CHAPTER X.

WISDOM OF CANNIBAL-LAND.

When outdoor amusements were not attractive, the warm house, though smoky, and the comfortable mat never failed to bring together a goodly company of young and old, who, sitting around the man of best memory and talking powers, would listen hour after hour to stories of bygone days, the miraculous doings of gods, the marvellous exploits of great heroes, theories, proverbs, omens, &c.

Often as I have sat listening to a Fijian talking of omens, tokens, auguries, &c., in his dark hut, where flashes of light ever and again flare through the gloom and smoke, like spirits rushing to and fro between this and the other world, have I thought of the words of our own poet—

“Now the wasted brands do glow, Whilst the screech-owl screeching low Puts the wretch that lies in woe In remembrance of a shroud.”

Presages of all kinds of events and of fortune’s endless changes are to be met with in great numbers in every part of cannibal-land. What with sounds heard in the night—soft, ghostly hands touching sensitive bodies during sleep—animals running about in a wild and excited state—birds coming out of the woods at unusual seasons—fish springing out of the water and striking a canoe, or any of its passengers—dreams—strange lights hovering over graves—a _first_ failure in any new enterprise—shooting stars—comets—various appearances in the western sky at sunset, and, as with other races,

“In the eastern sky the rainbow,”

one never need be at a loss to find something clearly ominous of something else.

Riddles, enigmas, and verbal conceits were always forthcoming when asked for in the cannibal hut, where the inmates would often chat long and pleasantly to while away the time. Now an old grey-headed man, glorying, as almost all old men do glory, in the golden days that have been, would open his mouth in parables, or tell long tales of great chiefs, who ruled the land as only they could rule it, and sailed fast canoes as none but they ever sailed them before or since. Or, if such subjects were thought too long and tedious, someone else would produce from his fruitful brain a lighter literature—a sort of “after-dinner talk.”

One evening I was lying full length among a number of dusky forms in the chief ambassador’s cottage. The subject of a recent village scandal had been well threshed out, and the silence which followed had been much too long. At last there was a stir, and an evident waking desire for talk, so a voice began—

“There’s a path that leads to no home. What is it?” Everybody tried, and of course, if only for courtesy’s sake, everybody “gave it up.” “It is the path of the traveller travelling, a stranger in strange lands!”

“The longing eye—whose is it?” Answer.—“The dog’s, looking and longing while we eat.”

“There is a wind that blows for many years without stopping, but at last there comes a lull—it stops—and a world falls. What wind is it that blows? and what is the world that falls when that wind ceases to blow?” Answer.—“The wind is the breath of man, and the world that falls is man himself.” A thought like this picked out of a savage mind is a poetic gem.

“We have just buried some old men, who, however, will ere long come back to us again, fresh and youthful. If you cannot unravel the matter, I will.” It was Long-Emptiness, the Court fool, who proved to be the intellectual Samson of the evening, who spoke. “Do you not know,” said he, with an air of triumph, “that we are just back from burying a lot of old yams, which six months hence will come to us again as young ones?”

Cannibal-land is not over rich in proverbs, or, if they can be said to abound in it, they are, for the most part, either far-fetched or unclean. One or two will suffice to show the character of this class of cannibal literature.

“Scratch, but do not cry, said the cat to the dog, who was getting the worst of it.” The meaning of which is, Do not be such a coward as to call others to help you, thereby involving them in your squabbles.

“Eat but drink not,—drink but eat not.” Good advice at meals, well attended to by the Fijians.

“Rest is better than food.” The over-worked man declines to eat until he has rested.

“Our greatest earthly treasures—what are they? Food and sleep.” True cannibal philosophy for both worlds.

“The source of all chopping power is the stomach.” This is one of the greatest articles in the creed of all canoe-builders and cannibal carpenters in general. The carpenters have the credit of invariably talking about being well fed. This must be a well understood clause in every contract made with them. Often, when the employer happens to be present, the artisan may be heard talking quite philosophically with his comrades on the great question of the “origin of power,” and the answer is as given above. The more civilised artisan of other countries will probably feel little inclination to find fault with philosophy of this practical and commonsense character, although it comes from a dark-skinned and savage “brother-chip” in the South Seas. For who could work in a tropical sun, or out of it either, without food, and plenty of it? Not, certainly, the vegetarian “brown man” of Polynesia, who has not strength of spirit enough to force himself to any lengthened physical endurance.

