CHAPTER II--THE FOUR BROTHERS
The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little
Makin; some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-
independent chieftains do him qualified homage. The importance of
the office is measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be
absolute; and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory
of residents.
On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa's father, Nakaeia, the
eldest son, succeeded. He was a fellow of huge physical strength,
masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some
intelligence of men and business. Alone in his islands, it was he
who dealt and profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and
his subjects toiled for his behoof in servitude. When they wrought
long and well their taskmaster declared a holiday, and supplied and
shared a general debauch. The scale of his providing was at times
magnificent; six hundred dollars' worth of gin and brandy was set
forth at once; the narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry:
and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering
themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the fore-hatch of a
wrecked vessel, king and commons howling and singing as they went.
At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel ended; Makin became once
more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all
the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling
under his bloodshot eye.
The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity of justice was
affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it
seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault
and midnight murder were the forms of process. The king himself
would play the executioner: and his blows were dealt by stealth,
and with the help and countenance of none but his own wives. These
were his oarswomen; one that caught a crab, he slew incontinently
with the tiller; thus disciplined, they pulled him by night to the
scene of his vengeance, which he would then execute alone and
return well-pleased with his connubial crew. The inmates of the
harem held a station hard for us to conceive. Beasts of draught,
and driven by the fear of death, they were yet implicitly trusted
with their sovereign's life; they were still wives and queens, and
it was supposed that no man should behold their faces. They killed
by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those
boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of
Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which
commanded the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat
below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in
a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down,
and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered.
Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal. But during the
remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in
remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission,
although still in vain; and the palms, accessories to the fact,
were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of wifely purity in
an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise. And yet
scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem. He was at
that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a pleasure-
house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one day he
summoned a new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him; that
is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the
husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets. She would
be arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded,
decked with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her
friends supposed; for death, as she well knew. 'Tell me the man's
name, and I will spare you,' said Nakaeia. But the girl was
staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover and the queens
strangled her between the mats.
Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds
that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face
of justice; his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall
with respect the firmness of his government; and even the whites,
whom he long opposed and kept at arm's-length, give him the name
(in the canonical South Sea phrase) of 'a perfect gentleman when
sober.'
When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he
summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal
policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign. The warning was
taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the
model of Nakaeia's. Nanteitei dispensed with guards, and walked
abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag. To conceal his
weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day;
advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered.
The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for
the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief
means of buttressing the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for
himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for
instance, Messrs. Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the
north end of the town. The masonry was the work of the seventeen
queens, who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses; but the man
who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished,
lest by chance he should look down and see them.
It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some
time already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari--
Maka and Kanoa, two brave childlike men. Nakaeia would none of
their doctrine; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being
human, he had some affection for their persons. In the house,
before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors
of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife them, and menacing the
missionary if he interfered; yet he not only spared him at the
moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some
expressions of respect. Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more
completely under the spell. Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in
his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence
on the king which soon grew paramount. Nanteitei, with the royal
house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal
missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced. It was a
compendious act. The throne was thus impoverished, its influence
shaken, the queen's relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women
(some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market. I have
been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married
to two of these impromptu widows, and successively divorced by both
for misconduct. That two great and rich ladies (for both of these
were rich) should have married 'a man from another island' marks
the dissolution of society. The laws besides were wholly
remodelled, not always for the better. I love Maka as a man; as a
legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime,
stern to repress innocent pleasures.
War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet
Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession
of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother,
Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the
storm burst. The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to
have always underlain and perhaps alternated with monarchy. The
Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in
the Speak House and debate: and the king's chief superiority is a
form of closure--'The Speaking is over.' After the long monocracy
of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless
grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous
of the influence of Maka. Calumny, or rather caricature, was
called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was
reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in
the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed
affront, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings. In
the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the
dust. The king sat in the maniap' before the palace gate expecting
his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in
the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had
taken post and diverted the succours as they came. They came
singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about his
neck. 'Where are you going?' asked the chief. 'The king called
us,' they would reply. 'Here is your place. Sit down,' returned
the chief. With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient
force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was
summoned and surrendered. About this period, in almost every part
of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the
skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of
the isle, a menace to ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate;
his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was
stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public
speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the
commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the
king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a
troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt.
He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one
regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This
was by repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers,
he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old;
it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia
turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right
hand of the vigorous Nakaeia. Nontemat', Mr. Corpse, was his
appalling nickname, and he had earned it well. Again and again, at
the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of
night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was
the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from
the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a
puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the
reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the
name of Tebureimoa.
The change in the man's character was much commented on in the
island, and variously explained by opium and Christianity. To my
eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency.
Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of
the Old Men. Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of
desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of
government. He played his part of bravo in the past, following the
line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence:
to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible,
perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and
his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he
capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits
among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice that
put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the
sceptre of a king.
A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my
observation, depicts him in his two capacities. A chief in Little
Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, 'Who is Kaeia?' A bird
carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a
committee of three. Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second
commissioner died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and
green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him
the name of Abou ben Adhem. Mr. Corpse was troubled with a
scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such
a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the
blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse
than awkward. 'I will strike the blow,' said the venerable Abou;
and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise. The
quarry was decoyed into the bush; he was set to carrying a log; and
while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow.
Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror,
turned to flee. But their victim recalled them to his side. 'You
need not run away now,' he said. 'You have done this thing to me.
Stay.' He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat
with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare. All the stages of a
violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing
features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr.
Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he
has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery. I
was never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the
king's thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at
unawares. I had once an errand for his ear. It was once more the
hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers abroad, and these
directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where
Tebureimoa lay unguarded. We entered without ceremony, being in
some haste. He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his
Gilbert Island Bible with compunction. On our sudden entrance the
unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled
on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having
recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats. So Eglon looked
on Ehud.
The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just; Nakaeia, the
author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of
kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity.
Not the nature, but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances
damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been
incongruously placed. At home, in a quiet bystreet of a village,
the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is,
he shows some private virtues. He has no lands, only the use of
such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the
old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and
he knows and uses it. Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a
hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the
rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a
shilling for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total
of three hundred pounds a year. He had been some nine months on
the throne: had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure
unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent
his brother's photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two
hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother's
legacy of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket. An
affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy
carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace.
It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues; that Tebureimoa
should have a diversion filled me with surprise.
