suits of white, others in a shirt and a brief cotton kilt. The women, however, all wore the same type of dress—a flowing nightdress of cotton or muslin, usually pink, pale green, or yellow, and a neat small sailor hat made in the islands, and commonly trimmed with a pretty wreath of shells. Most of them wore their hair loose, to show off its length and fineness—Tahitians have by far the most beautiful hair of any island race—and not a few were shoeless, though nearly all had smart parasols. The colour of the crowd was extremely various, for Tahiti has more half and quarter castes than full-blooded natives—in Papeete at all events. The darkest, however, were not more than tea-coloured, and in most instances the features were really good.
So much one gathered in the course of landing. Later on, during the few days I spent in an hotel waiting for the Cook Island steamer—for, alas! I was not staying in Tahiti—there was opportunity for something further in the way of observation. But———
But——— It happens to every one in Tahiti, why should I be ashamed of it? There was once a scientific man, who came to write a book, and took notes and notes and notes—for two days and a half. Then, he thought he would take a morning’s rest, and that is five years ago, and he has been resting ever since, and they say in the stores that he has not bought so much as a sheet of letter paper, or a penny bottle of ink, but that his credit for cigars and ice, and things that go with both very well, and for pyjamas to lounge about the back verandah in, and very cheap novels, and silk-grass hammocks, is nearly run out in Papeete. There was a Government official—perhaps it was two, or three, or sixty Government officials—who came to Papeete very full of energy and ability, and very much determined to work wonders in the sleepy little colony.... He, or they, is, or are, never to be seen awake before three in the afternoon, and his clerks have to type the signatures to his letters, because he will not trouble to write his name; and their people think they died years and years ago, because they have never carried out their intention of telling some one to find some one else to send a message to say they are alive. And there are a dozen or fourteen gentlemen who keep stores in Papeete, and if you go in to buy things in the morning or afternoon or evening, mayhap you will find the gentleman or his understudy asleep behind the counter, but mayhap you will find the door shut, and the proprietor away at breakfast, which takes him an hour, or lunch, which takes from two hours to three, or dinner, which occupies him from six till nine inclusive. After that, he may open again for a little while, or he may not.
Must I explain now what happened to me in Papeëte, or why I am not in a position to add anything to the scientific or ethnological, or geographic knowledge of the world, concerning the Society Islands in general?
A duty, obvious, immediate, and unperformed, is perhaps the best of all spices to a dish of sweet laziness. And there is not on earth’s round ball such a spot to be lazy in as pleasant Papeëte. One is never fairly awake. It is dreamland—and what a happy dream! The golden light on the still lagoon is surely the “fight that never was on sea nor land”—before we sailed in under the purple peaks of Orohena. The chanting of the coral reef far out at sea, unceasing, day and night, is the song the sirens sang to strong Ulysses, in the dream dreamed for all ages by the old Greek poet, long ago. The languorous voices of the island women, sweet and low as the “wind of the western sea”—the stillness of the island houses, where feet go bare upon the soundless floors, and music waxes and wanes so softly now and then in whispering songs or lightly swept piano keys, that it only blends with the long mysterious murmur of the wind in the rustling palm trees, to lull the senses into perfect rest—these, too, are of the world of dream.
Something out of dreamland, also, is the little hotel where most of the travellers stay—a rambling bungalow in a grass enclosure, overrun with vivid flowers and splendid leafage. That the proprietress should welcome her guests in a long lace and muslin nightgown-dress, her pretty brown feet bare, and her flowing wavy hair crowned with a wreath of perfumed gardenia and tuberose, seems quite a natural part of the dream; that the chamber-maids should be beautiful island girls clad in the same garb, and that they should sit in the drawing-room playing the piano and singing wild melancholy island songs, like the sighing of the surf on the shore, when they ought to be making beds or serving dinners, is also “in the picture.” That the Chinese cook should do elaborate Parisian cookery, and that the coffee and the curry and the bread (or at least the bread-fruit) should be picked in the garden as required, and that there should be no visible means of shutting the door of the bathroom, which is very public, until a carpenter is called in, and that L————, the charming proprietress, should explain with a charming smile: “Only the house been using it all this time,” to account completely for the deficiency—all this belongs unmistakably to the irresponsible dream-country. And when the warm tropic night drops down, and one goes wandering in the moonlight, to see for the first time the palm-tree plumes all glassy-silver under the radiant sky, flashing magically as they tremble in the faint night wind, it is more than ever the land of dream that is thus lit up in the soft clear dusk. So vivid is the moonlight, that one can even see the scarlet colour of the flamboyant flowers fallen in the dust, and distinguish the deep violet and hyacinthine hues of the far-off mountain peaks across the bay.... How, in such a place, can one waste the night in sleep?
It is certainly not like any sort of waking life one has hitherto known, to find that the market of Papeëte—one of the principal sights of the place—is held on Sunday mornings before sunrise. One might have supposed that such a supremely indolent people would scarcely choose the most inconvenient hour of all the twenty-four for a general gathering. But they do choose it, and the visitor who wants to see the market must choose it also.
L———— calls me, herself, at some unearthly hour, not much after four, and I get up and dress in the warm darkness. It is the hot season at present and the air, night and day, is very like a hot bath, and not far behind it in temperature. I have been loafing about the town during the previous day in rather thin shoes, and my feet have been almost blistered by the heat of the ground striking up through light soles, so that I cannot walk very far, and am glad to find the market close at hand.
L————, in a fresh muslin nightdress (she has something like fifty or sixty of them), acts as guide. She has put a new coronet of flowers in her hair, and before we reach the market she proceeds to dress me up Tahiti fashion, with, long necklaces of sweet white blossoms round my neck, falling all over my dress, and a heavy crown of closely woven gardenias on my head, instead of my hat, which she removes, and politely carries. She wants to pull my hair down as well, but in a temperature of eighty degrees the idea does not sound tempting, so I decline to follow Tahitian custom further. Besides, there is really no knowing where she would stop!
There is not yet a glimmer of daylight when we enter the market-place, and flaring lamps and torches cast huge flickering shadows all over the gay assembly. Fruit and fish for the most part are the wares—but such fish, and such fruit! Where one would look at home for white and grey turbot, pallid plaice, zinc-coloured herrings, here one may see the most gorgeous shapes of gold and scarlet and green; of iridescent rose, silver, orange; of blue, brilliant as a heap of tumbled sapphire, and pearl as bright as the lining of a shell. Tahiti is famous for its beautiful fish, and indeed these in the market look almost too poetically lovely to eat.
Then the fruit! bananas as big as cucumbers, as small as ladies’ fingers (after which, indeed, this little sugar-sweet, variety is named), dark red bananas, flavoured like a peach, large bloomy ones, tasting and looking like custard within; smooth yellow ones, like those exported to other countries, whither the daintier fruits will not safely go—pineapple in rough-skinned heaps (one learns soon in Tahiti how to eat a pineapple, and that is to peel it, cut it into largest possible lumps, eat the latter undiminished even if they make you speechless, and never, never, shoe the fruit)—oranges of several different kinds, custard-apples, rose-apples, paw-paws, melons, avocado pears, guavas, mangoes, and other fruits the name of which I have never heard—all lying together in masses under the lamplight, costing not as many halfpence to buy as at home they would cost shillings.
The native beauties are here in a merry crowd, intent quite as much upon enjoyment as on business. Scarcely one but wears a flower behind her ear—and if you have ever been in the South Seas, you will know what that pretty little signal means, but if you have not, why then I shall not tell you—and all are so wreathed, and crowned, and necklaced with woven blossoms, that the air is heavy with scent, and the market-place looks as though the transformation scene of a pantomine were just about to begin, with a full chorus of flower-decked nymphs appearing for the dance.
One exceedingly pretty girl, with a perfect cataract of black hair overflowing her pale green gown, and a pair of sparkling dark eyes that could never be matched outside the magic lines of Cancer and Capricorn, is making and frying pancakes with something fruity, nature unknown, inside them. She has half a dozen French officers about her, enjoying breakfast and flirtation at the same time. Another, who is selling a number of the oddest little parcels imaginable, made out of cut-up joints of bamboo, carefully sealed, is doing a good trade among the coloured and semi-coloured ladies. L———— says she is selling readymade sauces, to be eaten with fish or meat, and adds that she herself will show me what Tahitian sauces are like later on, because there is no one in the whole group fit to act as scullion to her in that important matter—or words to the same effect.
Strange-looking mountain men are here, dressed in shirt and kilt of cotton cloth, patterned in flowers and leaves as big as soup-plates. The former garment is a concession to Papeete—outside the town, the “pareo” or kilt alone forms the Tahitian full-dress suit. These men have come in to sell the “fei,” or wild banana, which is only found on the highest and most perilous of the mountain precipices. To get it, the Tahitian must climb where not even a goat would venture to go, and make his way back, having secured the fruit, carrying a bunch that is a heavy load, even on level ground. Many are the lives that have been lost gathering the “fei,” but the Tahitian, like all islanders, is something of a fatalist, and the death of one fruit gatherer never stops another from going a-hunting in the very same place next day.
There is something about the same “fei” that is worth noting. It is one of the standing dishes of the islands—a cooking banana, large, and well-flavoured when baked, but not so attractive on the whole as many of the other kinds. The Tahitian, however, ascribes to this variety a certain magic property, not unlike that of the fabled lotus. If you eat of the “fei,” he says, especially if you eat freely of it, you will fall under the spell. For ever, in its working, it binds you to Tahiti. You may go away, and without any intention of returning, say goodbye to the islands, and place many thousand miles of land and sea between yourself and sweet Tahiti, saying to yourself that you and Papeëte have no more to do with one another for ever.... Yet by-and-by—some day, one knows not when; it may be soon, or it may be late, but it will surely come—you will return to Tahiti. The spell of the fei will work, and draw you back again.
So the natives said, and I thought the fancy a pretty one, and wondered whether it had really any connection with the lotus myth, and then forgot all about it.
That is three years ago, and since those days I have travelled the whole world over, leaving Tahiti behind as one leaves a station passed long ago on a railway journey, upon a line that one never expects to traverse again. As I write, the snows of winter Britain lie thick outside my window, and a sea of Arctic coldness breaks in freezing green and grey upon a desolate shore. Nothing on earth seems farther away than-the warm blue waves, and flowers that never fade, and shining coral sands of Tahiti. But... there is a steamer running southward before long, and a great sunny city on the other side of the world where the island boats lie waiting at the quays. And one of those island boats, in a month or two, will carry a passenger back to Tahiti—a passenger who ate of the fei three years ago, and went away for ever, but on whom the spell of the magic fruit has worked—after all.
CHAPTER II
The History of Tahiti—Drink and the Native—In the Old Wild Days—The Simple and the Civilised Life—What an Island Town is like—The Lotos Eaters—Cocoanuts and Courtesy—A Feast of Fat Things—The Orgy on the Verandah—Schooners and Pearls—The Land of Tir-n’an-Oge.