The conversation, of which the foregoing is the substance, had aroused the drowsy company to a little more intellectual activity, and Shark, the priest, struck in with some remarks on a more abstruse subject—the question of the eternity or non-eternity of the universe. This is what he said thereanent:—

“The land is waiting for the water; both the land and the water are waiting for the sky; one cannot pass away without the other. Therefore, when one goes, all the others go with it.”

For savage philosophy this is not so bad. The next remark of the priest’s is not so good; but it will help to show how imagination in the cannibal brain employed itself on objects which it could not understand.

“When the sun is drowned (_i.e._ set), he goes down to the spirit-world to enlighten the lands and people there. So, when it is day there it is night here, and _vice versa_.”

The following theory, propounded by the same authority, will have to be revised or thrown away as false science—as false as that of the ancients which taught that the earth was firmly planted on the back of an elephant, &c.

The tides are caused by a great fish in mid-ocean, alternately drinking and vomiting up the water. While he drinks the tide ebbs, even till all the flats and reefs are dry, at which crisis the converse operation begins. The fish ejects from his mouth all the water that has passed through it. The tide is now turned, the reefs gradually become covered, the rivers rise, it is high tide; or, as our ecclesiastical friend put it, “the lagoons on the giant’s back are full of water, and the fishermen may sail up and down here in their double canoes.” Thus for ever does this wonderful fish keep at the post of duty.

In respect of tides there is a belief among the natives that the wood-pigeon is never heard cooing at either high or low tide; nor is any human being ever known to die, but at one or the other of those times. In cases of sickness where the patient is sinking, and all hope of recovery has died out in the hearts of watching friends, it is quite common to hear the announcement that “the spirit will depart at the next low tide;” that passed and the person still alive, “he will not die till the high tide.” And so on, a crisis happening at each change of tide, until death closes the scene or hope revives.

Some of the fables of cannibal-land are not mere useless compositions without point or moral in them, but often teach, in their rough and inelegant way, valuable lessons. The following from the lips of Centipede, who, on this particular night, had the monopoly of this part of the conversational entertainment, teaches practical benevolence as clearly and forcibly as our own “Love me—love my dog.”

“Our teeth will be covered with blood to-day,” said a lean and hungry dog in a _tete-à-tete_ with an equally gaunt and hungry cat. “Why?” asked puss, probably thinking there was a prospect of a good meal of flesh. “Because,” said her canine friend, “although there is plenty of fish, those _long posts_ will be sure to eat it all up, leaving you and me nothing but the bones.” The long posts are the human masters and mistresses, who on hearing this fable ought never again to treat their dogs or servants as though they never had any appetite, or enjoyed only the leavings of others.

“I’ll stay and take care of the foundation,” said the snake who would gladly have escaped from the burning house, but could not because the flames were too fast for him. This is our “fox and the grapes” over again, but with this important difference, that the snake was burnt, whereas the fox had only to walk off without the grapes.

In the following we come upon resurrection gleams:—“The Moon and the Rat talked together of death. ‘Let us all die like me,’ said the Rat, ‘run our course, die therein, and have done with it.’ ‘Nay,’ answered the Moon, ‘let us all die like me—run our course, and die in it, but after a little while appear again!’” Unhappily the rat’s proposal was adopted. In this fable the cannibal notion as to a resurrection is briefly dealt with and dismissed. There is, indeed, little or nothing in any of the mythologies pointing to a belief in a bodily resurrection.

Here we have a fable which points at the numerous class of persons who would have us “do as they tell us—not as they do.”

“The great and little fish once called a monster meeting to consider the best thing to be done to escape or get rid of the new danger which had lately made its appearance below water, and snatched away so many of their friends and kinsfolk. The new danger complained of was a baited fish-hook[7] which a fish of another sort was always letting down from above. After many large and small fry had told their minds, one Rakasalah, who must have been a very important fish in his own eyes if no where else, darted forward and delivered himself thus:—‘Fellow fishes! let me tell you a bit of my mind. When the hook comes down be sure you never bite it; swim wide of it, and your lives will never be snatched away!’ The words were hardly out of his mouth when down came a bait, which Rakasalah darted at with the swiftness of lightning, and, without even the slightest precautionary nibble, bolted hook and all. Of course he was hooked up into another world—one much less conducive to his health than that in which he delivered his last oration. The last thing he ever heard from his own land was, not the deafening applause of his fellow-fishes, which would have charmed his ear had he been consistent, but their angry scoffing shout—‘Behold the fish that told us not to bite the bait, and was the first to swallow it all himself!’” From this fable is derived the proverb “He preaches like Rakasalah, the fish.”

