CHAPTER VI--GRAVEYARD STORIES
WITH my superstitious friend, the islander, I fear I am not wholly
frank, often leading the way with stories of my own, and being
always a grave and sometimes an excited hearer. But the deceit is
scarce mortal, since I am as pleased to hear as he to tell, as
pleased with the story as he with the belief; and, besides, it is
entirely needful. For it is scarce possible to exaggerate the
extent and empire of his superstitions; they mould his life, they
colour his thinking; and when he does not speak to me of ghosts,
and gods, and devils, he is playing the dissembler and talking only
with his lips. With thoughts so different, one must indulge the
other; and I would rather that I should indulge his superstition
than he my incredulity. Of one thing, besides, I may be sure: Let
me indulge it as I please, I shall not hear the whole; for he is
already on his guard with me, and the amount of the lore is
boundless.
I will give but a few instances at random, chiefly from my own
doorstep in Upolu, during the past month (October 1890). One of my
workmen was sent the other day to the banana patch, there to dig;
this is a hollow of the mountain, buried in woods, out of all sight
and cry of mankind; and long before dusk Lafaele was back again
beside the cook-house with embarrassed looks; he dared not longer
stay alone, he was afraid of 'spirits in the bush.' It seems these
are the souls of the unburied dead, haunting where they fell, and
wearing woodland shapes of pig, or bird, or insect; the bush is
full of them, they seem to eat nothing, slay solitary wanderers
apparently in spite, and at times, in human form, go down to
villages and consort with the inhabitants undetected. So much I
learned a day or so after, walking in the bush with a very
intelligent youth, a native. It was a little before noon; a grey
day and squally; and perhaps I had spoken lightly. A dark squall
burst on the side of the mountain; the woods shook and cried; the
dead leaves rose from the ground in clouds, like butterflies; and
my companion came suddenly to a full stop. He was afraid, he said,
of the trees falling; but as soon as I had changed the subject of
our talk he proceeded with alacrity. A day or two before a
messenger came up the mountain from Apia with a letter; I was in
the bush, he must await my return, then wait till I had answered:
and before I was done his voice sounded shrill with terror of the
coming night and the long forest road. These are the commons.
Take the chiefs. There has been a great coming and going of signs
and omens in our group. One river ran down blood; red eels were
captured in another; an unknown fish was thrown upon the coast, an
ominous word found written on its scales. So far we might be
reading in a monkish chronicle; now we come on a fresh note, at
once modern and Polynesian. The gods of Upolu and Savaii, our two
chief islands, contended recently at cricket. Since then they are
at war. Sounds of battle are heard to roll along the coast. A
woman saw a man swim from the high seas and plunge direct into the
bush; he was no man of that neighbourhood; and it was known he was
one of the gods, speeding to a council. Most perspicuous of all, a
missionary on Savaii, who is also a medical man, was disturbed late
in the night by knocking; it was no hour for the dispensary, but at
length he woke his servant and sent him to inquire; the servant,
looking from a window, beheld crowds of persons, all with grievous
wounds, lopped limbs, broken heads, and bleeding bullet-holes; but
when the door was opened all had disappeared. They were gods from
the field of battle. Now these reports have certainly
significance; it is not hard to trace them to political grumblers
or to read in them a threat of coming trouble; from that merely
human side I found them ominous myself. But it was the spiritual
side of their significance that was discussed in secret council by
my rulers. I shall best depict this mingled habit of the
Polynesian mind by two connected instances. I once lived in a
village, the name of which I do not mean to tell. The chief and
his sister were persons perfectly intelligent: gentlefolk, apt of
speech. The sister was very religious, a great church-goer, one
that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that
she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was somewhat
of a freethinker; at the least, a latitudinarian: he was a man,
besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an
impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected
superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had
discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in
the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible
authority, to task. 'There is something wrong about your
graveyard,' said I, 'which you must attend to, or it may have very
bad results.' 'Something wrong? What is it?' he asked, with an
emotion that surprised me. 'If you care to go along there any
evening about nine o'clock you can see for yourself,' said I. He
stepped backward. 'A ghost!' he cried.
In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to
blame another. Half blood and whole, pious and debauched,
intelligent and dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine
with their recent Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the
old island deities. So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly
dwindled into village bogies; so to-day, the theological Highlander
sneaks from under the eye of the Free Church divine to lay an
offering by a sacred well.