ALTHOUGH I certainly did not use the few days of my stay in Tahiti to the best advantage—although I saw none of the public buildings of Papeëte, never set eyes on any of the officials of the place, and did not collect any statistics worth mentioning, I gathered a few crude facts of a useful kind, which are herewith offered as a sop to the reader, who must be informed and improved, or know the reason why. (If he would only go to Tahiti, that dear reader, whom, all travellers know so well and fear so much! if he would just spend a week lying on the coral beach, and strolling in the moonlight, and listening to native songs, and feeding fat on native dainties—he would never want to be informed of anything any more, and as to being improved... O Tahiti, loveliest and least conventional of the siren countries of the dear South Seas, can you lay your hand on your heart, and honestly declare you are improving?)
Tahiti was discovered, not by Captain Cook, as is rather commonly supposed, but by Captain Wallis of H.M.S. Dolphin, in 1767. Captain Wallis formally took possession of the group in the name of His Majesty King George III., and Captain Cook, in the course of his different visits to the islands, laid the foundations of all the civilisation they afterwards acquired. Nevertheless, the islands are French property to-day. There is nothing in the Pacific better worth owning than the Society group, more fertile, more beautiful, more healthy, richer in valuable tropical products—and the construction of the Panama Canal, an event which has been foreseen for several generations, will obviously add much to the importance of the islands. Because of these, and other excellent reasons, Great Britain, acting on the principles by which her colonial policy is commonly guided, allowed the Society Islands to slip gradually into the hands of a power better able than herself to appreciate their value, and the group, after thirty-seven years of “protection,” was finally taken possession of by France, in the year 1880. The native Queen, Pômare IV. (Pomare being a dynastic name like Cæsar, but, unlike the latter, applied to both sexes), was allowed to retain her state and possessions under the French protectorate. Her successor, King Pomare V., who succeeded in 1877 and died in 1891, only reigned for three years. After the formal annexation he retained his title of king, and much of his state, but the power was entirely in French hands. Prince Hinoe, his heir, who would in the ordinary course have occupied the throne, lives in a handsome European-built house near Papeete, and enjoys a good pension, but is otherwise not distinguished in any way from the ordinary Tahitian.
Under French rule, the islands have done fairly well. There were at first many regrettable disputes and troubles between opposing camps of missionaries, but these have long since been made up. Commerce is in rather a languishing state. The group exports copra, vanilla, pearl-shell, and fruit, but the trade with America was so much on the down-grade during the time of my visit, that steamers were leaving the port with empty holds. The natives are well treated under the present system; the liquor laws, however, are defective, and no Tahitian, apparently, has any difficulty in obtaining as much strong spirits as he wants and can pay for. The disastrous effects of such carelessness as this need no mention to the reader who knows anything of darkskinned races. For the benefit of the reader who does not, however, it may be remarked that all colonial administrators agree concerning the bad effects of intoxicants on coloured races of every kind. It matters not at what end or part of the scale of colour the man may be—whether he is a woolly-haired, baboon-jawed nigger from Central Africa, a grave, intelligent, educated Maori of New Zealand, or a gentle child-like native of Tahiti, barely café-au-lait as to colour—all the same, and all the time, spirits are sure to convert him, temporarily, into a raging beast, and, in the long run, to wipe out him and his kind altogether. It is not a question of temperance principles or the reverse, but merely a matter of common-sense policy, in dealing with races which have shown themselves unable to withstand the effects of the liquors that our hardier northern nations can use with comparative safety. One may lay it down as a general principle that nothing with a coloured skin on it can take, intoxicants in moderation—it is not at all, or all in all, with the “native” when it comes to strong drinks. Scientific folk would probably set down the comparative immunity of the white races to the protection that lies behind them in the shape of centuries of drinking ancestors. The coffee-coloured islander’s great-grandparents did not know whisky, just as they never experienced measles and other diseases, that do not usually kill the white, but almost always put an end to the “man and brother.” Therefore, the islander’s body has not, by inheritance, acquired those points of constitution which enable the white to resist whisky and measles, and other dangerous things; and when they touch him, he goes down at once. A parallel may be found in the case of opium, which the white man, broadly speaking, cannot take in moderation, although most of the yellow races can. Europeans who once acquire a liking for the effects of opium will generally die as miserable wrecks, in the course of a very few years. A Chinaman, under similar circumstances, may, and often does, live to a good old age, without taking any harm at all from his constant doses. His ancestors have been opium takers, the Englishman’s have not. It is the case of the islander and the spirits over again.
After which digression, one has some way to come back to the fact that the French Government does not prevent the Tahitian from drinking gin nearly so effectively as it should, and that, in consequence, the diminution of the native population receives a downward push that it does not in the least require. In the Fijis, British rule keeps spirits strictly away from all the natives, with the exception of the chiefs, and something, at least, is thereby done to slacken the decline that afflicts the people of almost every island in the Pacific. The Fijian chiefs, as a rule, drink heavily, and do not commonly live long, thus providing another argument in favour of restriction.
The population of Tahiti is indeed much less than it should be. Captain Cook’s estimates of native populations are now understood to have been mistaken in many cases, owing to the fact that he calculated the entire numbers from the density of occupation round the shores. As most Pacific islands are inhabited about the coasts alone, the interior being often unsuitable for cultivation, and too far removed from the fishing-grounds to suit an indolent race, it can easily be understood that serious errors would arise from such a method of estimate. The diminution, therefore, since ancient times, is not quite so alarming as the first writers on the Pacific—and, indeed, many who followed them—supposed it to be. If the sums worked out by the travellers who visited Honolulu in the sixties, or Tahiti a little later, had been correct, both of these important groups would long since have been empty of all native population. But the Hawaiian group has still a very fair number of darkskinned people, while Tahiti, including all its islands, had a population, according to the census of 1902, of over thirteen thousand, one-eighth of whom are said to be French, and a smaller number Chinese and other foreigners.
Still, it cannot be said that this is a large, or even a fair population for a group of islands covering 580 square miles, nor can it be denied that the numbers of the Tahitians are steadily on the decrease. The exact causes of the decline are disputed, as indeed they are in connection with every other coloured race in the Pacific. European diseases of a serious kind are extremely common in the group, and consumption also is frequent. These are two obvious causes. Less easily reckoned are the unnamed tendencies towards extinction that follow the track of the white man through the lands of primitive peoples, all over the world. There can be no doubt that the old life of the Pacific—feasting, fighting, making love, and making murder: dressing in a bunch of leaves, and living almost as completely without thought for the morrow as the twittering parrakeets in the mango trees—suited the constitution of the islander better than the life of to-day.
It may have been bad for his spiritual development, and it certainly was bad for any wandering white men who came, by necessity or choice, to visit his far-away fastnesses. But he lived and flourished in those bad days, whereas now he quietly and unostentatiously, and quite without any rancour or regret, dies.
Why? Old island residents will tell you that, even if every disease brought by the white man were rooted out to-morrow, the native would still diminish in numbers. He has done so in islands where the effects of European diseases were comparatively slight. He does so in New Zealand, where the Maori (the supposed ancestor of most of the island peoples) is petted, cherished, and doctored to an amazing extent by the ruling race, and yet persists in dying out, although he is not affected by consumption or other evils to any serious extent. There are undoubtedly other causes, and perhaps among them not the least is the fact that, for most Pacific races, life, with the coming of civilisation, has greatly lost its savour.
It used to be amazingly lively in Tahiti, in the wild old days. Then, the Tahitian did not know of white men’s luxuries—of tea and sugar and tinned stuffs, lamps and kerosene, hideous calico shirts and gaudy ties, muslin gowns and frilled petticoats for the women, “bits” to make patchwork quilts with, and beds to put the quilts on, and matchwood bungalows to put the beds in, and quart bottles of fiery gin to drink, and coloured silk handkerchiefs to put away on a shelf, and creaking shoes to lame oneself with on Sundays. Then, he did not let or sell his land to some one in order to get cash to buy these desirable things; nor did his womankind, for the same reason, adopt, almost as a national profession, a mode of life to which the conventionalities forbid me to give a name. Nor did the distractions of unlimited church-going turn away his mind from the main business of life, which was undoubtedly that of enjoyment. He had no money, and no goods, and did not want either. He had no religion (to speak of) and desired that still less. All he had to do was to secure a good time, and get up a fight now and then when things in general began to turn slow.
It must be said that the existence of the “Areoi,” a certain secret society of old Tahiti, went far to minimise the risk of dullness. The members formed a species of heathen “Hell-Fire Club,” and they cultivated every crime known to civilisation, and a few which civilisation has happily forgotten. Murder, theft, human sacrifices, cannibalism, were among their usual practices, and the domestic relationships of the Society (which was large and influential, and included both sexes) are said to have been open to some criticism. They were popular, however, for they studied music and the dance as fine arts, and gave free entertainments to every one who cared to come. They travelled from village to village, island to island, giving “shows” wherever they went, and winning welcome and favour everywhere by the brilliance and originality of their improprieties. They were as wicked as they knew how, and as amusing, and as devilish, and as dazzling.... How the young Tahitian lad, not yet tattooed, and considered of no importance, must have reverenced and envied them! how he must have imitated their pranks in the seclusion of the cocoanut groves, and hummed over their songs, and longed for the time when he himself should be big enough to run away from home, and go off with the delightful, demoniacal, fascinating Areois!
Then there was always a native king in Tahiti in those days, and a number of big native chiefs, each one of whom had his own little court, with all the exciting surroundings of a court which are never missing in any part of the world, from Saxe-Niemandhausen to Patagonia. And there were tribal fights from time to time, when property changed hands, and war-spears were reddened, and a man might hunt his enemy in the dusk, stealthy, soft-footed, with heart jumping in his breast, along the shadowy borders of the lagoon.... Murder and mischief and fighting and greed, pomp of savage courts and stir of savage ambitions, and the other world that nobody knew or cared about, shut off by a barrier of seas unexplored.... It was a life in which a man undoubtedly did live, a life that kept him quick until he was dead. Does the decline of Pacific races look less unaccountable now?
In these days, the Tahitian is undoubtedly improved. He never was a very “bad lot” all round, in spite of the Areois; but Civilisation, of course, had to take him in hand once it was known he was there, for Civilisation will not have loose ends or undusted corners in her house, if she can help it. So the people of Tahiti were discovered, and converted, and clothed, and taught, and they gave up being Areois, and worshipping heathen gods, and going about without shirts and skirts, and they went frequently to church, and supported their white pastors generously, and began to trade with the Europeans, so that the latter made much money.
They are quite happy and uncomplaining, and manage to have a reasonably good time in a quiet way, but they will die out, and nobody can prevent them. You see, they are rather bored, and when you are bored, the answer to the question, “Is life worth living?” is, at the least, debatable—to a Pacific Islander.
