Part 8

Mataafa sometimes gives us _kava_, and occasionally has done us the honour to come and drink it in our own hut. In that case he has his own bowl, a most intimate and personal property, from which no one else must drink; and with all courtesy he apologizes to us for this necessity of position. For as he explains guardedly he is in some sense sacred--having been a form of the divine. And he is the most religious of men in our meanings.

In one princely place that we visited, in Savii, we found a lady who occupied by ancestry the position of “_kava divider_”; that is to say that it was her duty and privilege to determine the sequence in presenting the cup according to dignity. And she appeared without warning and claimed the right.

From this circle of the chiefs drinking _kava_ on the green, even the children know enough to keep away. Even the young man who hands the cups is careful in his walk not to appear to turn his back to any one of the chiefs. Respect for the chief is the basis of everything. It is probably the foundation of their extreme courtesy, only broken by natural exuberance, impatience, or simplicity. The chief was sacred, even in war. It was a terrible thing for a commoner of the enemy to kill him. In legends of Tahiti there are tales of how men deliberated whether they were of high enough birth to take the life of a vanquished chieftain. The very language indicates this division between class of the chief and everything else outside. For the chief and everything relating to him there is a special language. The chief’s head, the chief’s body and all its parts, the chief’s food, all that he does, his feelings, his possessions, his dog, his wife and her actions, even when she breaks the Seventh Commandment, have special names. In many instances the common name of a thing is changed for another when that thing is spoken of in his presence. In some cases the particular grade of his rank is indicated by the word used; so that you speak of a _tulafale’s_ eating as _tausami_; of a chief’s eating as _taumafa_; of such a chief as Mataafa’s eating as _taute_. But it would not be polite of a chief to use these words with reference to himself.

When passers-by draw toward the end of our village and reach the highway in front of Mataafa’s hut, they keep to the further side of the path, leaving as large a space as it is possible to make, out of respect for the privileges of the chief of chiefs.

On all the fringes of the village, however, the children play quiet games. Our spaces are too restricted for the young men to have their games; but further down they collect at times to play, by throwing a stick so as to make it touch the ground and skim along to the goal. So with us there is very little. Occasionally some of the boys gallop wildly up and down the beach; but there are very few horses in this immediate neighbourhood at which we are not displeased, however beautiful the sight may be, because they ride the horses too young, and push them beyond their strength.

As the evening comes on the sun goes down rapidly, and the afterglow, the most beautiful moment of the South Sea day, begins its long continuance. The girls gather together or sit with the young men, either on the grass or on little raised benches under trees, or very late again on still smaller benches, holding at the most two people, which they ingeniously fit between the divergent stems of the cocoanuts. This half siesta, half conversazione, is carried on as long as there is light, and if there be moonlight, through any number of hours that may escape the darkness disliked by the Polynesian.

Our little friend Taēlē leaves her hut and sits far apart in her accustomed place, all alone, immovable, looking toward the sea, thinking perhaps; but how do I know?

Some of the little children, the little girls especially, repeat in a small way the native songs and the native dance the _siva_. Sometimes a bigger girl sketches out some steps for them; but we are extremely proper in our village, and the _siva_, of which the Samoan is passionately fond, is not looked upon with favour by the missionary or the brown members of the church. However, we succeed now and then in getting girls and young men from the neighbourhood, or passing villagers and travellers, to favour us with this entertainment. The _siva_ dances about which I wrote you at length, upon the day of my arrival, are yet to us always novel. By and by I suppose that they will be, like everything else, accepted by us as an ordinary form of social dissipation. But it is certainly worth coming all this way, even to see one of them. The beautiful rhythm of song and movement, the accuracy of time kept, the evidently absorbing delight of the performers, who become more and more insatiate, until one wonders that they are not exhausted by such gymnastics, the pictorial disposition of the scene, usually at night or in dark places, the dancers dressed in flowers and leaves in contrasts and harmonies of colour that are nature’s own, with bodies and limbs glistening with oil, the spectators all absorbed, and as Robinson Crusoeish as the spectacle itself--all these things are the _siva_. If I do not refrain and cut short at once, I shall become entangled in trying to give you word pictures that are utterly inadequate. I feel, too, that the drawings and paintings I have made are so stupid from their freezing into attitudes the beauties that are made of sequence. These beauties do not touch the missionary. The invariable objection to amusement, to dissipation, to that weakening of purpose which our indulgences bring, make this natural of course, and we can understand it. But these kindly natives need, I think, every possible excuse for innocent occupation. There is so little for them to do to-day, and we feel that by lending our countenance to the _siva_ we are rescuing both the native and the missionary from a false position. The condemnation of the dance had gone from the white missionary to his brown brother, the local Polynesian clergyman or deacon; and when we arrived we learned that even our excellent Sunday-school, church-keeping friend, Faatulia, the wife of the chief Seumanu, himself also a most excellent and worthy member of the church, had been excommunicated for having danced a European cotillion at the Fourth of July ball given by our American Consul. The revulsion is beginning, and we are glad to help in forwarding it.

