CHAPTER II--MAKING FRIENDS
The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-
estimated. The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though
hard to speak with elegance. And they are extremely similar, so
that a person who has a tincture of one or two may risk, not
without hope, an attempt upon the others.
And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters
abound. Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the
bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and
hamlet; and even where these are unserviceable, the natives
themselves have often scraped up a little English, and in the
French zone (though far less commonly) a little French-English, or
an efficient pidgin, what is called to the westward 'Beach-la-Mar,'
comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now taught, besides, in the
schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of British ships, and
the nearness of the States on the one hand and the colonies on the
other, it may be called, and will almost certainly become, the
tongue of the Pacific. I will instance a few examples. I met in
Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he
had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one
word of German. I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in
Rapa-iti that while the children had the utmost difficulty or
reluctance to learn French, they picked up English on the wayside,
and as if by accident. On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in
the Carolines, my friend Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the
lads playing cricket on the beach and talking English; and it was
in English that the crew of the Janet Nicoll, a set of black boys
from different Melanesian islands, communicated with other natives
throughout the cruise, transmitted orders, and sometimes jested
together on the fore-hatch. But what struck me perhaps most of all
was a word I heard on the verandah of the Tribunal at Noumea. A
case had just been heard--a trial for infanticide against an ape-
like native woman; and the audience were smoking cigarettes as they
awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable French lady, not far from
tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared she would engage the
prisoner to be her children's nurse. The bystanders exclaimed at
the proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke no
language. 'Mais, vous savez,' objected the fair sentimentalist;
'ils apprennent si vite l'anglais!'
But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first
stage of my relations with natives I was helped by two things. To
begin with, I was the show-man of the Casco. She, her fine lines,
tall spars, and snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon,
and the white, the gilt, and the repeating mirrors of the tiny
cabin, brought us a hundred visitors. The men fathomed out her
dimensions with their arms, as their fathers fathomed out the ships
of Cook; the women declared the cabins more lovely than a church;
bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in the chairs and
contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I have seen
one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and delight,
rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions. Biscuit, jam,
and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the
photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their
everyday costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in
three weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign;
alien faces, barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered,
in the swerving cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise. Her
Majesty was often recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss
her photograph; Captain Speedy--in an Abyssinian war-dress,
supposed to be the uniform of the British army--met with much
acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew Lang were admired in the
Marquesas. There is the place for him to go when he shall be weary
of Middlesex and Homer.
It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth
some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands.
Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same
convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In
both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the
chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of
regarding money as the means and object of existence. The
commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war
abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the cherished
practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,
proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under
cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving
Highlander; long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-
eating Kanaka. The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and
resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs,
reminded me continually of the days of Lovat and Struan.
Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a touchy punctilio,
are common to both races: common to both tongues the trick of
dropping medial consonants. Here is a table of two widespread
Polynesian words:-
House. Love.
Tahitian FARE AROHA
New Zealand WHARE
Samoan FALE TALOFA
Manihiki FALE ALOHA
Hawaiian HALE ALOHA
Marquesan HA'E KAOHA
The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan
instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots.
Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called
catch, written with an apostrophe, and often or always the
gravestone of a perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to
this day. When a Scot pronounces water, better, or bottle--wa'er,
be'er, or bo'le--the sound is precisely that of the catch; and I
think we may go beyond, and say, that if such a population could be
isolated, and this mispronunciation should become the rule, it
might prove the first stage of transition from t to k, which is the
disease of Polynesian languages. The tendency of the Marquesans,
however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very
common letter l, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is
agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon
grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will
you find such names as Haaii and Paaaeua, when each individual
vowel must be separately uttered.
These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of
my own folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not
only inclined me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but
continually modified my judgment. A polite Englishman comes to-day
to the Marquesans and is amazed to find the men tattooed; polite
Italians came not long ago to England and found our fathers stained
with woad; and when I paid the return visit as a little boy, I was
highly diverted with the backwardness of Italy: so insecure, so
much a matter of the day and hour, is the pre-eminence of race. It
was so that I hit upon a means of communication which I recommend
to travellers. When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of
superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and
fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism:
Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's head, the second-sight, the
Water Kelpie,--each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the
black bull's head of Stirling procured me the legend of Rahero; and
what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts,
enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the Tevas
of Tahiti. The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship
grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship
that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content
himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown. And the
presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk
in clouds of darkness.
The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the
west of the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A
grove of palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as
for a triumph) with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour.