Footnote 7:

Made of tortoise shell.

As I listened to the following tale given with some others of a similar character by Flag, the King’s herald, I thought involuntarily of the “Green Isle,” and the “Blessed St. Patrick.” There are neither parrots nor pine trees on the island of Ono. This Ono was once the abode of a powerful hero who was great in arms and in jealousy. One day a parrot, in a pine tree near his house, kept up a continual chatter, chattering away as only parrots can. The jealous god, influenced by but one idea, and that as “cruel as the grave,” rashly concluded the voice to be that of some hero like himself, come perhaps from another island to pay his addresses to the lady whose heart was already bestowed on him. This thought overpowered him and forced him to an act of folly. Dashing furiously at the pine tree he tore off one of its branches, and chased therewith the beautiful bird, shouting as he drove him from the shores of the island, “Begone! flee! avaunt! and never show your colours again this side of the water!” Since that fatal day the soil and air of Ono have been unfriendly alike to pine trees and parrots. No sooner are they landed there than they die.

Conjurors’ tricks formed a common source of amusement when idlers were gathered together, though in the minds of the priesthood they were regarded as powers to excite the fears and command the homage and obedience of the simple and weak-minded. Nearly all the priests gained and kept public patronage by juggling tricks, many of which were akin to those performed at English fairs and by street conjurors. One cannibal juggler would drink large draughts of cocoanut oil, swallow uncooked giant beans, eat fire, and chew the ends of trumpet-shells, while the astonished lookers-on shouted their plaudits or sat trembling in every limb at what to them appeared to be horrible realities. One great magician lives in the poetry of his country, because he possessed a spear that would spring into life at his bidding. With this living spear, glowing as if on fire with the life that was in it, he would go forth and hush the roaring of the waterfalls!

The cannibal poets, though unacquainted with anything like the “Seven Ages” of human life as pictured for us by our own Shakespeare, have nevertheless sketched fairly enough “Four Ages” in the following enigmatic and pictorial way, as I gathered from my garrulous friend Long-Emptiness, who always contributed largely to the general amusement at social gatherings.

“There is a little animal which at sunrise, and for a short while afterwards, has but one leg. As, however, the sun climbs upward, he gains four legs. Presently, when the sun is a little higher, and begins in good earnest his course towards mid-heavens and the west, this strange creature returns to the use of two legs! This may be said to be the longest and best stage of all. Then—

‘Last scene of all, That ends this strange, eventful history,’

when the sun, or ‘Eye of Day,’ as the language poetically calls it, prepares to go down to enlighten the inhabitants of the spirit-world, and the wind spoken of before is abating, and a world is about to fall, this wonderful animal may be seen hobbling along on three legs.”

Though Englishmen would be ashamed to give this up, our cannibal fire-side company of minds more opaque, or hurrying off to dreamland, did so without a single mental effort; whereupon Long-Emptiness, assuming the air of the only wise savage present, ended the night’s amusements by thus untying the knot:—

“The little animal I have been telling you of is man, who for some time after his birth cannot move—he does nothing but lie still on the mat. This is the one-leg stage in man’s life. After a while the infant begins to crawl on all fours. This, clearly enough, is the four-leg era. But when the sun rises higher in the sky, the being which a few weeks ago could only travel by means of hands and knees, finds, after many falls and hair-breadth escapes, that he can stand sublimely on his feet. He has now entered on the two-leg stage. As, however, the sun goes to his setting, _i.e._, as man’s life wanes, ‘two-legs’ begin to tremble;—they can do duty no longer without the help of a third leg. ‘Give me my walking-stick,’ says the tottering old man, who now feels that he is come to the last stage of his earthly existence, even that of three legs. All beyond

‘Is second childishness and mere oblivion.’”

The close resemblance of the foregoing to the riddle the Sphinx propounded to Œdipus will be noticed. The Fijian author, however, had no inspiration from the white man. The similarity is another item in support of the theory that all these mythologies have a common origin, and that the Fijians were once in communication with Asiatic races.