I try to deal with the whole matter here because of a particular
quality in Paumotuan superstitions. It is true I heard them told
by a man with a genius for such narrations. Close about our
evening lamp, within sound of the island surf, we hung on his
words, thrilling. The reader, in far other scenes, must listen
close for the faint echo.
This bundle of weird stories sprang from the burial and the woman's
selfish conjuration. I was dissatisfied with what I heard, harped
upon questions, and struck at last this vein of metal. It is from
sundown to about four in the morning that the kinsfolk camp upon
the grave; and these are the hours of the spirits' wanderings. At
any time of the night--it may be earlier, it may be later--a sound
is to be heard below, which is the noise of his liberation; at four
sharp, another and a louder marks the instant of the re-
imprisonment; between-whiles, he goes his malignant rounds. 'Did
you ever see an evil spirit?' was once asked of a Paumotuan.
'Once.' 'Under what form?' 'It was in the form of a crane.' 'And
how did you know that crane to be a spirit?' was asked. 'I will
tell you,' he answered; and this was the purport of his
inconclusive narrative. His father had been dead nearly a
fortnight; others had wearied of the watch; and as the sun was
setting, he found himself by the grave alone. It was not yet dark,
rather the hour of the afterglow, when he was aware of a snow-white
crane upon the coral mound; presently more cranes came, some white,
some black; then the cranes vanished, and he saw in their place a
white cat, to which there was silently joined a great company of
cats of every hue conceivable; then these also disappeared, and he
was left astonished.
This was an anodyne appearance. Take instead the experience of
Rua-a-mariterangi on the isle of Katiu. He had a need for some
pandanus, and crossed the isle to the sea-beach, where it chiefly
flourishes. The day was still, and Rua was surprised to hear a
crashing sound among the thickets, and then the fall of a
considerable tree. Here must be some one building a canoe; and he
entered the margin of the wood to find and pass the time of day
with this chance neighbour. The crashing sounded more at hand; and
then he was aware of something drawing swiftly near among the tree-
tops. It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so that its
hands were free for murder; it depended safely by the slightest
twigs; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua
recognised it for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging
as it came. Prayer was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of
the Shadow, and it is to prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes
his escape. No merely human expedition had availed.
This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was
abroad by day. And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of
the night watch and the many references to the rising of the
morning star, it is no singular exception. I could never find a
case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in
its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems
the signal of its coming. Mr. Donat was once pearling on the
uninhabited isle of Haraiki. It was a day without a breath of
wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of
contumelious breezes. The divers were in the midst of the lagoon
upon their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in
the camp. Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native
who accompanied Donat into the wood in quest of sea-fowls' eggs.
In a moment, out of the stillness, came the sound of the fall of a
great tree. Donat would have passed on to find the cause. 'No,'
cried his companion, 'that was no tree. It was something NOT
RIGHT. Let us go back to camp.' Next Sunday the divers were
turned on, all that part of the isle was thoroughly examined, and
sure enough no tree had fallen. A little later Mr. Donat saw one
of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar unaffected
panic, on the same isle. But neither would explain, and it was not
till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the occasion
of their terrors.
But whether by day or night, the purpose of the dead in these
abhorred activities is still the same. In Samoa, my informant had
no idea of the food of the bush spirits; no such ambiguity would
exist in the mind of a Paumotuan. In that hungry archipelago,
living and dead must alike toil for nutriment; and the race having
been cannibal in the past, the spirits are so still. When the
living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal imagination drew the
shocking inference that the dead might eat the living. Doubtless
they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere malice.
Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but
even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a
cannibal dainty. And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least
in the far eastern islands, is to prowl for food. It was as a
dainty morsel for a meal that the woman denounced Donat at the
funeral. There are spirits besides who prey in particular not on
the bodies but on the souls of the dead. The point is clearly made
in a Tahitian story. A child fell sick, grew swiftly worse, and at
last showed signs of death. The mother hastened to the house of a
sorcerer, who lived hard by. 'You are yet in time,' said he; 'a
spirit has just run past my door carrying the soul of your child
wrapped in the leaf of a purao; but I have a spirit stronger and
swifter who will run him down ere he has time to eat it.' Wrapped
in a leaf: like other things edible and corruptible.
