PART III: THE GILBERTS
CHAPTER I--BUTARITARI
At Honolulu we had said farewell to the Casco and to Captain Otis,
and our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was
taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu,
on a pigmy trading schooner, the Equator, Captain Dennis Reid; and
on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian
fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and
bore with a fair wind for Micronesia.
The whole extent of the South Seas is a desert of ships; more
especially that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in
these islands; communication is by accident; where you may have
designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive
another. It was my hope, for instance, to have reached the
Carolines, and returned to the light of day by way of Manila and
the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were destined to re-
appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of mountains.
Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had
intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary
cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings
upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins;
I had learned to welcome shark's flesh for a variety; and a
mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long
lost to sense and dear to aspiration.
The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near
the line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb
ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a
heavenly brightness. Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava,
measuring perhaps (at the widest) a quarter of a mile from beach to
beach. In both, a coarse kind of taro thrives; its culture is a
chief business of the natives, and the consequent mounds and
ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye. In all else they
show the customary features of an atoll: the low horizon, the
expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the
sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and
interest of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points
like life on shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken
for granted; and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon
the centre of attention. The isles are populous, independent,
seats of kinglets, recently civilised, little visited. In the last
decade many changes have crept in; women no longer go unclothed
till marriage; the widow no longer sleeps at night and goes abroad
by day with the skull of her dead husband; and, fire-arms being
introduced, the spear and the shark-tooth sword are sold for
curiosities. Ten years ago all these things and practices were to
be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old society will have
entirely vanished. We came in a happy moment to see its
institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed.
Populous and independent--warrens of men, ruled over with some
rustic pomp--such was the first and still the recurring impression
of these tiny lands. As we stood across the lagoon for the town of
Butaritari, a stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with
the brown roofs of houses; those of the palace and king's summer
parlour (which are of corrugated iron) glittered near one end
conspicuously bright; the royal colours flew hard by on a tall
flagstaff; in front, on an artificial islet, the gaol played the
part of a martello. Even upon this first and distant view, the
place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a village; rather of
that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city rustic and yet
royal.
The lagoon is shoal. The tide being out, we waded for some quarter
of a mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a
flagrant stagnancy of sun and heat. The lee side of a line island
after noon is indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the
trade will be still blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon
it will be blowing also, speeding the canoes; but the screen of
bush completely intercepts it from the shore, and sleep and silence
and companies of mosquitoes brood upon the towns.
We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise. A few
inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed.
As we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to
explore a city of the dead. Only, between the posts of open
houses, we could see the townsfolk stretched in the siesta,
sometimes a family together veiled in a mosquito-net, sometimes a
single sleeper on a platform like a corpse on a bier.
The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of
churches. Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they
could scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when
the toys are mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many
were open sheds; some took the form of roofed stages; others were
walled and the walls pierced with little windows. A few were
perched on piles in the lagoon; the rest stood at random on a
green, through which the roadway made a ribbon of sand, or along
the embankments of a sheet of water like a shallow dock. One and
all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree wood and palm-
tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no hammer
sounded, in their building, and they were held together by lashings
of palm-tree sinnet.
In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island,
a lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of
framing sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the
street shows in a vista. The proportions of the place, in such
surroundings, and built of such materials, appeared august; and we
threaded the nave with a sentiment befitting visitors in a
cathedral. Benches run along either side. In the midst, on a
crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king and queen when they
shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop, apparently from a
hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the hoop (which
hangs askew) is dressed with streamers of the same material, red
and white.
This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and
presently we stood before its seat and centre. The palace is built
of imported wood upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron,
the yard enclosed with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of
lych-house. It cannot be called spacious; a labourer in the States
is sometimes more commodiously lodged; but when we had the chance
to see it within, we found it was enriched (beyond all island
expectation) with coloured advertisements and cuts from the
illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the treasures of
the crown stand public: a bell of a good magnitude, two pieces of
cannon, and a single shell. The bell cannot be rung nor the guns
fired; they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade
of the royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square.
A straight gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace
door; the containing quay-walls excellently built of coral; over
against the mouth, by what seems an effect of landscape art, the
martello-like islet of the gaol breaks the lagoon. Vassal chiefs
with tribute, neighbour monarchs come a-roving, might here sail in,
view with surprise these extensive public works, and be awed by
these mouths of silent cannon. It was impossible to see the place
and not to fancy it designed for pageantry. But the elaborate
theatre then stood empty; the royal house deserted, its doors and
windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence.
On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient
gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on
the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing moving.
The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a
parapet. At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands
into an oblong peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and
summer parlour of the king. The midst is occupied by an open house
or permanent marquee--called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now
pronounced, a maniap'--at the lowest estimation forty feet by
sixty. The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a
woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of
coral, within by a frame of wood. The floor is of broken coral,
divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far
enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and
disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen
to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.
It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when
we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright
shed, we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful
people, some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of
Butaritari. The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen
yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a
cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy
musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood
displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved, upon examination, to be
a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats,
lolled Tebureimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the
house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas
which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and
cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous
and dull: he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held
awake by apprehension: a pepper rajah muddled with opium, and
listening for the march of a Dutch army, looks perhaps not
otherwise. We were to grow better acquainted, and first and last I
had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet always to
hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is no
doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.
The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming. But the
queen, who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible;
and there was present an interpreter so willing that his volubility
became at last the cause of our departure. He had greeted us upon
our entrance:- 'That is the honourable King, and I am his
interpreter,' he had said, with more stateliness than truth. For
he held no appointment in the court, seemed extremely ill-
acquainted with the island language, and was present, like
ourselves, upon a visit of civility. Mr. Williams was his name:
an American darkey, runaway ship's cook, and bar-keeper at The Land
we Live in tavern, Butaritari. I never knew a man who had more
words in his command or less truth to communicate; neither the
gloom of the monarch, nor my own efforts to be distant, could in
the least abash him; and when the scene closed, the darkey was left
talking.
The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch
itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence. So much the more
vivid was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the
islet, the Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his
unmelodious David, Mr. Williams, chattering through the drowsy
hours.