I have written of this at some length, because, mutatis mutandis, it applies to nearly all the island races.
It is not only the Tahitian who looks back with wistful eyes to the faded sunset of the bad old times, with all their savage gaudiness of scarlet blood and golden licence, and languishes in the chill pale dawn of the white man’s civilisation. It is the whole Pacific world, more or less. The Simple Life in the raw original is not, by many a long league, as simple and innocent as it is supposed to be, by those new and noisy apostles of a return to Nature, who have never got nearer to the things of the beginning than a week-end up the Thames—but, unsimple and uninnocent as it is, it suits the coloured man better than anything else. Would one, therefore, wish to put back the clock of time, re-establish heathenism and cannibalism over all the Pacific, and see Honolulu, Fiji, Samoa, with their towns and Government Houses, and shops and roads and plantations, leap back to the condition of the still uncivilised western islands, where no man’s life is safe, and the law of might is the only law that is known? Hardly. There is no answer to the problem, and no moral to be drawn from it either. But then, you do not draw morals in the South Seas—they are not plentiful enough.
The Society Islands—which were so named in compliment to the Royal Society—lie between 16° and 18° south latitude, and 148° and 158° west longitude. Tahiti itself is much the largest, the driveway round this island being about ninety miles long. Huaheine, Raiatea, Murea, Bora-Bora, and the small islands Taha’a and Maitea, are much less important. The only town of the group is Papeëte.
So much, for the serious-minded reader, already mentioned, who knows most things beforehand, and likes his information cut-and-dried. The commoner and more ignorant reader, I will assume, knows no more about Tahiti than I did before I went, and therefore will be glad of amplification.
Sixteen degrees only from the equator is hot—very hot at times—and does not allow of a really cool season, though the months between April and October are slightly less warm than the others, and at night one may sometimes need a blanket. Everything near the equator is a long way from England, and everything on the south side of the line is a very long way, and anything in the Pacific is so far off that it might almost as well be in another star. Tahiti, therefore, is quite, as the Irish say, “at the back of God-speed.”
Perhaps that is where much of its charm lies. There is a fascination in remoteness, hard to define, but not on that account less powerful. “So far away!” is a word-spell that has charmed many a sail across the seas, from the days of the seekers after the Golden Fleece till now.
Papeëte was the first of the island towns that I saw, and it is so typical an example of all, that one description may serve for many.
Imagine, then, a long, one-sided street, always known in every group as “the beach.” The reason is apparent—it really is a beach with houses attached, rather than a street with a shore close at hand. The stores—roomy, low, wood-built houses, largely composed of verandah—are strung loosely down the length of the street. Flamboyant trees, as large as English beeches, roof in the greater part of the long roadway with a cool canopy of green, spangled by bunches of magnificent scarlet flowers. Almost every house stands in a tangle of brilliant tropical foliage, and the side streets that run off landwards here and there, are more like Botanic Gardens with a few ornamental cottages let loose among them, than prosaic pieces of a town—so richly does the flood of riotous greenery foam up over low fence tops, and brim into unguarded drains and hollows, so gorgeously do the red and white and golden flowers wreathe tall verandah posts, and carpet ugly tin roofs with a kindly tapestry of leaf, and bloom. Foot to foot and hand to hand with Nature stands man, in these islands, let him but relax for a moment, and—there!—she has him over the line!... Leave Papeëte alone for a couple of years, and you would need an axe to find it, when you came back.
There are a number of hotels in Papeëte—mostly of an indifferent sort, and none too cheap—and there are several large cafés and restaurants, run on lines entirely Parisian, and a crowd of smaller ones, many owned, by Chinese, where the hard-up white may feed at a very small cost, pleasantly enough, if he does not ask too many questions about the origin and preparation of his food. There are three local newspapers, and a military band plays in the afternoons, and there are clubs of all kinds’ and not a little society, which—being society—is in its essence bound to be uninteresting and flat, even here in the many-coloured South Seas. But under all this, the native life flows on in its own way, and the Tahitian takes his pleasure after his immemorial fashion, as quietly and as lazily as he is allowed. I have spoken hitherto of only one side of the main street. The other, which gives directly on the sea, belongs to the Tahitian life of Tahiti. Here, a green slope of soft grass stretches down to the greener waters of the sparkling lagoon: delicate palms lean over the still sea-mirror, like beauties smiling into a glass; flamboyant and frangipani trees drop crimson and creamy blooms upon the grass; and, among the flowers, facing the sea and the ships and the dreamy green lagoon, lie the natives, old and young. They wear the lightest of cotton clothing, scarlet and rose and butter-cup yellow, and white scented flowers are twisted in their hair. Fruits of many colours, and roots and fish, lie beside them. They eat a good part of the day, and their dogs, sleeping blissfully in the shade at their feet, wake up and eat with them now and then. There is plenty for both—no one ever goes short of food in Tahiti, where the pinch of cold and hunger, and the burden of hard, unremitting, unholidayed work are alike unknown. Sometimes the natives wander away to the river that flows through the town, and take a bath in its cool waters; returning later to lounge, and laze, and suck fruit, and dream, on the shores of the lagoon again. The sound of the surf, droning all day long on the coral reef that bars the inner lake of unruffled green from the outer ocean of windy blue, seems to charm them into a soft half-sleep, through which, with open but unseeing eyes, they watch the far-off creaming of the breakers in the sun, and the flutter of huge velvet butterflies among the flowers, and the brown canoes gliding like water-beetles about the tall-masted schooners in the harbour. With sunset comes a cooling of the heated air, and glowworm lights begin to twinkle through the translucent red walls of the little native houses scattered here and there. It will soon be dark now: after dark, there will be dancing and singing in the house; later, the sleeping mats will be laid out, and with the moon and the stars glimmering in through the walls upon their still brown faces, the Tahitians will sleep.... So, in the sunset, with
Dark faces, pale against the rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters
wander home.
Only a flash in the long cinematograph of the wonderful track that circles the globe, is Tahiti. I cannot tell of Murea, the marvellous island that lies opposite Papeete, seven and a half miles away, because, during the few days I spent in Tahiti, no boat was going there, and none could be induced to go. So I had to look at Murea’s splintered towers and spiring pinnacles, and wonderful purple goblin palaces, floating high among the clouds, from the tantalising distance of Papeëte harbour. Nor could I join some steamer friends in driving round the ninety-mile roadway, as we had intended—stopping in native towns, and seeing something of the inner life of the island—because no one in the capital had any teams for hire just then, and nobody knew when there would be any. Some of us went up the river to see Pierre Loti’s bathing pool, and came back rather disappointed, and others drove out to the tomb of Pômare V., three miles from the town. It was a pile of concrete and stone, modelled after European fashions, and not especially interesting.
One of the ladies of the party wandered off with me down the beach, neither of us being interested in the resting-place of the defunct Pomare—and here we found plenty of food for mind and body both. For was not this a pandanus, or screw-pine, which we had read about, overhanging the lagoon, with the quaintest mops of palmy foliage, set on long broom-handles of boughs, and great fruits like pineapples hanging among the leaves, and yellow and scarlet kernels lying thick on the sand below—the tree itself perched up on tall bare wooden stilts formed by the roots, and looking more like something from a comic scene in a pantomime, than a real live piece of vegetation growing on an actual shore? And were not these cocoanuts that lay all about the beach under the leaning palms—nuts such as we had never seen before, big as a horse’s head, and smooth green as to outside, but nuts all the same?
A native slipped silently from among the thick trees beside us—a bronze-skinned youth of eighteen or nineteen, dressed only in a light pareo or kilt of blue and white cotton. He stood with hands lightly crossed on his breast, looking at us with the expression of infinite kindliness and good-nature that is so characteristic of the Tahitian race. We signed to him that we wanted to drink, and he smiled comprehendingly, shook his head at the nuts on the ground, and lightly sprang on to the bole of the palm beside us, which slanted a little towards the sea. Up the trunk of that tree, which inclined so slightly that one would not have thought a squirrel could have kept its footing there, walked our native friend, holding on with his feet and hands, and going as easily as a sailor on a Jacob’s ladder. Arrived in the crown some seventy feet above, he threw down two or three nuts, and then descended and husked them for us.
Husking a cocoanut is one of the simplest-looking operations in the world, but I have not yet seen the white man who could do it effectively, though every native is apparently born with the trick. A stick is sharply pointed at both ends, and one end is firmly set in the ground. The nut is now taken in the hands, and struck with a hitting and tearing movement combined, on the point of the stick, so as to split the thick, intensely tough covering of dense coir fibre that protects the nut, and rip the latter out. It comes forth white as ivory, about the same shape and size as the brown old nuts that come by ship to England, but much younger and more brittle, for only the smallest of the old nuts, which are not wanted in the islands for copra-making, are generally exported. A large knife is used to crack the top of the nut all round, like an egg-shell, and the drink is ready, a draught of pure water, slightly sweet and just a little aerated, if the nut has been plucked at the right stage. There is no pleasanter or more refreshing draught in the world, and it has not the least likeness to the “milk” contained in the cocoanuts of commerce. No native would drink old nuts such as the latter, for fear of illness, as they are considered both unpleasant and unwholesome. Only half-grown nuts are used for drinking, and even these will sometimes hold a couple of pints of liquid. The water of the young cocoanut is food and drink in one, having much nourishing matter held in solution. On many a long day of hot and weary travel, during the years that followed, I had cause to bless the refreshing and restoring powers of heaven’s best gift to man in the tropics, the never-failing cocoanut.
I will not insult the reader by telling him all the uses to which the tree and its various products are put, because those are among the things we have all learned at our first preparatory school; how the natives in the cocoanut countries make hats and mats and houses, and silver fish-servers and brocaded dressing-gowns, and glacé kid boots with fourteen buttons (I think the list used to run somewhat after that fashion—it is the spirit if not the letter)—all out of the simple cocoanut tree; a piece of knowledge which, somehow or other, used to make us feel vaguely virtuous and deserving, as if we had done it all ourselves....
But all this time the youth is standing like a smiling bronze statue, holding the great ivory cup in his hands, and waiting for us to drink. We do so in turn, Ganymede carefully supporting the cup in his upcurved hands, and tilting it with a fine regard for our needs, as the water drops down in the nut like the tide on a sandy shore when the moon calls back the sea.
Then we take out purses, and want to pay Ganymede; but he will not be paid, until it becomes plain to him that the greatest politeness lies in yielding. He takes our franc, and disappears among the trees, to return no more. But in a minute, out from the bush comes running the oddest little figure, a very old, grey-bearded man, very gaily dressed in a green shirt and a lilac pareo, and laden very heavily with ripe pineapples. We guess him to be Ganymede’s father, and see that our guess was right, when he drops the whole heap of fruit upon the ground at our feet, smiling and bowing and murmuring incomprehensively over it, and then begins to vanish like his son.