Or take an experience of Mr. Donat's on the island of Anaa. It was
a night of a high wind, with violent squalls; his child was very
sick, and the father, though he had gone to bed, lay wakeful,
hearkening to the gale. All at once a fowl was violently dashed on
the house wall. Supposing he had forgot to put it in shelter with
the rest, Donat arose, found the bird (a cock) lying on the
verandah, and put it in the hen-house, the door of which he
securely fastened. Fifteen minutes later the business was
repeated, only this time, as it was being dashed against the wall,
the bird crew. Again Donat replaced it, examining the hen-house
thoroughly and finding it quite perfect; as he was so engaged the
wind puffed out his light, and he must grope back to the door a
good deal shaken. Yet a third time the bird was dashed upon the
wall; a third time Donat set it, now near dead, beside its mates;
and he was scarce returned before there came a rush, like that of a
furious strong man, against the door, and a whistle as loud as that
of a railway engine rang about the house. The sceptical reader may
here detect the finger of the tempest; but the women gave up all
for lost and clustered on the beds lamenting. Nothing followed,
and I must suppose the gale somewhat abated, for presently after a
chief came visiting. He was a bold man to be abroad so late, but
doubtless carried a bright lantern. And he was certainly a man of
counsel, for as soon as he heard the details of these disturbances
he was in a position to explain their nature. 'Your child,' said
he, 'must certainly die. This is the evil spirit of our island who
lies in wait to eat the spirits of the newly dead.' And then he
went on to expatiate on the strangeness of the spirit's conduct.
He was not usually, he explained, so open of assault, but sat
silent on the house-top waiting, in the guise of a bird, while
within the people tended the dying and bewailed the dead, and had
no thought of peril. But when the day came and the doors were
opened, and men began to go abroad, blood-stains on the wall
betrayed the tragedy.
This is the quality I admire in Paumotuan legend. In Tahiti the
spirit-eater is said to assume a vesture which has much more of
pomp, but how much less of horror. It has been seen by all sorts
and conditions, native and foreign; only the last insist it is a
meteor. My authority was not so sure. He was riding with his wife
about two in the morning; both were near asleep, and the horses not
much better. It was a brilliant and still night, and the road
wound over a mountain, near by a deserted marae (old Tahitian
temple). All at once the appearance passed above them: a form of
light; the head round and greenish; the body long, red, and with a
focus of yet redder brilliancy about the midst. A buzzing hoot
accompanied its passage; it flew direct out of one marae, and
direct for another down the mountain side. And this, as my
informant argued, is suggestive. For why should a mere meteor
frequent the altars of abominable gods? The horses, I should say,
were equally dismayed with their riders. Now I am not dismayed at
all--not even agreeably. Give me rather the bird upon the house-
top and the morning blood-gouts on the wall.
But the dead are not exclusive in their diet. They carry with them
to the grave, in particular, the Polynesian taste for fish, and
enter at times with the living into a partnership in fishery. Rua-
a-mariterangi is again my authority; I feel it diminishes the
credit of the fact, but how it builds up the image of this
inveterate ghost-seer! He belongs to the miserably poor island of
Taenga, yet his father's house was always well supplied. As Rua
grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with this fortunate
parent. They rowed the lagoon at dusk, to an unlikely place, and
the lay down in the stern, and the father began vainly to cast his
line over the bows. It is to be supposed that Rua slept; and when
he awoke there was the figure of another beside his father, and his
father was pulling in the fish hand over hand. 'Who is that man,
father?' Rua asked. 'It is none of your business,' said the
father; and Rua supposed the stranger had swum off to them from
shore. Night after night they fared into the lagoon, often to the
most unlikely places; night after night the stranger would suddenly
be seen on board, and as suddenly be missed; and morning after
morning the canoe returned laden with fish. 'My father is a very
lucky man,' thought Rua. At last, one fine day, there came first
one boat party and then another, who must be entertained; father
and son put off later than usual into the lagoon; and before the
canoe was landed it was four o'clock, and the morning star was
close on the horizon. Then the stranger appeared seized with some
distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which
was that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east,
set the tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a
strange, shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan--a thing to
freeze the blood; and, the day-star just rising from the sea, he
suddenly was not. Then Rua understood why his father prospered,
why his fishes rotted early in the day, and why some were always
carried to the cemetery and laid upon the graves. My informant is
a man not certainly averse to superstition, but he keeps his head,
and takes a certain superior interest, which I may be allowed to
call scientific. The last point reminding him of some parallel
practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the fish were left, or carried
home again after a formal dedication. It appears old Mariterangi
practised both methods; sometimes treating his shadowy partner to a
mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish to rot upon the
grave.