We could scarcely have _sivas_ of our own--that is to say that our village could not give them properly. They should be under the direction of the right social leader, and we have no _taupo_. The _taupo_ is a young woman elected by the village for the purpose of directing all social amenities in which women can take part. It is for her to receive the guests, to know who they are and what courtesies should be extended to them; to provide for their food and lodging. If they are great people like ourselves, for their being attended, for their having all small comforts of bath and soft mats and tappa, for their being talked to and sung to and danced to. She is invariably chosen of good descent, and she is beautiful if fate allows it, but she must be a lady above all. She must also be a virgin, and be continually protected, escorted, watched, investigated, by one or many duennas, who never for a single instant lose sight of her. Her position in that way is a trying one. Contrary to all feminine instincts, she is rarely allowed to have her own way in the adornment of her person. Her expert attendants insist upon having a voice in dressing her on all show occasions; notwithstanding, it seemed to me that I recognized in each individual _taupo_ a something that had escaped the levelling influence of so much interest taken in her attire. Remember that she dances in front of the warriors in battle.

When the time comes, the village that has chosen her, also chooses her husband, and makes her gifts, as a dowry. Sometimes, and this is one of the terrors of the situation, the village is very hard to please, and rejects offers which the _taupo_ might perhaps have accepted if a less important and freer agent. She can always escape by bolting, and marry as she pleases, thereby forfeiting her position and the respect of well-thinking people. A match not well thought of by society is as much deplored here as in our very best circles. Marriage, apparently lightly entered into, is a very serious matter. Rank, position, is only transmitted by blood; and a mésalliance in Samoa entails consequences still more disastrous than in the court life of Germany. Perhaps my South Sea Islander is not sentimental. He is simple and natural, but he looks at everything in a practical way, and his ideas, having always been the same, enable him to keep this natural simplicity without any protest in favour of that freedom that brings on love tragedies.

As the day draws to its last close in the fairy colouring of the long afterglow, people come back to their evening meal--a regular hour and moment, here where divisions of time seem so uncared for that no older man or woman could accurately know their age; unless they date from some well-known event recorded by the foreigner.

(In other places people have told me, it was so many bread-fruit seasons ago; it was when such a ship was here.)

Magongi, the owner of our hut, returning from his fishing, drops a fish or two at our posts, according to Samoan etiquette and in honour to guests and chiefs like ourselves. Faces are turned from gazing at the sea, toward the houses where meals are getting ready. The young people give up their seats on the little platforms, or “lookouts” by the sea, and the lover confides his courtship, in Polynesian way, to others to continue for him.

This evening, as every evening, with the last afterglow, in each hut of the village, with the lighting of fire or lamp, comes the sound of the evening prayer before meal. In pagan days, with the lighting of the evening fire (meant for light), in the hollow basin scooped out in the centre of the hut, after a libation to the gods _outside_, thrown out between the posts, the Samoan prayed a prayer like this:

“Sail by, O Gods! and let us be: Ye unknown Gods, who haunt the sea.”

When I hear the sound of the evening hymn, fixed and certain like all their habits, I recall this prayer, so full of the future that has come upon these dwellers in islands, and has brought with our faith and our ideas--the latter certainly misunderstood--a slow extinction of their past and of their very existence. For in all Polynesia, though arrested now for a time, there has been within the hundred years from discovery a fading away. As the Tahitian song says:

“The coral will grow and man must perish.”

I have been telling of the influence of missionaries upon old customs, such as dances. Let me say something further.

I want to note that it was easier to get the Samoans to accept any form of Christian worship because their religion was simpler than that of the other islands. They were free from a great many horrors--the belief in the necessity of human sacrifice. They hated cannibalism. Their heavier nature had never led them to such immorality as tempted other South Sea Islanders, who thereby resemble us more.