“Here—stop!” calls my companion. “We don’t want to take your fruit without buying it. Come back, please, come back!”
The little old-gentleman trots back on his thin bare legs, recalled more by the tone than the words, which he obviously does not understand, and takes a hand of each of us in his own brown fingers. He shakes hands with us gently and firmly, shaking his head negatively at the same time, and then, like the romantic youths of Early Victorian novels, “turns, and is immediately lost to view in the surrounding forest,” carrying the honours of war, indubitably, with himself.
“Well, they are real generous!” declares my American companion, as we go back to the tomb. “By the way, Miss G————, I guess you’d better not sit down on that grass to wait for the rest. I wouldn’t, if I was you.”
“Why not? it’s as dry as dust.”
“Because the natives say it’s somehow or other—they didn’t, explain how—infected with leprosy, and I guess they ought to know; there’s plenty of it all over the Pacific—— I rather thought that would hit you where you lived.”
It did. I got up as quickly as a grasshopper in a hurry. Afterwards, on a leper island thousands of miles away from Tahiti—— But that belongs to another place.
L————, the ever-amiable, our half-caste landlady at the little bungalow hotel, all overgrown with bougainvillea and stephanotis, was grieved because we had seen nothing in the way of “sights,” and declared her intention of giving a native dinner for us.
It was not very native, but it was very amusing. It took place in the verandah of the hotel, under a galaxy of Chinese lanterns, with an admiring audience of natives crowding the whole roadway outside, and climbing up the trees to look at us. This was principally because the word had gone forth in Papeëte (which owns the finest gossip-market in the South Seas) that the English and American visitors were going to appear in native dress, and nobody knew quite how far they meant to go—there being two or three sorts of costume which pass under that classification.
The variety which we selected, however, was not very sensational. The ladies borrowed from L————‘s inexhaustible store, draped themselves in one or other of her flowing nightdress robes, let loose their hair, and crowned themselves with twisted Tahitian corqnets of gardenia and tuberose. A scarlet flower behind each ear completed the dress, and drew forth delighted squeaks from the handmaidens of the hotel, and digs in the ribs from L————, who was nearly out of her mind with excitement and enjoyment. Shoes were retained, contrary to L————‘s entreaties, but corsets she would not permit, nor would she allow a hairpin or hair-ribbon among the party. The men guests wore white drill suits with a native pareo, scarlet or yellow, tied round the waist. It was a gay-looking party, on the whole, and the populace of Tahiti seemed to enjoy the sight.
The dinner was served at a table, but most of the dishes were on green leaves instead of plates, and L———— begged us, almost with tears in her eyes, to eat the native dainties with our fingers, as they tasted better that way. Little gold-fish, baked and served with cocoanut sauce, were among the items on the menu: sucking-pig, cooked in a hole in the ground, fat little river crayfish, breadfruit baked and served hot, with (I regret to say) European butter, native puddings made of banana and breadfruit, and the famous raw fish. Some of the guests would not touch the latter, but the rest of us thought it no worse than raw oysters, and sampled it, with much enjoyment. I give the receipt, for the benefit of any one who may care to try it. Take any good white fish, cut it up into pieces about two inches long, and place the latter, raw, in lime-juice squeezed from fresh limes, or lemon-juice, if limes are not to be had. Let the fish steep for half a day, and serve it cold, with cocoanut sauce, the receipt for which is as follows:—Grate down the meat of a large cocoanut, and pour a small cup of sea-water over it. Leave it for three or four hours, and then strain several times through muslin (the fine brown fibre off young cocoanut shoots is a correct material, but the reader may not have a cocoanut in his back garden). The water should at last come out as thick and opaque as cream.
This is the true “milk of the cocoanut” about which one so often hears. It is of immemorial antiquity in the South Seas.
Captain Cook mentions it in his Voyages, and describes the cocoanut shells full of it, that were given to every man at a feast, in which to dip his food. When used as a sauce for meat or fish, one or two fresh red peppers from the nearest pepper bush are cut up and put in. Chili pepper, judiciously used, is a fair substitute for the latter. The sauce is also used for many native puddings and sweet dishes, in which case it is made with fresh water and the pepper is left out. As a fish sauce it is unsurpassed, and may be recommended to gourmands as a new sensation. It should be served in bowls of brown cocoanut shell.
Breadfruit some of us tasted for the first time at this dinner. It was universally liked, though a few maintained that it resembled potato more than bread. I found it very like the latter, with a suggestion of floury cracknel biscuit. It is most satisfying and nourishing. One never, in island travels, feels the want of fresh bread when breadfruit is available. L———— had cooked it native fashion, peeled and baked on hot stones in a pit in the ground. It is a good-sized fruit in its natural state, about as large as a medium hothouse melon, and bright green in colour. The skin is divided into lizard-like lozenges, and the surface is very rough. Whether it is indigenous to the islands or not, I cannot say, but it was there when Cook came, and it grows wild very freely, providing an immense store of natural food.
Taro we also had, baked native style. It is a plant in use over almost all the Pacific, very easily cultivated and rapidly producing immense bluish-coloured roots, which look like mottled soap when cooked and served. It is extremely dense and heavy, but pleasant to most tastes. The white taro is a less common kind, somewhat lighter.
The mangoes that were served with the meal (among many other fruits) were of a variety that is generally supposed to be the finest in the world. No mango is so large, so sweet, or so fine in grain, as the mango of Tahiti, and none has less of the turpentine flavour that is so much disliked by newcomers to tropical countries. It is a commonplace of the islands that a mango can only be eaten with comfort in a bath, and many of the guests that evening would not have been sorry for a chance to put the precept into practice, after struggling with one or two mangoes, which were, of course, too solid to be sucked, and much too juicy and sticky not to smear the hands and the face of the consumers disastrously.
L———— gave us many French dishes with our native dinner, to suit all tastes, and gratify her own love of fine cookery, but these would be of little interest to recount. I cannot forget, however, how this true artiste of the kitchen described the menu she had planned, on the morning of the entertainment. She sat down beside me on a sofa to tell the wondrous tale, and, as she recited dish after dish, her voice rose higher and higher, and her great black eyes burned, and she seized me by the arm and almost hugged me in her excitement. When she came to the savouries, tears of genuine emotion rose in her eyes, and at the end of the whole long list, her feelings overcame her like a flood, and, gasping out—“Beignets d’ananas à la Papeete; glaces. Vénus, en Cythère; fromage——” she cast herself bodily into my arms and sobbed with delight. She was fully fifteen stone, and the weather was exceedingly warm, but I admired her artistic fervour too much to tell her to sit up, and stop crying over my clean muslin (as I should have liked to do), because it seemed to me that L———— was really a true artiste in her own way, and almost worthy to rank, in the history of the kitchen, with Vatel the immortal, who fell upon his sword and died, because the fish was late for the royal dinner.
Of the other evening, when half a dozen guests of mixed nationalities began, through a temptation of the devil, to talk politics at ten o’clock on the verandah—of the fur that, metaphorically speaking, commenced to fly when the American cast the Irish question into the fray, and the Englishman vilified Erin, and the Irishwoman, following the historical precedent, called the Frenchwoman to her aid, and the latter in the prettiest manner in the world, got up and closed her two small hands round the throat of John Bull, and choked him into silence—it would not be necessary to tell, had not the sequel been disastrous to the fair name of our steamship party in Papeete. For a big banana spider, as big in the body as half a crown, and nearly as hard, came suddenly out from the stephanotis boughs, and, like a famous ancestor, “sat down beside” a lady of the party. This caused the politicians to rush to the aid of the lady, who had of course mounted a chair and begun to scream. The spider proved extremely difficult to kill, and had to be battered with the legs of chairs for some time before he yielded up the ghost—one guest, who found an empty whisky bottle, and flattened the creature out with it, carrying off the honours of the fray. After which excitement, we all felt ready for bed, and went.
“And in the morning, behold” the kindly L———— smiling upon her guests, and remarking: “Dat was a real big drunk you all having on the veràndah, after I gone to bed!”
“Good heavens, L————!” exclaims Mrs. New England, pale with horror, “what do you mean?”
“Surely, Mrs. L————, you do not suppose for an instant any of our party were—I can hardly say it!” expostulates a delicate-looking minister from the Southern States, here for his lungs, who was very prominent last night in arguing Ireland’s right to “secede” if she liked.
“That’s a good one, I must say,” remarks John Bull, rather indignantly.
But L———— only smiles on. She is always smiling.
“Dat don’t go, Mr. —————” she says pleasantly. “I couldn’t sleep last night, for the way you all kicking up, and the girl, she say you fighting. Madame ————— she trying to kill Mr. Bull, all the gentlemen smashing the leg of the chairs, the lady scream—and dis mornin’, I findin’ a large whisky bottle, all drunk up.”
I am privately choking with laughter in a corner, but I cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs. New England, who really looks as if about to faint.
“I don’ mind!” declares L———— delightedly. “Why, I been thinking all dis time you haven’t been enjoyin’ yourself at all. I like every one here they having a real good time. Every one,” she smiles—and melts away into the soft gloom of the drawing-room, where she sits down, and begins to play softly thrumming, strangely intoxicating Tahitian dance music on the piano.
“Elle est impayable!” says the Frenchwoman, shrugging her shoulders. “From all I hear of Tahiti, my dear friends, I think you shall find yourselves without a chiffon of character to-morrow.... But courage! it is a thing here the most superfluous.”
Madame was a true prophet, I have reason to know; for many months after, the story of the orgy, held on L————‘s verandah by the English and French and American ladies and gentlemen, reached me in a remote corner of the Pacific, as “the latest from Papeete.” What I wanted to know, and what I never shall know, for my boat came in next day, and took me away to Raratonga—was whether the minister from the South eventually died of the shock or not. I do not want to know about the lady from New England, because I am quite certain she did—as certain as I am that I should have, myself, and did not.
Of the prospects in Tahiti for settlers I cannot say much. It was said, while I was in Papeete, that there was practically no money in the place, and the traders, like the Scilly Island washerfolk of well-known fame, merely existed by trading with each other. This may have been an exaggeration, or a temporary state of depression. The vanilla trade, owing to a newly invented chemical substitute, was not doing well, but judging by what I saw next year in Fiji, the market must have recovered. The climate of Tahiti is matchless for vanilla growing, and land is not very difficult to get.
