The Fijians Part 21

The Fijian is not naturally a hot-blooded or lascivious race, in spite of all that I have said. Its growing profligacy has been called in to fill the place of the forms of excitement that formerly contented it.

Yet in certain directions the s.e.xual appet.i.te is easily aroused. The act of _tokalulu_ (spying upon women bathing) is reprobated by the tribal conscience, but is nevertheless exceedingly common among the young men, and the women exhibit their contempt for it in a remarkable manner.

Slightly clad as they are, Fijian women are as particular about absolute nudity as their European sisters. A Mbau girl of rank who was bathing in the river discovered a young mountaineer spying upon her from behind a clump of reeds. Instead of concealing herself, as her instinct prompted her, she allowed him to see that he was observed, and came out of the water before him _in puris naturalibus_. Having pa.s.sed him proudly by, she dressed herself leisurely and returned home to announce what she had done. The man never held up his head again in that village, for he caught the meaning of the action--that he was of no more account to her than a pig who had strayed down to the bathing-place. To the Fijian mind no explanation was necessary.

Dancing in the _meke_ appears to be a strong stimulus to pa.s.sion in the women. At a big _meke_ on the Ra coast one young man surpa.s.sed all his fellows in the war-dance, and as the torchlight gleamed on his oily limbs a young woman, unable to contain herself, rushed into the middle of the dancing ground, and clutching him, took his loin-cloth in her teeth. This terrible breach of decorum became the gossip of the district, and when she came to her senses she would have taken her own life for shame if her friends had not prevented her.

I must touch lightly on certain horrible forms of s.e.xual exaltation provoked by carnage. The corpses destined for the oven were received by the women with indecent songs and dances which were only ceremonial in part. At the sack of a fortress the corpses of young girls were subject to outrage, v.a.g.i.n.a cadaveris fructu bananae cocto immisso calefacta.

[Pageheader: FIJIANS ARE NEUROTIC]

Some forms of s.e.xual perversion exist, but are not common. They are held to be contemptible rather than criminal and horrible. Offences against nature seem to be confined to the inland tribes of Western Vitilevu, who have been the least affected by intercourse with Europeans, and they have there, no doubt, been occasionally practised from very remote times, though, curiously enough, they are there called "white man's doings" (_valavala vavalangi_). In one lamentable case of a European addicted to such vice, Thakombau ordered him to leave the group, and he was afterwards killed in the New Hebrides.

The nervous system of the Fijian is curiously contradictory, and it is at least probable that the premature excitement of the s.e.xual instinct in the women has an injurious effect upon their fecundity. In s.e.xual matters they are certainly neurotic. I have met with several cases of what is called _ndongai_, which corresponds with what is called "broken heart" in Europeans. Two young people who have come together once or twice, and who have been suddenly separated, sicken and pine away, and unless their intrigue can be resumed, they do not recover. It is not regarded as a psychological or interesting malady, as love-sickness is with us, but as a physical ailment for which but one remedy is known.

The causes of the growing laxity of morals lie too deep for the efforts of the Wesleyan missionaries to check it. They have prohibited tattooing (_veinkia_), hair cutting and hair-dressing by persons of the opposite s.e.x, and the old swimming games. But, on the other hand, certain church festivals have innocently tended in the opposite direction. All the older natives are agreed in saying that the dances of school-children (_meke ni kilovolt_), which bring together the young people of several villages, are made the occasion for dissoluteness as soon as the native teachers' backs are turned. The early missionaries failed to see that in breaking down the _mbure_ system, and inculcating family life on the English plan, they were leaving the native to follow his own inclinations. Intertribal peace and the possession of boats to make travel easy did the rest. Nevertheless, the Fijians as a race practise less s.e.xual licence than many races which are not decreasing, and if it were not for the frequent attempts to procure abortion on the part of unmarried girls in order to conceal their shame, it would have but little influence upon the vital statistics of the race.

CHAPTER XVI

EPIDEMIC DISEASES

While the great island groups of Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand, Tonga, and the Solomons had been known to Europe for many years--some of them for nearly two centuries--the Fijians lived their lives unconscious that there was another world beyond the reefs that encircled their islands. They planted food sufficient for their needs, they obeyed the rigid code of laws with which custom had bound them, they intermarried with their friends and fought their enemies, but without the carnage that followed the introduction of fire-arms. It is still unknown who was the first European to enter the group.[84]

For the evils innocently produced by the first visitors we must turn to native traditions, those irresponsible records that can lay claim to historical value in respect of their irresponsibility, recording what the historian would have forgotten, and omitting nearly everything to which written histories attach value.