A road runs from end to end of the covert among beds of flowers,
the milliner's shop of the community; and here and there, in the
grateful twilight, in an air filled with a diversity of scents, and
still within hearing of the surf upon the reef, the native houses
stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same word, as we have seen,
represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a shade of
difference, the abode of man. But although the word be the same,
the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among
the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most
commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses
of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the
polite Samoan--none of these can be compared with the Marquesan
paepae-hae, or dwelling platform. The paepae is an oblong terrace
built without cement or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty
feet in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and
accessible by a broad stair. Along the back of this, and coming to
about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a
covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in
its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming,
some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one
of White's sewing-machines the only marks of civilization. On the
outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a
shed; at the other there is perhaps a pen for pigs; the remainder
is the evening lounge and al fresco banquet-hall of the
inhabitants. To some houses water is brought down the mountains in
bamboo pipes, perforated for the sake of sweetness. With the
Highland comparison in my mind, I was struck to remember the
sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I have sat and been
entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands. Two things, I
suppose, explain the contrast. In Scotland wood is rare, and with
materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is
excluded. And in Scotland it is cold. Shelter and a hearth are
needs so pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day
after a bare bellyful, and at night when he saith, 'Aha, it is
warm!' he has not appetite for more. Or if for something else,
then something higher; a fine school of poetry and song arose in
these rough shelters, and an air like 'Lochaber no more' is an
evidence of refinement more convincing, as well as more
imperishable, than a palace.
To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and
dependants resort. In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes,
and the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps
the lamp glints already between the pillars and the house, you
shall behold them silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and
children; and the dogs and pigs frisk together up the terrace
stairway, switching rival tails. The strangers from the ship were
soon equally welcome: welcome to dip their fingers in the wooden
dish, to drink cocoanuts, to share the circulating pipe, and to
hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of the French, the
Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San Francisco and New
Yo'ko. In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any tourist, I
have met the same plain and dignified hospitality.
I have mentioned two facts--the distasteful behaviour of our
earliest visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon
the cushions--which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan
manners. The great majority of Polynesians are excellently
mannered; but the Marquesan stands apart, annoying and attractive,
wild, shy, and refined. If you make him a present he affects to
forget it, and it must be offered him again at his going: a pretty
formality I have found nowhere else. A hint will get rid of any
one or any number; they are so fiercely proud and modest; while
many of the more lovable but blunter islanders crowd upon a
stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies. A slight or an
insult the Marquesan seems never to forget. I was one day talking
by the wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes
suddenly to flash and his stature to swell. A white horseman was
coming down the mountain, and as he passed, and while he paused to
exchange salutations with myself, Hoka was still staring and
ruffling like a gamecock. It was a Corsican who had years before
called him cochon sauvage--cocon chauvage, as Hoka mispronounced
it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be
supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into
offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding
silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality.
When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly
explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa-
nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things that a
gentleman should give, not sell; or at least that he should not
sell to any friend. On another occasion I gave my boat's crew a
luncheon of chocolate and biscuits. I had sinned, I could never
learn how, against some point of observance; and though I was drily
thanked, my offerings were left upon the beach. But our worst
mistake was a slight we put on Toma, Hoka's adoptive father, and in
his own eyes the rightful chief of Anaho. In the first place, we
did not call upon him, as perhaps we should, in his fine new
European house, the only one in the hamlet. In the second, when we
came ashore upon a visit to his rival, Taipi-Kikino, it was Toma
whom we saw standing at the head of the beach, a magnificent figure
of a man, magnificently tattooed; and it was of Toma that we asked
our question: 'Where is the chief?' 'What chief?' cried Toma, and
turned his back on the blasphemers. Nor did he forgive us. Hoka
came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of all the
countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the Casco.
The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute. The
flying city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James's Park
affords but a pale figure of the Casco anchored before Anaho; for
the Londoner has still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan
passes to his grave through an unbroken uniformity of days.
On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a
valedictory party came on board: nine of our particular friends
equipped with gifts and dressed as for a festival. Hoka, the chief
dancer and singer, the greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the
handsomest young fellows in the world-sullen, showy, dramatic,
light as a feather and strong as an ox--it would have been hard, on
that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there stooped and silent,
his face heavy and grey. It was strange to see the lad so much
affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of the
curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so
gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the
half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:
strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan,
the last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all
been given to us by their possessors--their chief merchandise, for
which they had sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers,
which they pressed on us for nothing as soon as we were friends.
The last visit was not long protracted. One after another they
shook hands and got down into their canoe; when Hoka turned his
back immediately upon the ship, so that we saw his face no more.
Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and facing us with
gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis dipped the
ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats. This was the
farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and
though the Casco remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not
one returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided
appearing on the beach. This reserve and dignity is the finest
trait of the Marquesan.