Quite a number of small schooners seemed to be engaged in the pearling trade with the Paumotus—a group of islands covering over a thousand miles of sea, and including some of the richest pearl beds in the world—(French property). I never coveted anything more than I coveted those dainty little vessels. Built in San Francisco, where people know how to build schooners, they were finished like yachts, and their snowy spread of cotton-cloth canvas, when they put out to sea, and their graceful bird-like lines, would have delighted the soul of Clarke Russell. One, a thirty-ton vessel, with the neatest little saloon in the world, fitted with shelves for trading; and a captain’s cabin like a miniature finer stateroom, and a toy-like galley forward, with a battery of shining saucepans, and a spotless stove—snowy paint on hull and deckhouses, lightened with fines of turquoise blue—splendid spiring masts, varnished till they shone—cool white awning over the poop, and sparkling brasses about the compass and the wheel, was so completely a craft after my own heart that I longed to run away with her, or take her off in my trunk to play with—she seemed quite small enough, though her “beat” covered many thousand miles of sea. Poor little Maid of the Islands! Her bones are bleaching on a coral reef among the perilous pearl atolls, this two years past, and her captain—the cheerful, trim, goodnatured X————, who could squeeze more knots an hour out of his little craft than any other master in the port save one, and could tell more lies about the Pacific in half an hour, than any one from Chili to New Guinea—of his bones are coral made, down where the giant clam swings his cruel valves together on wandering fish or streaming weed, or limb of luckless diver, and where the dark tentacles of the great Polynesian devil-fish
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
The pitcher that goes to the well, and the schooner that goes to the pearl islands, are apt to meet with the same fate, in time. Nevertheless, tales about the Paumotus are many, and interesting enough to attract adventurers from far, if they were known. How the rumour of a big pearl gets out; how a schooner sets forth to run down the game, pursues it through shifting report after report, from native exaggeration to native denial, perhaps for months; how it is found at last, and triumphantly secured for a price not a tenth its worth; how one shipload of shell, bought on speculation, will have a fortune in the first handful, and the next will yield no more than the value of the shell itself—this, and much else, make good hearing.
“Look at that pearl,” said a schooner captain to me one day, showing me a little globe of light the size of a pea, and as round as a marble. “I hunted that for a year, off and on. The native that had it lived way off from anywhere, but he knew a thing or two, and he wouldn’t part. I offered him goods, I offered him gin, I offered him twenty pounds cash, but it was all no go. How d’you think I got it at last? Well, I’ll tell you. I went up to his island with the twenty pounds in a sack, all in small silver, and when I came into his house, I poured it all out in a heap on the mats. ‘Ai, ai, ai!’ he says, and drops down on his knees in front of it—it looked like a fortune to him. ‘Will you sell now?’ says I, and by Jove, he did, and I carried it off with me. Worth? Can’t say yet, but it’ll run well into three figures.”
The pearling in the French islands is strictly preserved, and the terms on which it is obtainable are not known to me. Poaching is a crime not by any means unheard of.
A glance at the map, and the extent of the Paumotu group, will explain better than words why the policing of the pearl bed must necessarily be incomplete.
The steamer came in in due course, and carried me away to the Cook Islands. Huaheine and Raiatea, in the Society group, were called at on the way, but Bora-Bora was left out, as it is not a regular port of call. I am glad I did not land on Bora-Bora, and I never shall, if I can help it. No place in the world could be so like a fairy dream as Bora-Bora looked in the distance. It was literally a castle in the air; battlements and turrets, built of vaporous blue clouds, springing steep and impregnable from the diamond-dusted sea to the violet vault of heaven. Fairy princesses lived there, one could not but know; dragons lurked in the dark caves low down on the shore, and “magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas,” looked down from those far blue pinnacles.
Perhaps there is a village on Bora-Bora, with a dozen traders, and an ugly concrete house or two, tin-roofed, defacing the beauty of the palm-woven native homes, and a whitewashed church with European windows, and a school where the pretty native girls are taught to plait back their flowing hair, and lay aside their scented wreaths of jessamine and orange-blossom.
But if all these things are there, at least I do not know it, and Bora-Bora can still remain to me my island of Tir-na’n-Oge—the fabled country which the mariners of ancient Ireland sought through long ages of wandering, and only saw upon the far horizon, never, through all the years, setting foot upon the strand that they knew to be the fairest in the world. If they had ever indeed landed there.... But it is best for all of us to see our Tir-na’n-Oge only in the far away.
Le seul rêve, intéresse.
Vivre sans rêve, qu’est-ce?
Moi, j’aime la Princesse
Lointaine.
CHAPTER III
Is It the Loveliest?—How they deal with the Beachcomber——Cockroaches and Local Colour—The Robinson Crusoe-Steamer—Emigrating to the South Seas—The Lands of Plenty—How to get an Island.
EVERY ONE has seen Raratonga, though few travellers have looked on it with their own mortal eyes.
Close your eyelids, and picture to yourself a South Sea Island, of the kind that you used to imagine on holiday afternoons long ago, when you wandered off down to the shore alone, to sit in a cave and look seaward, and fancy yourself Crusoe or Selkirk, and think the “long, long thoughts” of youth. Dagger-shaped peaks, of splendid purple and gorgeous green, set in a sky of flaming sapphire—sheer grey precipices, veiled with dropping wreaths of flowery vine and creeper—gossamer shreds of cloud, garlanding untrodden heights, high above an ocean of stainless blue—shadowy gorges, sweeping shoreward from the unseen heart of the hills—white foam breaking upon white sand on the beach, and sparkling sails afloat in the bay—is not this the picture that wanders ever among the gleams and glooms that dart across the schoolboy’s brain?
It is not very like the average South Sea Island on the whole—but it is a faithful portrait of Raratonga, the jewel of the Southern Seas.
Nothing is more hotly disputed than the claims of the many beautiful islands among the numberless groups of the Pacific to the crown of supremest loveliness. Tahiti is awarded the apple of Paris by many, Honolulu by a few, Samoa by all who have been there and nowhere else. The few who have seen the quaint loveliness of Manahiki, or Humphrey Island, uphold its claims among the highest, and for myself, I have never been quite certain whether the low atoll islands are not more lovely than all else, because of their matchless colouring. But, if one pins one’s faith to the high islands, the accepted type of Pacific loveliness, there is nothing more beautiful between ’Frisco and Sydney, Yokohama and Cape Horn, than Raratonga, chief island of the Cook archipelago.
These islands lie some sixteen hundred miles north-east of New Zealand, and about six hundred miles to the westward of Tahiti. They are eight in number, seven inhabited, and one uninhabited, and cover about a hundred and sixty miles of sea. The largest, Atiu, is about thirty miles round, Raratonga, which is the principal island, containing the seat of government and the only “white” town, is twenty miles in circumference.
The whole group, as well as a number of outlying islands as much as six and seven hundred miles away, is under the guardianship of the Resident Commissioner appointed by New Zealand, to which colony the islands were annexed in 1900. The government, as administered by Colonel Gudgeon, a soldier who won much distinction in the days of the New Zealand Maori wars, is all that could be desired. The beachcomber element, which is so unpleasantly in evidence in other groups, has been sternly discouraged in the Cook Islands, the Commissioner having the right to deport any one whose presence seems undesirable to the cause of the general good. It is a right not infrequently used. During my stay in the island, two doubtful characters, recently come, were suspected of having committed a robbery that took place in the town. There was practically no one else on the island who could have done the deed, or would—but direct evidence connecting the strangers with the crime, was not to be had. Under these circumstances, the Commissioner simply deported the men by the next steamer, giving no reason beyond the fact that they were without means of support. There were no more thefts. The colonel might, in the same manner, have ordered myself away by the next steamer, and compelled it to carry me to New Zealand, if he had had reason to suppose that I was likely to disturb the peace of the island in any way, or incite it to violence or crime. The doctor—also a Government official—was empowered to regulate the amount of liquor consumed by any resident, if it appeared to exceed the permitted amount—two bottles of spirits a week. Under these circumstances, one would expect Raratonga to be a little Arcadia of innocence and virtue. If it was not quite that, it was, and is, a credit to British Colonial rule, in all things essential.
Before the annexation, the government was chiefly in the hands of the Protestant missionaries, who, with the best intentions in the world, carried things decidedly too far in the way of grandmotherly laws. Even white men were forbidden to be out of doors after eight o’clock in the evening, on pain of a heavy fine, and the offences for which the natives were fined would be incredible, were they not recorded in the Governmental reports of New Zealand.
In Raratonga of the older days (not yet ten years past) a native who walked at dusk along the road with his sweetheart, his arm round her waist after the manner of sweethearts all the world over, was obliged to carry a burning torch in his hand, and was fined if he let it go out. If he was found weeping over the grave of a woman to whom he was not related (surely the strangest crime in the world) he was again brought up and fined. These are only samples of the vagaries of irresponsible missionary rule, but they go far to prove that spiritual and temporal legislation are better kept apart.
A Government accommodation house had been planned, but not built, when I visited Raratonga, so I arranged, on landing, to take an unused house by the week, and “do for” myself, as there seemed no other way of living. Scarcely had I taken possession of my quarters, however, when the residents came down to call, and invite me to stay in their house. I did not know any of them, and they did not know me, but that did not matter—we were not in chilly England, where a whole country-side must discuss your personal history, family connections, probable income, and religious views, for a good six months, before deciding whether you are likely to be an acquisition or not, and calling accordingly. I began to understand, now, the meaning of the term “colonial hospitality,” which had formerly fallen on uncomprehending ears. And when I was settled down that evening in the most delightful of bungalow houses, with a charming host and hostess, and a pretty daughter, all doing their best to make me feel at home, I realised that I was about to see something of the true island life at last.
It began rather sooner than I could have wished. When my new friends had gone to bed, and left me sitting up alone in the hall to write letters for the morning’s mail, the local colour commenced to lay itself on somewhat more rapidly and thickly than I desired. I am not particularly nervous about insects, but it is trying, when one is quite new to the tropics, to see a horde of cockroaches as large as mice, with fearsome waving horns, suddenly appear from nowhere, and proceed to overrun the walls and floor, with a hideous ticking noise. And when one has steeled oneself to endure this horrid spectacle, it is still more trying to be shocked by the silent irruption of dozens of brown hairy hunting-spiders, each big enough to straddle over a saucer, which dart about the walls on their eight agile legs, and slay and eat the beetles, crunching audibly in the silence of the night.... Truly, it was like a waking nightmare.
Those cockroaches! What I suffered from them, during the year or two of island travel that followed! How they spoiled my tea, and ate my dresses (or parts of them), and flew into my hair of moonlight nights, and climbed into my berth on shipboard! It was on a liner that shall be nameless, very early in the course of my wanderings, that I first discovered the tendency of the cockroach to share the voyager’s couch unasked, and never again did I know unvexed and trustful sleep aboard a tropic ship. It was a moonlight night, and I was lying looking peacefully at the brilliantly silvered circle of my port, when suddenly a horrid head, with waving feelers, lifted itself over the edge of my berth and stared me coldly in the face. I hit out, like the virtuous hero in a novel, and struck it straight between the eyes, and it dropped to the floor with a dull sickening thud, and lay there very still. I thought gloatingly of how the blood would trickle out under my door in the morning in a slow hideous stream, and how the stewardess, bringing my early tea, would start and stop, and say in an awestruck tone that one that night had met his doom—and so thinking, I fell asleep.