The Rev John Hunt,[85] writing in 1843, says:--

"The first white people with whom the Fijians had any intercourse were four or five shipwrecked mariners, one or two of whom were dressed something like ministers of religion: probably the master and a pa.s.senger. The vessel was wrecked on a reef near Oneata called Mbukatatanoa, and the party referred to were either killed at Oneata or Lakemba, and, I fear, eaten also. Shortly after their death a dreadful distemper scourged the natives. It appears, from the description given of it, to have been a very acute dysentery, or a form of cholera. Its progress through the group was fearfully rapid and destructive; in many places it was with the greatest difficulty that persons could be found to bury the dead. Those who were seized died in the most excruciating agonies."

The native version, given nearly fifty years later, one was that morning after a great gale from the eastward the men of Oneata, looking towards the islet Loa on the great reef Mbukatatanoa, saw red streamers waving in the wind; strange beings, too, moved about among them. It chanced that some men of the Levuka tribe in Lakemba, off-shoots from distant Mbau, holding special privileges as amba.s.sadors, who linked the eastern and the western islands, were visitors in Oneata. Two of these, bolder than the natives of the place, launched a light canoe and paddled near to Loa. The report they brought back ran, "Though they resemble men, yet must they be spirits, for their ears are bound about with scarlet and they chew burning sticks." After anxious discussion the double canoe _Tai-walata_ was launched, and when they drew near Loa the spirits beckoned to them, and persuaded them to draw near and carry them to the main island. One of these they proved to be mortal as themselves for he was buried on Loa, being dead of violence, exposure, or disease.

Here the tradition becomes confused. Muskets and ammunition were taken from the wrecked ship, but the men of Oneata knew nothing of their uses, else perhaps the native history of Fiji had been different. The powder they kept to be used as a pigment for their faces, and the ramrods to be ornaments for the hair. One warrior, relates the tradition, smeared the wet pigment over hair and all, and when it would not dry, but lay cold and heavy on the scalp, he stooped his head to the fire to dry the matted locks. There was a sudden flash, very bright and hot, and a tongue of flame leaped from the head and licked the wall, and the warrior sprang into the square with a head more naked than when he was born.

[Pageheader: A TERRIBLE EPIDEMIC]

The red-capped sailors had scarce landed when a pestilence broke out among the people. Here is a literal translation of the poem that describes it:--

The great sickness sits aloft, Their voices sound hoa.r.s.ely, They fall and lie helpless and pitiable, Our G.o.d Ndengei is put to shame, Our own sicknesses have been thrust aside, The strangling-cord is a n.o.ble thing,[86]

They fall p.r.o.ne; they fall with the sap still in them.

A lethargy has seized upon the chiefs, How terrible is the sickness!

We do not live, we do not die, Our bodies ache; our heads ache, Many die, a few live on, The strangling-cord brings death to many, The _malo_ round their bellies rots away, Our women groan in their despair, The _liku_ knotted round them they do not loose, Hark to the creak of the strangling-cords, The spirits flow away like running water, _ra tau e_.

The strangers never left Oneata alive. One tradition ascribes their death to the pestilence, another to the vengeance of the men of Levuka, and as the natives believed them to have brought the scourge, we may accept the more tragic of the two. At any rate, though various strange plunder from the wreck was carried westward to Mbau, there is no record of any foreigner accompanying them.

It is not certain that this was the only visitation of the epidemic called _lila_. The traditions are so confused, and the versions so different in detail, that there is some reason to believe either that there were two visitations or that infection travelled so slowly that the disease only reached the western portion of the group some years after it had decimated the islands to the eastward. The traditional poetry of every district records the disease, and there are several data that enable us to fix the visitation within the limits of a few years.

Most accounts refer to the appearance of a large comet with three tails, the centre tail coloured red and the outer white, that it rose just before dawn and was visible for thirty-seven nights in succession. Here is the native account of it:--

Sleeping in the night I suddenly awake, The voice of the pestilence is borne to me, uetau, I go out and wander abroad, _uetau_, It is near the breaking of the dawn, _uetau_, Behold a forked star, _uetau_, We whistle with astonishment as we gaze at it, _uetau_, What can it portend? _uetau_, Does it presage the doom of the chiefs? _e e_.