Then the missionaries came to them so late--at the end of the thirties--that the Samoans had already been able to learn about this religion that fixed everything--this desirable law called Lotu, which was to settle everything for them, and make everything straight. (Lotu[5] also means church, Lotu Tonga, the Tongan Church, etc.) So that within the very shortest possible time the missionaries succeeded in converting them, in fact, were waited for and expected, one might say, by the next chance ship. The terrible reputation of savageness of these islanders, owing to their having murdered La Peyrouse’s men in Tutuila, on first acquaintance, so guarded them that even so far back as 1836, and later, very little was known of them--they were carefully avoided. But certain outcasts, escaped convicts, terrors of the sea, had come among them, and had even begun to instruct them to expect this law of Good. It is one of the most touching, as well as one of the most atrocious, of small facts. Old Samasone was telling us the stories of these old times: how some stranded ruffian, unable to return to white lands, had felt obliged, upon being questioned, to assert his value and knowledge by some imitation that might not later conflict with the outside facts. Some brutal, drunken, murderous wretch would choose, some day, to simulate a Sunday, and sing obscene or brutal forecastle songs, all the same to those who did not understand a word, as representing the church service of song which he described.

Samasone, whose American name is Hamilton, and who has been here for the third of a century, tells us lengthily and in detail such stories, and gives us long accounts of Samoan manners, in the same way that might be his if he were still in native New England. And when I shut my eyes, I can fancy myself sitting on the edge of some Newport wharf, and listening to Captain Jim or Captain Sam, discoursing wisely, with infinite detail.

Fifty years have passed since those things, paralleled more or less elsewhere in the South Seas; and now from the hut of Mataafa, the great chief, which is next to mine, with the sunset, comes the Angelus, sung by the people yet nearer to nature than Millet’s peasants. I hear also the Ave Maria Stella; the cry of the exiled sons of Eve for help in this vale of tears, for whether Catholic like Mataafa, or Protestant like my good neighbour Tofae, they are all very Christian. Indeed, my other neighbour is a preacher, an eloquent one, like a true Samoan, a race where eloquence is hereditary in families. I hear him thundering on Sundays against the Babylonians, and all the bad people of Scripture.

They are all steeped in a knowledge of the words of the Bible. In any serious conversation, in political discussion, we hear the well-known types of character referred to, and all the analogies pushed to the furthest extreme.[6] The rather light-minded girls whom we have about us amuse themselves on Sunday with capping verses from the Bible. The young men of our boat crew, whose moral views on many subjects would bring a blush to the cheek of the most hardened clubman, are fond of leading in prayer, are learned in hymnology, and are apt to be fairly strict sabbatarians. Here and elsewhere, in many other islands, it is often very difficult on Sunday to obtain the use of a boat, the only vehicle possible. Remember that I am, and shall be for a long time, writing from islands, where all life is along the shore, where only occasionally are there roads, or what we would call roads; where there are few horses, somtimes none at all; where the natural road is over the beach, when it is uninterrupted by rock and cliffs, and where the boat can take you quietly along inside of the reef. But as I shall make it out clearly later, the Polynesian likes to have things settled one way or the other, as all sensible people do.

And then the Bible--I am not speaking of the New Testament--is so near them; they read so often their own story in the life of Israel of many centuries back. They are not separated from a civilization of that form by such and so many changes as our ancestors’ minds have passed through. Their habit of life must even be said to antedate the biblical. They do not have to make excuses for the conduct of God’s chosen people. They can take all as it is written. They need not suppose some error in the account of the witch of Endor. In such a valley, buried under trees, or behind that headland where the palms toss in the roar of the trades, dwells some woman, wiser and more powerful in the solitude and in the night than we judge her by day. She can tell what things are happening elsewhere; what things are likely to come. She brings in the dead by the hand. She tells of what the dead are now doing, of their wars and their struggles in the empty outside world. What she revealed some nights ago, to a chosen few who say they were present, is murmured about the villages, and makes a feature of conversation not unlike society news. I have listened at night, in out-of-the-way places, among preachers and people of confirmed Bible piety, to the last reports from the spirit world: to the news of war there; to the tale of great fights which had occurred on such a day of the moon, when the battleground of the reef was strewn with the corpses of the dead already dead to us. And I remember once hearing how some spirit ruling over a part of our island had declined to enter into war because he had not been attacked, and his religious principles, which were Christian, confined him to the defensive. Perhaps all these things meant more to my good friends than they did to me, curious as I was to find in these reports some traits of their character, some manner of theirs of looking at the things of this world. I believe that to them these agitations of the outside world were presages of coming danger, of trouble to their earthly lives; that they saw omens of victory because the spirits of such and such possible ancestors had triumphed. But no doubt, in some way not understood by me, all these vague stories confirmed them in certain directions, or made them hesitate. At any rate, it kept the land peopled with fears. It makes the terror of the forest more vivid and more reasonable. The _po_--the dark, the night--is impressive to the Polynesian; the brave man may have all the fear of the little boy. And I own that I have never seen a nature which at night assumed more mystery, a more threatening quiet. The vegetation never rests. The plants are always growing. The sighing of the palms so deceptively like rain; the glitter of the great leaves of the banana, striking one against the other, with a half metallic clink; the fall of dead branches; the sudden drop of the cocoanut or the bread-fruit; the perpetual draught, carrying indefinite sounds from the untrodden interior; the echo of the surf from the reef, against the high mountains; the splash of the water on the shore; the flight of the “flying fox” in the branches; the ghostlike step of the barefooted passerby; the impossibility of the eye carrying far throught angles of tropical foliage--all these things make the night--the _po_, not a cessation of impressions, but a new mystery.