I woke, with one cockroach in my hair, chewing a plait, and another nibbling my heel. I got up and looked round. It was then that I wished I had never come away from home, and that, since I had come, my sex forbade me to go and berth in the hold. I was convinced that, if I could have done so, I should have had a quiet night, because the hold is the part of a ship where the cockroaches come from, and they had all come—they were on the floor of my cabin, and sitting about the quilt.
The hideous battle raged all night, and in the morning I asked one of the mates for an axe, to help me through the coming renewal of hostilities. He recommended boracic acid instead, and I may record, for the benefit of other travellers, that I really found it of some use.
To find out, as far as possible, what were the prospects for settlers in some of the principal Pacific groups, was the main object of my journey to the Islands. It had always seemed to me that the practical side of Pacific life received singularly little attention, in most books of travel. One could never find out how a living was to be made in the island world, what the cost of housekeeping might be, what sort of society might be expected, whether the climates were healthy, and so forth—matters prosaic enough, but often of more interest to readers than the scenic descriptions and historical essays that run naturally from the pen of any South Sea traveller.
Certainly, the romantic and picturesque side of the islands is so obvious that it takes some determination, and a good deal of actual hard work, to obtain any other impressions whatever. But white human beings, even in the islands, cannot live on romance alone, and many people, in Britain and elsewhere, are always anxious to know how the delightful dream of living in the South Seas may be realised. Practical details about island life, therefore, will take up the most of the present chapter, and readers who prefer the lighter and more romantic vein, must turn the pages a little further on. .
The number of those who wish to settle in the Pacific is by no means small.
The Pacific Ocean has always had a special interest for the English, from the days of Drake s daring circumnavigation, through the times of Captain Cook and the somewhat misunderstood Bligh, of the Bounty, down to the dawn of the twentieth century. The very name of the South Seas reeks of adventure and romance. Every boy at school has dreams of coral islands and rakish schooners, sharks, and pearls; most men retain a shamefaced fancy for stories of peril and adventure in that magical South Sea world, of whose charm and beauty every one has heard, although very few are fortunate enough to see it with their own bodily eyes. For the Pacific Islands are, both in point of time and distance, about the remotest spots on the surface of the globe, and they are also among the most costly for the ordinary traveller to reach. Thus, for the most part, the South Seas dream, which so many hot-blooded young Saxons cherish, remains a dream only. The youth who has a fancy for Canadian farming life, or for stock-raising in Australasia, may gratify his desire with the full approval of parents and guardians in private life, and of Empire-builders in high places. But the British possessions in the South Seas—and what extensive possession they are let Colonial maps prove—may cry out for settlers from the rainy season to the dry, and round again to the rainy season once more, without attracting a single colonist of the right kind.
What is the reason of this? Where is the broken link? The British Pacific Islands need settlers; young Britons at home are only too ready to adventure themselves. Why do they not? There are several reasons. The first, perhaps, is that neither party can hear the other. In England few possess any information about the South Sea Islands. In the Pacific the white residents (almost all New Zealand traders and Government officials) are possessed with an idea that only wastrels of the worst kind drift out from England to the South Seas, and that nothing better is to be looked for. The result is that at the present date young Englishmen by the hundred are losing their small capital as “pupils” on Canadian farms, or are starving on the roads in South Africa, while all the time the South Sea Islands hold out hands of peace and plenty, begging humbly for a respectable white population. The brown races are dying out with fearful rapidity; at their best they never touched the limitless capacities of the golden Pacific soil. Its richness has always seemed to the original inhabitants an excellent reason for abstaining from cultivation. When the earth produced of itself everything that was necessary for comfort, why trouble to work it? Now, however, when so many groups of fertile islands have fallen into the hands of more progressive nations, things are changed. The white man can live happily and healthily in the Pacific; he can obtain a good return for a small capital at the best, and at the worst cannot possibly suffer from either cold or hunger, since neither exists in the South Seas. He can lease or buy land from the natives at slight cost, work it with small labour, and sell the product to a sure market. Honesty, sobriety, and industry repay their possessor as almost nowhere else in the world. Yet, with all this, the white settler in the Pacific Islands is generally of a more or less undesirable kind.
The “beachcomber” white, without friends, means, or character; the “remittance man,” paid to keep as far away from home as possible; the travelling ne’er-do-well, with a taste for novelties in dissipation, and a fancy for being outside the limit of Press and post—all these are familiar figures in the Pacific. Kipling’s Lost Legion musters there by the score; the living ghosts of men whose memorial tablets are blinking white on the walls of English country churches, walk by daylight along the coral beaches. Only the steady man, the young energetic man with a future and without a past, the man who can get on without a three-weekly spree of the most torrid kind, commonly keeps away. And these are just the men that the “Islands” want. Local trading interest, religious and otherwise, often does its best to keep them from coming, through a natural, if scarcely praiseworthy, desire to retain personal hold of everything worth holding. The Governmental party of every group desires the respectable settler with a little capital, and expresses its desire, as a rule, in gentle wails delivered through Governmental reports—a method about as effective as putting one’s head into a cupboard to hail a ’bus in the street. The Press does not recognise the existence of any habitable land in the Pacific, outside Honolulu and Samoa. So the dead lock continues.
I can see the Left Behind in the office raise his head at this, and look through the muddy panes of the counting-house window, or across the piles of summer goods on the shop counters, out beyond the clanging street, and right through the whole round world to the far-away Pacific lands. He wants to get away so very badly, that poor Left Behind, and he does not quite see his way to do it, because every one discourages him if he hints at the subject, and he does not know how one could make a living, out in those fairy lands that he wishes so much to see. Well, I am on his side in this matter. If it is a crime to long for a glimpse of the wonderful island world, to ache for a life spent under the free winds of heaven, and a chance of the danger, adventure, and excitement, which are as strong wine to the heart of almost every young Englishman—then it is a crime shared by the best that the nation has ever known, and one which has done more to build up the empire than all the parochial virtues ever owned by a million Young Men’s Improvement Societies put together.
The Islands are not the place for the ne’er-do-well, and I would also warn the exasperating young man, who never did a square day’s work in his life, never got into trouble with his employers or his superiors, but always found himself misunderstood, unappreciated, and incomprehensibly “sacked,” with an excellent character, at the first hint of slacking business—that the islands will not suit him either. If he comes out, he will not starve or go to the workhouse, because you cannot die of hunger where there is always enough vegetable food to keep the laziest alive, and you do not need workhouses, under the same happy conditions—but he will “go native,” and there are some who would say he had better starve, a good deal. There are men who have “gone native” in most of the Pacific groups, living in the palm-leaf huts with the villagers—but a white man in a waist-cloth and a bush of long hair, sleeping on a mat and living on wild fruit and scraps given by the generous natives, drunk half the time and infinitely lower, in his soberest hours, than the coloured folk who unwisely put up with him, is not a happy spectacle.
The Cook Islands, which may be taken as a sample of many other groups, are small to look at on the map, and not over large, when one counts up the number of square miles. But one cannot fairly estimate the value of island land by its extent. Much of it is so rich that every foot has its worth, and that is by no means despicable. And, in any case, there is plenty available for the small cultivator—the man who has only a few hundred pounds, and cannot afford to do things on the colossal scale that makes big fortunes.
Among the productions of the group are pineapples, custard apples, coffee, tobacco, pepper, mammee-apple or paw-paw, granadilla, cocoa, cotton, vanilla, limes, lemons, oranges, bananas, castor-oil, and many other useful plants, besides a number of excellent vegetables, not known to most Europeans. Many of the fruits above mentioned grow practically wild. Bananas come to bearing in fifteen months, cocoanuts in seven years, limes in four or five. The water supply is good all round, and there is a monthly steamer from Auckland.
The land in all the islands belongs to the natives, and cannot usually be bought outright. Leases of any length, can, however, be secured at very low rates, with the New Zealand Government laws, administered through the Resident, to back up the titles, so that a man who plants cocoanuts—the safest of island products—may be sure that his children and grandchildren will enjoy the fruits of his labour.
In most of the outer islands the natives cannot use more than a small fraction of the land, and are quite willing to let large sections at a shilling or two an acre. In Raratonga, the chief island, there has been more demand for land, and prices are consequently higher; also, the chiefs are not always ready to let, even though they do not use what they have. It may be said, however, of the group as a whole, that there is land, and a prospect of a good return for capital, ready for any reasonable number of settlers, if they bring habits of industry and a determination to succeed along with them.
There are two classes of possible settlers to be considered—the man with capital, and the man without.
How much does it take to start a man as a planter, and what return can he expect?
Taking the Cook Islands as a general example (but by no means suggesting that the resources of the Pacific begin and end there) the young Englishman wishing to seek his fortune as a planter should have at least £500 to start on, exclusive of passage-money. He can do excellently with a few hundreds more, but it is as well to put things as low as possible. Copra—the dried kernel of the cocoanut—is the usual, and the safest, investment. It is always saleable, and the demand increases year by year—so much so, that the large soapmaking firms, who are the chief users of the product, are of late planting out islands for themselves. The cost of clearing and planting the land is about £5 an acre. The rent, in the outer islands, should not exceed a couple of shillings an acre. In about seven years, the returns begin to come in, and in ten years’ time the land should be bringing in £5 net profit for every acre of trees. This is, of course, a long time to wait, but bananas can grow on the same land meantime, and will generally yield a quick return. Once the cocoanuts start bearing, they go on for sixty years or more, so that a copra plantation is one of the best investments for a man who has others to come after him.
Banana growing may be managed with less capital, but the profits are not so sure, since fruit is perishable, and cannot wait for the steamer as copra can. Coffee has been grown, but is not of late years doing well, because of something like a “ring” formed in New Zealand to lower the prices. Cotton used to do excellently, and I have never heard any satisfactory reason against its being taken up afresh. It is running wild in a good many parts of the group. The plants above mentioned, however, by no means exhaust the resources of the islands, which are suitable for growing anything that will live in the tropics, and are fortunately not subject to the destructive hurricanes that from time to time do so much damage in Tahiti and the Fijis. Hurricanes are not absolutely unknown, but they are very rare, and not of the worst kind.
The cost of living is not very serious, but it must not be supposed that the settlers can live decently and like white men, on nothing a year. A house costs something to put up, and furniture to a certain small amount is necessary, clothes do not grow on the cocoanut tree, nor do lamps and kerosene, or tools and nails, or fishing lines, or flour and bacon and tea and tinned butter, and the few groceries that the settler may need. Still, with care, a single man can live quite respectably on fifty pounds a year, and enjoy, in all probability, better health than he has had at home.
