CHAPTER VI--CHIEFS AND TAPUS
We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the
chief called Taipi-Kikino. An elegant guest at table, skilled in
the use of knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun
and started for the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable,
always ingratiating and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he
found his cheerfulness. He had enough to sober him, I thought, in
his official budget. His expenses--for he was always seen attired
in virgin white--must have by far exceeded his income of six
dollars in the year, or say two shillings a month. And he was
himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest in the
village. It was currently supposed that his elder brother,
Kauanui, must have helped him out. But how comes it that the elder
brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy
commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in
Anaho? That the one should be wealthy, and the other almost
indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for
comparatively few children are brought up in the house or succeed
to the estates of their natural begetters. That the one should be
chief instead of the other must be explained (in a very Irish
fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at all.
Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been
deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed. We have seen, in the
same house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such
extruded island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life
and death, now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours. So when
the French overthrew hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the
Marquesas freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with
a vote for a conseiller-general at Tahiti, they probably conceived
themselves upon the path to popularity; and so far from that, they
were revolting public sentiment. The deposition of the chiefs was
perhaps sometimes needful; the appointment of others may have been
needful also; it was at least a delicate business. The Government
of George II. exiled many Highland magnates. It never occurred to
them to manufacture substitutes; and if the French have been more
bold, we have yet to see with what success.
Our chief at Anaho was always called, he always called himself,
Taipi-Kikino; and yet that was not his name, but only the wand of
his false position. As soon as he was appointed chief, his name--
which signified, if I remember exactly, PRINCE BORN AMONG FLOWERS--
fell in abeyance, and he was dubbed instead by the expressive
byword, Taipi-Kikino--HIGHWATER MAN-OF-NO-ACCOUNT--or, Englishing
more boldly, BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK--a witty and a wicked cut. A
nickname in Polynesia destroys almost the memory of the original
name. To-day, if we were Polynesians, Gladstone would be no more
heard of. We should speak of and address our Nestor as the Grand
Old Man, and it is so that himself would sign his correspondence.
Not the prevalence, then, but the significancy of the nickname is
to be noted here. The new authority began with small prestige.
Taipi has now been some time in office; from all I saw he seemed a
person very fit. He is not the least unpopular, and yet his power
is nothing. He is a chief to the French, and goes to breakfast
with the Resident; but for any practical end of chieftaincy a rag
doll were equally efficient.
We had been but three days in Anaho when we received the visit of
the chief of Hatiheu, a man of weight and fame, late leader of a
war upon the French, late prisoner in Tahiti, and the last eater of
long-pig in Nuka-hiva. Not many years have elapsed since he was
seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man's arm across his
shoulder. 'So does Kooamua to his enemies!' he roared to the
passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold
this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French,
paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man of
the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and
decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and
with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone's--only for the
brownness of the skin, and the high-chief's tattooing, all one side
and much of the other being of an even blue. Further acquaintance
increased our opinion of his sense. He viewed the Casco in a
manner then quite new to us, examining her lines and the running of
the gear; to a piece of knitting on which one of the party was
engaged, he must have devoted ten minutes' patient study; nor did
he desist before he had divined the principles; and he was
interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he learned to
work. When he departed he carried away with him a list of his
family, with his own name printed by his own hand at the bottom. I
should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little
of a humbug. He told us, for instance, that he was a person of
exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate: the
commons might be sots, but the chief could not stoop so low. And
not many days after he was to be observed in a state of smiling and
lop-sided imbecility, the Casco ribbon upside down on his
dishonoured hat.
But his business that morning in Anaho is what concerns us here.
The devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon the reef; it was
judged fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for
that end, in Polynesia, a tapu (vulgarly spelt 'taboo') has to be
declared, and who was to declare it? Taipi might; he ought; it was
a chief part of his duty; but would any one regard the inhibition
of a Beggar on Horse-back? He might plant palm branches: it did
not in the least follow that the spot was sacred. He might recite
the spell: it was shrewdly supposed the spirits would not hearken.
And so the old, legitimate cannibal must ride over the mountains to
do it for him; and the respectable official in white clothes could
but look on and envy. At about the same time, though in a
different manner, Kooamua established a forest law. It was
observed the cocoa-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green
nuts impoverishes and at last endangers the tree. Now Kooamua
could tapu the reef, which was public property, but he could not
tapu other people's palms; and the expedient adopted was
interesting. He tapu'd his own trees, and his example was imitated
over all Hatiheu and Anaho. I fear Taipi might have tapu'd all
that he possessed and found none to follow him. So much for the
esteem in which the dignity of an appointed chief is held by
others; a single circumstance will show what he thinks of it
himself. I never met one, but he took an early opportunity to
explain his situation. True, he was only an appointed chief when I
beheld him; but somewhere else, perhaps upon some other isle, he
was a chieftain by descent: upon which ground, he asked me (so to
say it) to excuse his mushroom honours.