It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and
the Polynesian varua ino or aitu o le vao is clearly the near
kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire. Here is a tale in which the
kinship appears broadly marked. On the atoll of Penrhyn, then
still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror
of the natives. He died, he was buried; and his late neighbours
had scarce tasted the delights of licence ere his ghost appeared
about the village. Fear seized upon all; a council was held of the
chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval of the Rarotongan
missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in the presence
of several whites--my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one--the grave was
opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred face
down. The still recent staking of suicides in England and the
decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close
parallels.
So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During
the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes
headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but
this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still
lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular
scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges
of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long centred and the loss had
been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet
and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was
earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground; and the
women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any
living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third
coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in,
carried home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The
rite was practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the
soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection. The present
king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares
the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an
entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise
hurtful. And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents
the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my Lafaele marks
the grosser terrors of the ignorant.
This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps
explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all
to share our European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the
first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in
houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres
dwelt with their children among the bones of generations. The
mummy, even in the making, was as little feared. In the Marquesas,
on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual
unction and exposure to the sun; in the Carolines, upon the
farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the family hearth.
Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in Samoa.
And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter,
cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night,
the head of her dead husband. In all these cases we may suppose
the process, whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully
exorcised the aitu.
But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure. Here the man is duly
buried, and he has to be watched. He is duly watched, and the
spirit goes abroad in spite of watches. Indeed, it is not the
purpose of the vigils to prevent these wanderings; only to mollify
by polite attention the inveterate malignity of the dead. Neglect
(it is supposed) may irritate and thus invite his visits, and the
aged and weakly sometimes balance risks and stay at home. Observe,
it is the dead man's kindred and next friends who thus deprecate
his fury with nocturnal watchings. Even the placatory vigil is
held perilous, except in company, and a boy was pointed out to me
in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own father. Not
the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect the
issue. A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was
beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the
less his spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the
neighbourhood of Government House was still avoided after dark. We
may sum up the cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires,
and the vampire spares none. And here we come face to face with a
tempting inconsistency. For the whistling spirits are notoriously
clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk
only, and that the medium was always of the race of the
communicating spirit. Here, then, we have the bonds of the family,
on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other,
helpfully persisting.
The child's soul in the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves. It is
the spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty. When they are
slain, the house is stained with blood. Rua's dead fisherman was
decomposed; so--and horribly--was his arboreal demon. The spirit,
then, is a thing material; and it is by the material ensigns of
corruption that he is distinguished from the living man. This
opinion is widespread, adds a gross terror to the more ugly
Polynesian tales, and sometimes defaces the more engaging with a
painful and incongruous touch. I will give two examples
sufficiently wide apart, one from Tahiti, one from Samoa.
And first from Tahiti. A man went to visit the husband of his
sister, then some time dead. In her life the sister had been
dainty in the island fashion, and went always adorned with a
coronet of flowers. In the midst of the night the brother awoke
and was aware of a heavenly fragrance going to and fro in the dark
house. The lamp I must suppose to have burned out; no Tahitian
would have lain down without one lighted. A while he lay wondering
and delighted; then called upon the rest. 'Do none of you smell
flowers?' he asked. 'O,' said his brother-in-law, 'we are used to
that here.' The next morning these two men went walking, and the
widower confessed that his dead wife came about the house
continually, and that he had even seen her. She was shaped and
dressed and crowned with flowers as in her lifetime; only she moved
a few inches above the earth with a very easy progress, and flitted
dryshod above the surface of the river. And now comes my point:
It was always in a back view that she appeared; and these brothers-
in-law, debating the affair, agreed that this was to conceal the
inroads of corruption.