What the time of waiting will cost the copra planter, each one must work out for himself. He will do best to spend his capital gradually, planting as he can afford. The returns will come in only by degrees, but he will be saved the mortification of seeing a promising plantation leave his possession for a third of its value, simply because he cannot afford to wait until the profits begin.
Copra, the chief article of commerce of the Pacific, is very easily prepared. The cocoanuts, when ripe, are husked, and emptied, and the kernels, as a rule, left to dry in the sun, though some few planters use artificial heat. Bagging is the only other operation necessary.
Bananas are often shipped clumsily and carelessly, in unprotected bunches. It would be much better to pack them in leaves and crate them, as is done in the Canary Islands, where the banana trade is the principal support of the country. Oranges are usually shipped in crates. They grow wild all over the Cook group, and are not attended to in any way, but in spite of this, the orange trade with New Zealand is by no means despicable.
Vanilla is not cultivated for market in these islands, but it would probably repay the experimenter. It does well in most of the Pacific groups, and the returns begin in three years from planting.
Island planters, as a race, seem to be the most conservative of men, and very shy of trying anything new and unproved. There are, of course, good reasons for this, but there are also excellent arguments in favour of exploiting fresh fields. The following brief hints may prove fruitful to enterprising minds.
Only one kind of banana—the sort familiar at home—is usually grown for trade. There are many varieties, however, and some of the very best travel quite as well as the commonplace “China” sort. The large red banana, sometimes called the Aitutaki banana, sometimes the peach banana, on account of its delicate peach-like flavour, is a fruit that would become the fashion at once, if it could be put on the market. One or two planters have gone so far as to send consignments down to New Zealand, but, finding that these did not sell on account of the unusual colour of the fruit, they never made another attempt. At the time of my visit, in 1904, the red banana was practically unobtainable in New Zealand or Australia. A little intelligent co-operation on the part of the buyers would probably get over the difficulty.
The same may be said of limes, a fruit which grows wild very freely. The lime is like a small, round-shaped lemon, and is not an attractive fruit in appearance. It also suffers under the disadvantage of being very badly represented as to flavour by the bottled “shop” lime-juice, with which the taste of the fresh lime has hardly anything in common. Where it can be obtained fresh, however, no one ever thinks of using lemon as a flavouring in food or drink. The lime is incomparably more delicate and refreshing than the best lemon ever grown. For some unknown reason, however, it is not used in New Zealand, or in the cities of Australia, to which it could be easily and profitably exported from many of the Pacific groups. Instead, the juice of limes is squeezed out by a very rough process, the fruit being run through a wooden hand-press, and is shipped away in casks. The lime trade would certainly rival the orange trade, if worked up.
Dried bananas have money in them, and the industry is especially adapted to some of the lesser Cook Islands, where steamer calls are at present irregular. The dried and pressed banana is better than the fig, and is considered a great delicacy by the few people in the colonies who have tried it. The Cook Islanders peel the fruit, and leave it to dry in the sun. When it is shrunk, dark, and sticky with its own sugar, they compress it into neat little packets covered with dried banana leaf, and tied with banana fibre. These will keep good for many months. Up to the present, the trade is extremely small, but there is no reason why it should not be increased.
One of the chief troubles of the settler is the guava bush, which runs wild all over the islands, and is extremely hard to destroy. It bears quantities of excellent fruit, but guavas do not pay for exporting, so no one, apparently, has thought of making the island pest profitable. And yet, when I went down to New Zealand, which is in direct communication with the Cook Islands and less than a week away, I found the price of guava jelly in the shops was higher than it is at home. Asked why no one in the islands sent jelly for sale, the grocers said it was because jampots were not made in New Zealand, and had to be imported if wanted. Since most jams in the colonies are sold in tins, this did not appear to me an unanswerable argument. Tins are made in the colonies, and the process of tinning jam or jelly should not be beyond amateur powers. Moreover, common tumblers (which are also made in New Zealand) are a good and profitable way of putting up jellies; purchasers are always willing to pay extra for the advantage of getting something useful along with the dainty itself.
Another item: Dried peppers bring a good price per ounce, and fine Chili pepper grows wild everywhere. So far, trade is nil.
Another: One of the commonest plants in the Southern Pacific, a weed bearing a bright red flower almost exactly like the pine-cone in shape, contains, in the flower, a quantity of white watery liquid, which is declared by the natives, and by many of the whites, to be an exceptionally fine hair tonic. No one, so far as I know, has tried to make anything out of this, or out of the wild castor oil, which is said to be of good quality.
If the settler cannot find some useful hint among these, he may be able to discover a few on the spot for himself.
The second class of settler—the man without capital, or with only a little—is a pariah everywhere. No colony wants him, agents warn him away, friends write to him begging him to stay where he is, and not tempt fortune by going out unprovided with plenty of cash. No doubt there is reason on the side of the discouragers; but there is not a colony in the world, all the same, where you shall not find the man who came out without capital, who endured a few years of hard work and short commons, began to get on, began to save, went on getting on and saving, and by-and-by became one of the most successful men in the place. Whereupon as a rule he becomes an adviser in his turn, and solemnly counsels young men of every kind against the imprudence of tempting fortune with an empty purse.
For all that, and all that, young Britons will continue to do what they are advised not to, and ships will carry out many a man to the far wild countries whose only gold is the gold of youth and health and a brave heart. “Sink or swim” is the motto of this kind of colonist, and if he often goes under, he very often floats on the top, and comes in on the flood-tide of good luck. “Fortune favours the brave”—a proverb none the less true because of its age.
To have an island of one’s own, in the beautiful South Seas, to live remote from strain and worry, and out of the clash and roar of twentieth-century civilization—to pass one’s days in a land of perpetual summer; work, but own no master, possess a country (small though it may be) yet know none of the troubles of sovereignty—this is an ambition of which no one need be ashamed, even though-it appear contemptible and even reprehensible to “Samuel Budgett, the Successful Merchant.” The planter with a fair amount of capital can realise the dream almost any day, for every big group in the Pacific has many small unoccupied islands which can be rented for a song, and if the newcomer is made of stuff that can stand being totally deprived of theatres, clubs, music halls, daily posts and papers, and a good many other charms (or burdens) of city life, he has only to pick and choose, secure a good title to-his island, decide what he means to grow on it, get his house built, and settle down at once.
But people who have very little money cherish the same ambition, often enough: There are thousands of men in the United Kingdom to whom a South Sea Island of their-own would be heaven—only they see no way of getting it. The desire comes, without doubt, of generations of insular ancestors. It is the “Englishman’s house is his castle" idea carried a step further than usual, that is all; and the boy that never wholly dies in the heart of every Briton is always ready to wake up and rejoice at the thought.
What is the moneyless man to do?
Well, first of all, he must get out to Sydney or Auckland, each being a port from which island vessels constantly sail, and with which island trade is closely concerned. It will not cost him so much as he thinks. If he goes by Auckland, he can get a third-class ticket from London for fifteen pounds, and Sydney is little more. Arrived, he will make use of the information he has, of course, obtained in London, from the offices of the Agent-General for New Zealand (or Australia, as the case may be) and try and get a job to keep him on his feet while he looks about. If he can do any kind of manual labour, he will not be at a loss—and if he cannot, or will not, he had much better stay at home on an office stool within sound of Bow Bells, and leave the far countries to men of tougher material.
In Sydney or Auckland he will find a good many firms connected with island trading interests, many of whom own trading stores dotted about the whole Pacific. It is often possible to obtain a job from one of these, if the newcomer is capable and steady. In this case, the way of getting up to the islands is clear, and the work of copra trading, keeping store for native customers, fruit-buying and shipping on the spot, is the best possible training for an independent position. If this proves a vain hope (it need not, in the case of a good man, if one may judge by the wretched incapables who occupy the trader’s post in many islands) our adventurer must try to raise the cost of a passage as best he can, and see what he can get to do among the white people of the group he has selected, when he arrives. There are so many useless wastrels in most of the islands, that character and capability are to a certain extent capital in themselves. Some one is generally in want of a plantation overseer to replace a drunken employee—some one else would be glad of a handy man to help with housebuilding of the simple island kind—and in many islands, board and lodging, and a little over, would be easily obtainable by any educated man, who would undertake to teach the children of the white settlers. There are groups in which no one is allowed to land who does not possess a certain minimum of cash, but it is not in any case that I know of more than ten pounds, and most islands have no such regulation.
Once so far on his journey, the would-be island owner must think out the rest for himself. There is sure to be a small island or two for rent, and there will probably be means of making money by slow degrees in the group itself. Where the will is, the way will be found.
The popular dream of finding and taking possession of an unoccupied island somewhere or other, and “squatting” there unopposed, is a dream and nothing more. The great European nations have long since parcelled out among themselves all the groups worth having, and rent or purchase is the only way to acquire land. Far-away separate islands, remote from everywhere, are still to be had for nothing in a few instances, but they are not desirable-possessions, unless the owner can afford a private sailing vessel, and in any case what has not been picked up is little worth picking in these days.
So much for the how and where of acquiring islands. I shall have one or two definite instances to give in another chapter.
CHAPTER IV
Where are the Six Thousand?—Calling on the Queen—A Victoria of the Pacific—The Prince sleeps softly—The Mystical Power of the Mana—How Islanders can die—A Depressing Palace—Round the Wonderful Roadway—The Home of Queen Tinomana—A Princess’s Love Story—Once on Board the Schooner!—The Incredible Crabs—Depravity of a Mor Kiri-kiri.
A HUNDRED years ago, Raratonga had six thousand native inhabitants, and was a very flourishing heathen country, where cannibalism was all the fashion, murder of shipwrecked sailors a common custom, and raids upon neighbouring islands the chief diversion. There is no doubt that the Raratongan of those days compared none too well with the Tahitian, who at the worst never was an habitual cannibal, and was almost always friendly to strangers. Williams was the first missionary to arrive in the earlier part of the last century, and the complete conversion of the island was rapid; the Raratongan in a few years was no longer cannibal, no longer warlike, had become hospitable and friendly to travellers, had learned to wear clothes (a good deal more than he wanted or should have had, but the missionary of the early days really did not know what a fatal thing he was doing, when he enforced the wearing of white man’s raiment on the unclothed native, and thereby taught him to catch cold, and die of chest diseases). The island had (and has) a large school for the training of mission teachers, and a church and mission house not to be matched in the Pacific for magnificence, and was on the whole a model of most of the virtues, compared with what it once had been. There were, and are, drawbacks to the missionary rule, but these have been discussed so freely in almost every book of Pacific travel ever written, that I do not feel it necessary to say over again what has so often been said before. The missionaries certainly civilised the islands, and made them safe to live in. Concurrently with this desirable result, others not so desirable took place, the fruit, in some cases, of irresponsible authority exercised by semi-educated men; in others, of the inevitable fate that follows the introduction of civilisation to primitive races. The Raratongan, like all the other brown folk of the islands, was asked to leap, almost at once, the gulf between utter savagery and comparative civilisation, that had taken his instructors all the time between the Roman Conquest and the end of the Dark Ages to overpass. With the docility of the true Polynesian, he did his best to comply. It was not his fault—and not, one must fairly say, the fault of the missionary either, save in a minor degree—that the effort meant death to him.