With such a landscape about me, I was ready to believe that handsome young men belated in the passages of the mountains had been met by the female spirit, whether her name be Sau Mai Afi or not, whose sudden love is death; and that the same being could be a man when the night traveller was a woman and beautiful. Had not the brother of one of our virgin friends been assailed by devils, in some adventurous night voyage, and had he not returned half crazed, and beaten in such a way that he had never recovered? All this had happened while we were there; we might have found him alive had we come a few weeks earlier.

And in the night-fishing how often do the dead, continuing their habits, fish on the reefs alongside of the living. They are silent, and their canoes keep apart, but they may silently step from one canoe to another, only to be known by the chill and anxiety that goes with them. I have seen with my own eyes, far out on the reef, the solitary torch pointed out to me as that of the dead. Often, when suspected, the spirit occupant of a canoe has made for shore and disappeared, _incessu patuit dea_, and has been assuredly recognized by the track of her torch through the mountains, where no living man goes. That certainly must have been our spirit disastrous to young men.

All these sides of common belief, or what perhaps we might call superstition, were shown to us little by little. On the outside our good friends believe roughly as we do, and all this that I am talking about is what remains attached to Christianity, or more properly, never disentangled from it. And I should suppose that it must have been difficult for the missionaries to expel these survivals of the past, in the same way that the old Church found it impossible, in certain corners of Europe, to wipe out the belief in fairies--the “little men,” the “good folk,” the “wee folk,” the “good neighbours”; the sacredness and influence of places. And here the practical mind of the savage, in its first reaction, after having received a set form of worship and faith as a great relief, would argue that the written Law, the Book, countenances most of the things they _cared_ for in their older worship. A very few years after the first christianization which began in the Society Islands, sects were formed, based upon the Bible, or using it as an excuse, with all the security of any theological difference. I have a vague feeling that many of my brown friends think that the Christian, even the missionary, does not carry out properly his belief, and that they themselves are nearer to the letter as well as to the spirit. If the missionaries have let loose among them the famous question of the lost tribes, I have no doubt that many of them must be imbued with the certainty of that descent. Many of their practices are so much like those of the early Jews, that, according to old-fashioned ways of historical criticism, an uninterrupted tradition might be argued. In fact, I am quite sure that many of the missionaries have so reasoned, and implanted among them a great feeling of confidence. And the Polynesian, having a perfectly healthy mind, likes to have everything settled. Anything more like the typical respectable Englishman I have never met. With the brown man one sees the natural healthy desire of having the questions of religion, of politics, of society, all settled on the same basis; there is such a thing as good form, and that settles it. After the first start, the islanders were much troubled at finding that there were many ways of looking at things, and that religion might be right and manners bad: that the wife of the missionary, who insisted on poke bonnets, was not dressing according to the most aristocratic forms of her own land. And when they find that their written religion does not provide for all their little wants, it must be very natural to supply the smaller ones, which are the everyday ones, with some of the older forms more fitted for individual and temporal advantages. It must be a comfort to many of them to know that the flight of certain birds indicates what they had better do to-morrow; that the coming of certain fish may mean, nay does mean--some change in family history; and they may still prefer to treat respectfully the animals and plants that were associated with their origins--what we might roughly call, their totem. The shark has been respected or the bread-fruit, or the owl; and in certain cases certain mysterious powers and sanctities might follow the line of descent, though concealed from the public, more especially the white men. Of this, I ought perhaps to say that I am confident; and that the powers would be recognized in certain people even when, as I have seen it, they belong to opposing Christian sects.