Now for the Samoan story. I owe it to the kindness of Dr. F. Otto
Sierich, whose collection of folk-tales I expect with a high degree
of interest. A man in Manu'a was married to two wives and had no
issue. He went to Savaii, married there a third, and was more
fortunate. When his wife was near her time he remembered he was in
a strange island, like a poor man; and when his child was born he
must be shamed for lack of gifts. It was in vain his wife
dissuaded him. He returned to his father in Manu'a seeking help;
and with what he could get he set off in the night to re-embark.
Now his wives heard of his coming; they were incensed that he did
not stay to visit them; and on the beach, by his canoe, intercepted
and slew him. Now the third wife lay asleep in Savaii;--her babe
was born and slept by her side; and she was awakened by the spirit
of her husband. 'Get up,' he said, 'my father is sick in Manu'a
and we must go to visit him.' 'It is well,' said she; 'take you
the child, while I carry its mats.' 'I cannot carry the child,'
said the spirit; 'I am too cold from the sea.' When they were got
on board the canoe the wife smelt carrion. 'How is this?' she
said. 'What have you in the canoe that I should smell carrion?'
'It is nothing in the canoe,' said the spirit. 'It is the land-
wind blowing down the mountains, where some beast lies dead.' It
appears it was still night when they reached Manu'a--the swiftest
passage on record--and as they entered the reef the bale-fires
burned in the village. Again she asked him to carry the child; but
now he need no more dissemble. 'I cannot carry your child,' said
he, 'for I am dead, and the fires you see are burning for my
funeral.'
The curious may learn in Dr. Sierich's book the unexpected sequel
of the tale. Here is enough for my purpose. Though the man was
but new dead, the ghost was already putrefied, as though
putrefaction were the mark and of the essence of a spirit. The
vigil on the Paumotuan grave does not extend beyond two weeks, and
they told me this period was thought to coincide with that of the
resolution of the body. The ghost always marked with decay--the
danger seemingly ending with the process of dissolution--here is
tempting matter for the theorist. But it will not do. The lady of
the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still supposed
to bear the brand of perishability. The Resident had been more
than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still supposed to go
the rounds.
Of the lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in
which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the
various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float
idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be
wearisome to tell. One story I give, for it is singular in itself,
is well-known in Tahiti, and has this of interest, that it is post-
Christian, dating indeed from but a few years back. A princess of
the reigning house died; was transported to the neighbouring isle
of Raiatea; fell there under the empire of a spirit who condemned
her to climb coco-palms all day and bring him the nuts; was found
after some time in this miserable servitude by a second spirit, one
of her own house; and by him, upon her lamentations, reconveyed to
Tahiti, where she found her body still waked, but already swollen
with the approaches of corruption. It is a lively point in the
tale that, on the sight of this dishonoured tabernacle, the
princess prayed she might continue to be numbered with the dead.
But it seems it was too late, her spirit was replaced by the least
dignified of entrances, and her startled family beheld the body
move. The seemingly purgatorial labours, the helpful kindred
spirit, and the horror of the princess at the sight of her tainted
body, are all points to be remarked.
The truth is, the tales are not necessarily consistent in
themselves; and they are further darkened for the stranger by an
ambiguity of language. Ghosts, vampires, spirits, and gods are all
confounded. And yet I seem to perceive that (with exceptions)
those whom we would count gods were less maleficent. Permanent
spirits haunt and do murder in corners of Samoa; but those
legitimate gods of Upolu and Savaii, whose wars and cricketings of
late convulsed society, I did not gather to be dreaded, or not with
a like fear. The spirit of Aana that ate souls is certainly a
fearsome inmate; but the high gods, even of the archipelago, seem
helpful. Mahinui--from whom our convict-catechist had been named--
the spirit of the sea, like a Proteus endowed with endless avatars,
came to the assistance of the shipwrecked and carried them ashore
in the guise of a ray fish. The same divinity bore priests from
isle to isle about the archipelago, and by his aid, within the
century, persons have been seen to fly. The tutelar deity of each
isle is likewise helpful, and by a particular form of wedge-shaped
cloud on the horizon announces the coming of a ship.
To one who conceives of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so
beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens.
And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds,
beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only
(timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive
again for ever. They are known to be healthy and harmless living
people, dwellers of an underworld; and the same fancy is current in
Tahiti, where also they have the hair red. Tetea is the Tahitian
name; the Paumotuan, Mokurea.