It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for
thoroughly sensible ends. With surprise, I say, because the nature
of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe. It is taken
usually in the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such
as that which to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking,
or yesterday prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on
Sunday. The error is no less natural than it is unjust. The
Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought
of ancient Rome; with them the idea of law has not been disengaged
from that of morals or propriety; so that tapu has to cover the
whole field, and implies indifferently that an act is criminal,
immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say)
'not in good form.' Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough,
such as those which deleted words out of the language, and
particularly those which related to women. Tapu encircled women
upon all hands. Many things were forbidden to men; to women we may
say that few were permitted. They must not sit on the paepae; they
must not go up to it by the stair; they must not eat pork; they
must not approach a boat; they must not cook at a fire which any
male had kindled. The other day, after the roads were made, it was
observed the women plunged along margin through the bush, and when
they came to a bridge waded through the water: roads and bridges
were the work of men's hands, and tapu for the foot of women. Even
a man's saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting
lady dares to use. Thus on the Anaho side of the island, only two
white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles;
and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one or
other. It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of
them, to an increased reserve between the sexes. Regard for female
chastity is the usual excuse for these disabilities that men
delight to lay upon their wives and mothers. Here the regard is
absent; and behold the women still bound hand and foot with
meaningless proprieties! The women themselves, who are survivors
of the old regimen, admit that in those days life was not worth
living. And yet even then there were exceptions. There were
female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses besides; nice customs
curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a
High Place, Father Simeon Delmar was shown a stone, and told it was
the throne of some well-descended lady. How exactly parallel is
this with European practice, when princesses were suffered to
penetrate the strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land
in which they were denied the control of their own children.
But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful
restrictions. We have seen it as the organ of paternal government.
It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing
to enforce them, rights of private property. Thus a man, weary of
the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to
this day you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great-
grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn. Or take
another case. Anaho is known as 'the country without popoi.' The
word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main food of
the people: thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in
the Marquesas, of breadfruit. And a Marquesan does not readily
conceive life possible without his favourite diet. A few years ago
a drought killed the breadfruit trees and the bananas in the
district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the open-handed
customs of the island, a singular state of things arose. Well-
watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho
accordingly crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, 'gave him
his name'--an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected--and from
this improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all
the world as though he had paid for them. Hence a continued
traffic on the road. Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and
glistening with sweat, may be seen at all hours of the day, a stick
across his bare shoulders, tripping nervously under a double
burthen of green fruits. And on the far side of the gap a dozen
stone posts on the wayside in the shadow of a grove mark the
breathing-space of the popoi-carriers. A little back from the
beach, and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to
find a cluster of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest.
'Why do you not take these?' I asked. 'Tapu,' said Hoka; and I
thought to myself (after the manner of dull travellers) what
children and fools these people were to toil over the mountain and
despoil innocent neighbours when the staff of life was thus growing
at their door. I was the more in error. In the general
destruction these surviving trees were enough only for the family
of the proprietor, and by the simple expedient of declaring a tapu
he enforced his right.
The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of
infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness. A slow disease
follows on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the
bones of the same fish burned with the due mysteries. The cocoa-
nut and breadfruit tapu works more swiftly. Suppose you have eaten
tapu fruit at the evening meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy;
in the morning, swelling and a dark discoloration will have
attacked your neck, whence they spread upward to the face; and in
two days, unless the cure be interjected, you must die. This cure
is prepared from the rubbed leaves of the tree from which the
patient stole; so that he cannot be saved without confessing to the
Tahuku the person whom he wronged. In the experience of my
informant, almost no tapu had been put in use, except the two
described: he had thus no opportunity to learn the nature and
operation of the others; and, as the art of making them was
jealously guarded amongst the old men, he believed the mystery
would soon die out. I should add that he was no Marquesan, but a
Chinaman, a resident in the group from boyhood, and a reverent
believer in the spells which he described. White men, amongst whom
Ah Fu included himself, were exempt; but he had a tale of a
Tahitian woman, who had come to the Marquesas, eaten tapu fish,
and, although uninformed of her offence and danger, had been
afflicted and cured exactly like a native.
Doubtless the belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and
fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should
be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that
they may detect a depredator by his sickness. Or, perhaps, we
should understand the idea of the hidden tapu otherwise, as a
politic device to spread uneasiness and extort confessions: so
that, when a man is ailing, he shall ransack his brain for any
possible offence, and send at once for any proprietor whose rights
he has invaded. 'Had you hidden a tapu?' we may conceive him
asking; and I cannot imagine the proprietor gainsaying it; and this
is perhaps the strangest feature of the system--that it should be
regarded from without with such a mental and implicit awe, and,
when examined from within, should present so many apparent
evidences of design.
We read in Dr. Campbell's Poenamo of a New Zealand girl, who was
foolishly told that she had eaten a tapu yam, and who instantly
sickened, and died in the two days of simple terror. The period is
the same as in the Marquesas; doubtless the symptoms were so too.
How singular to consider that a superstition of such sway is
possibly a manufactured article; and that, even if it were not
originally invented, its details have plainly been arranged by the
authorities of some Polynesian Scotland Yard. Fitly enough, the
belief is to-day--and was probably always--far from universal.
Hell at home is a strong deterrent with some; a passing thought
with others; with others, again, a theme of public mockery, not
always well assured; and so in the Marquesas with the tapu. Mr.
Regler has seen the two extremes of scepticism and implicit fear.
In the tapu grove he found one fellow stealing breadfruit, cheerful
and impudent as a street arab; and it was only on a menace of
exposure that he showed himself the least discountenanced. The
other case was opposed in every point. Mr. Regler asked a native
to accompany him upon a voyage; the man went gladly enough, but
suddenly perceiving a dead tapu fish in the bottom of the boat,
leaped back with a scream; nor could the promise of a dollar
prevail upon him to advance.
The Marquesan, it will be observed, adheres to the old idea of the
local circumscription of beliefs and duties. Not only are the
whites exempt from consequences; but their transgressions seem to
be viewed without horror. It was Mr. Regler who had killed the
fish; yet the devout native was not shocked at Mr. Regler--only
refused to join him in his boat. A white is a white: the servant
(so to speak) of other and more liberal gods; and not to be blamed
if he profit by his liberty. The Jews were perhaps the first to
interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the Jewish virus is
still strong in Christianity. All the world must respect our
tapus, or we gnash our teeth.