There are not nineteen hundred Raratongans living now in the fertile little country that used to support six thousand of their ancestors. There are not enough babies in the island to carry on the population at half its present level, in the future. Not one of the “chief” families, of whom there are a dozen or so, has any living children at all. Consumption is common, and on the increase; more serious diseases are commoner still. A Raratongan seldom lives to be very old, and he almost always dies without resistance or regret. The islanders are happy and sunny in their own quiet way, but the backbone of life has been broken for them, and in the promise of the future, grey or golden, they have no share. To-day is theirs, but they have no to-morrow.
The Arikis, or chiefs, to whom the principal power once belonged, and who still retain much importance, regret this state of affairs in an amiable, fatalistic way, but do not trouble themselves very much over it. They are for the most part of the opinion of Sir Boyle Roche about the claims of posterity; and anyhow, they have their fruit trading to think about, and the next public dancing and singing party, and the last illegal beer-brewing up in the hills—so the decadence of their country sits lightly on their minds.
These Arikis are one and all inferior to the ruling sovereign, Queen Makea, who still contrives to retain a great deal of quiet power in her shapely old hands, in spite of the fact that she is nominally deposed, and her country owned by New Zealand. I had not been in Raratonga more than a day or two, when my hosts took me to call upon the queen, intimating that she would feel hurt if the newcomer was not presented to her.
We walked through the blazing sun of the tropic afternoon, down the palm-shaded main street of Avarua town, to the great grassy enclosure that surrounds the palace of the queen. One enters through a neat white gate; inside are one or two small houses, a number of palms and flowering bushes, and at the far end, a stately two-storeyed building constructed of whitewashed concrete, with big railed-in verandahs, and handsome arched windows. This is Makea’s palace, but her visitors do not go there to look for her. In true South Sea Islander fashion, she keeps a house for show and one for use. The islander, though he aspires when “civilised,” to own a big concrete house, “all same papalangi” (white man), does not really like living in a building that shuts out the air. He discovered the fresh-air system long before it was thought of by the folk who discovered him, and his own houses are always made of small poles or saplings, set without any filling, so that the whole building is as airy as a birdcage, and almost as transparent. In this he lives, while the big concrete house, with its Auckland made tables, chairs, and beds, and the red and blue table-cloths, and horrible gilt lamps fringed with cut glass lustres, and shrieking oleograph of King Edward in his coronation robes, is kept strictly for show, and perhaps for an occasional festival, such as a wedding party. It is an odd custom, but sensible, on the whole.
Makea’s favourite house is a pretty little reed and thatch villa several miles out in the country. When she is in town, she makes some concession to state by living in a small one-storeyed cottage, with a thatch and a verandah, and not much else, close beside her big palace. We found her at the cottage when we called, sitting on the verandah upon an ironwood couch, and petting a little turtle of which she is very fond. It seems a curious sort of creature to adore, but an elderly lady must have her little pet of some kind. In other climes, it is a pug, a parrot, or a cat. Here, the little turtle is considered chic, so the queen has one, the turtle having been always considered a perquisite of royalty in the old days, when the chiefs had the best of everything, even down to the choicest tit-bits of the roasted enemy, while the commonalty had to put up with what they could get.
I was introduced to the queen, who shook hands politely, and sent one of her handmaids for chairs. These being brought, my hostess and I sat down, and the latter conversed with Makea in Raratongan, translating a few conventional politenesses from myself, and conveying others to me in return. The queen wanted to know how I liked the island, if I had really come all the way from England, as she had heard, whether I was not afraid to travel so far alone, how long I hoped to stay, and so forth. All the time, as we talked, her keen black eyes were scanning me silently, rapidly, comprehensively, and making their own judgment, quite independently of the conversation and its inevitable formalities. And I, on my side, was gazing, I fear with some rudeness, at the very remarkable figure before me.
Makea, since the death of her husband, Prince Ngamaru, a few years ago, has laid aside all vanities of dress, and wears only the simplest of black robes, made loose and flowing from the neck in island fashion. She is supposed to be at least seventy years of age, and she is extremely stout, even for her height, which is well over six feet. Yet a more impressive figure than this aged, deposed, uncrowned sovereign, in her robe of shabby black, I have never seen. Wisdom, kindliness, and dignity are written large on her fine old face, which has more than a touch of resemblance to the late Queen Victoria. And oh, the shrewdness, the ability, the keen judgment of men and things, that look out from those brown, deep-set eyes, handsome enough, even in old age, to hint at the queen-like beauty that once belonged to this island queen!
Makea was always known as a wise, just, and very powerful sovereign. She ruled over the whole Cook group, and her word was law everywhere, even to the Prince Consort, the warlike Ngamaru, who to the very last retained some traces of his heathen upbringing, and used to be seen, in the island councils of only a few years ago, making the horrible cannibal gesture which signifies in unmistakable pantomime, “I will tear the meat from your bones with my teeth!” at any other council member who presumed to disagree with him. Their married life was a happy one, in spite of the prince’s violent character, and when he died, the widowed queen took all her splendid robes of velvet, silk, and satin, gorgeously trimmed with gold, tore them in fragments, and cast them into his grave, so that he might he soft, as befitted the prince who had been loved so well by such a queen.
Makea holds much of the real power in her hands to-day, for all that the islands are the property of the British Crown, and administered by a Commissioner. The Raratongan is submissive to chiefs by nature, and the queen, though uncrowned, is still reverenced and feared almost, as much as of old. It is firmly believed that she possesses the mystic power known as “mana” among the Maori races, and this, as it gives the owner power to slay at will, is greatly feared. The word is almost untranslatable, meaning, perhaps, something like “prestige,” “kudos,” or the old English “glamour.” It includes, among other gifts, second sight to a certain extent, the power to bring good or evil luck, and the ability already mentioned to deal death at will.
This last may sound like fiction. It is nothing of the sort, it is plain, bald fact, as any one who has ever lived in the islands can testify. There is nothing more commonly known in the South Seas than the weird power possessed by kings and heroes to slay with a word, and instances of its exercise could be found in every group.
Makea does not use it now, so they say. She is old: like aged folks in other places, she wants to “make her soul,” and it can readily be imagined that the mission authorities do not approve of such heathen proceedings. Still, there is not a native in Raratonga who does not believe that she could strike him dead with a wish, any day in the week, if she chose: and there are not a few who can tell you that in the days long ago, she exercised the power.
“Makea, she never rude, because she great chief,” said a relation of the royal family to me one day. “She never say to any one, ‘You go die!’ I think. She only saying, some time, ‘I wish I never seeing you again!’ and then the people he go away, very sorry, and by-n’-by he die—some day, some week, I don’ know—but he dyin’ all right, very quick, you bet!”
The power to die at will seems to be a heritage of the island races, though the power to live, when a chief bids them set sail on the dark seas of the unknown, is not theirs. Suicide, carried out without the aid of weapons or poisons of any kind, is not at all uncommon. A man or woman who is tired of life, or bitterly offended with any one, will often lie down on the mats, turn his face, like David of old; to the wall, and simply flicker out like a torch extinguished by the wind. There was once a white schooner captain, who had quarrelled with his native crew; and the crew, to pay him out, lay down and declared they would die to spite him.... But this is about Makea the Queen, not about the godless brutal captain, and the measures he took to prevent his men from taking passage in a body across the Styx. They didn’t go after all, and they were sore and sorry men when they made the island port, and the captain, who was a very ill-educated person, boasted far and wide for many a day after that, that he would exceedingly well learn any exceedingly objectionable nigger who offered to go and die on him again—and that is all that I must say about it, for more reasons than one.
The queen, after a little conversation, punctuated by intervals of fanning and smiling (and a more charming smile than Makea’s, you might search the whole South Seas to find), sent a girl up a tree for cocoanuts, and offered us the inevitable cocoanut water and bananas, without which no island call is complete. Afterwards, when we rose to go, she sent a handmaid with us to take us over the palace, of which she is, naturally, very proud, though she never enters it except on the rare occasion of some great festival.
The palace proved to be as uninteresting as the queen herself was interesting and attractive. It had a stuffy, shut-up smell, and it was furnished in the worst of European taste, with crude ugly sofas and chairs, tables covered with cheap-jack Manchester trinkets, and staring mirrors and pictures—partly sacred art, of a kind remarkably well calculated to promote the cause of heathenism, and partly portraits, nearly as bad as those one sees in the spring exhibitions at home. There were two or three saloons or drawing-rooms, all much alike, on the lower storey. Upstairs (it is only a very palatial island house that owns an upstairs) there were several bedrooms, furnished with large costly bedsteads of mahogany and other handsome woods, and big massive wardrobes and tables—all unused, and likely to remain so. The place was depressing on the whole, and I was glad to get out of it into the cheerful sun, although the heat at this hour of the afternoon was really outrageous.
[Illustration: 0165]
Another afternoon, I drove out to see Queen Tinomana, a potentate only second to Makea in influence. Tinomana, like Makea, is a dynastic name, and is always borne by the high chief, man or woman, who is hereditary sovereign of a certain district. The present holder of the title is a woman, and therefore queen.
What a drive it was! The roadway round the island is celebrated all over the Pacific, and with justice, for nothing more lovely than this twenty-mile ribbon of tropic splendour is to be found beneath the Southern Cross. One drives in a buggy of colonial pattern, light, easy-running, and fast, and the rough little island horse makes short work of the miles of dazzling white sandy road that circle the shores of the bright lagoon. On one side rises the forest, green and rich and gorgeous beyond all that the dwellers of the dark North could possibly imagine, and opening now and then to display picture after picture, in a long gallery of magnificent mountain views—mountains blue as the sea, mountains purple as amethyst, mountains sharp like spear-heads, towered and buttressed like grand cathedrals, scarped into grey precipices where a bat could scarcely cling, and cloven into green gorges bright with falling streams. On the other, the palms and thick undergrowth hardly veil the vivid gleam of the emerald lagoon lying within the white-toothed barrier reef, where all day long the surf of the great Pacific creams and froths and pours. By the verge of the coral beach that burns like white fire in the merciless sun, the exquisite ironwood tree trails its delicate tresses above the sand, so that, if you leave the carriage to follow on the road, and walk down by the beach, you shall catch the green glow of the water, and the pearly sparkle of the reef, through a drooping veil of leafage fine as a mermaid’s hair. Sometimes the buggy runs for a mile or two through thick woods of this lovely tree, where the road is carpeted thickly with the fallen needles of foliage, so that the wheels run without sound, and you may catch the Eolian harp-song of the leaves, sighing ceaselessly and sadly