Now, as I have already said, the great chief of Mbau, Mbanuve, died of the _lila_, and was thereafter known as Mbale-i-vavalangi--the victim of the foreign disease. When the comet of 1882 appeared, the old men declared that it presaged the death of Thakombau, for that a larger comet had foretold the death of King Mbanuve, and a smaller one the destruction of Suva in 1843. We know that the successor of Mbanuve, Na-uli-vou, or Ra Mate-ni-kutu, was reigning in 1809, when Charles Savage, the Swede, arrived in the group. The only comet recorded about the beginning of the century--Donati's, which appeared in 1811, was too late for Mbanuve's death--was the comet of 1803, and this date corresponds exactly with the other traditions we have of Na-uli-vou's reign, which we know lasted until 1829.

It is perhaps worth noting that on the day of the installation of Na-uli-vou, while the sickness was still raging, there was a total eclipse of the sun. "The birds went to roost at high noon, thinking from the darkness that night had fallen." In the same year, says the tradition, there was a hailstorm that broke down the yam-vines, followed by a great hurricane which flooded the valley of the Rewa, swept hundreds of the sick out to sea, and purged the land of the pestilence.

I have already given reasons for identifying this eclipse with that of February 1803. There seems to be evidence enough for the belief that a great epidemic was introduced by a vessel wrecked on the Argo (Mbukatatanoa) reef in 1802-3.

And now for the symptoms. Mbanuve, it seems clear, died of acute dysentery, but tradition also speaks of a lingering disease with headache, intense thirst, loss of appet.i.te, stuffiness of the nose, and oppression of the chest. The second visitation, if indeed the two were not raging together, seems to have been a very acute form of dysentery.

[Pageheader: CONTACT PRODUCES EPIDEMICS]

"Before white men came," says the oldest of the natives, "no one died of acute diseases; the people who died were emaciated by lingering infirmities. Coughs came with white men; so did dysentery, for Ratu Mbanuve died of a foreign disease resembling dysentery soon after it was brought here. This we have always heard from our elders." In attributing the diminution of their race to infectious diseases introduced by foreign ships, the Fijians do not limit their meaning to such illnesses as measles, whooping-cough, or other zymotic epidemics, but they include diseases now endemic among them, such as dysentery and influenza--not a specific influenza which has overspread the world since 1889, but the annual recurrent febrile catarrh or severe cold in the head and chest which is now one of the commonest ailments in the country, and which often terminates fatally in the case of the aged, infants, and those already affected by pulmonary disease.

Fijians are not the only islanders who a.s.sert that dysentery and influenza have been introduced among them by foreigners. The late Dr.

Turner[87] of Samoa says that this is the general belief of the natives of Tanna and most other Pacific islands. Writing of Tanna in the New Hebrides fifty years ago, he says:--

"Coughs, influenza, dysentery, and some skin diseases, the Tannese attribute to their intercourse with white men, and call them 'foreign things.' When a person is said to be ill, the next question is, 'What is the matter? Is it Nahac (witchcraft), or a foreign thing?' The opinion there is universal that they have had tenfold more diseases and death since they had intercourse with ships than they had before. We thought at first that it was prejudice and fault-finding, but the reply of the more honest and thoughtful of the natives invariably was, 'It is quite true; formerly here people never died until they were old, but now-a-days there is no end of this influenza, coughing, and death.'"

Turner himself, with every member of his Mission, was obliged to flee from Tanna because an epidemic of dysentery was ascribed to his presence. A worse fate befell the missionary family of Samoans living on the neighbouring island of Futuna for the same reason; others were killed at the Isle of Pines and at Niue and the Mission teachers on Aneiteum were threatened with death.

On May 20, 1861, the Rev. G. N. Gordon and his wife were murdered by the natives of Eromanga in consequence of an outbreak of measles which had been introduced by a trading vessel.

Referring to Samoa, Dr. Turner writes that:--

"Influenza is a new disease to the natives. They say that the first attack of it ever known in Samoa was during the Aana War in 1830, just as the missionaries Williams and Barth with Tahitian teachers first reached their sh.o.r.es. The natives at once traced the disease to the foreigners and the new religion; the same opinion spread through these seas, and especially among the islands of the New Hebrides, has proved a serious hindrance to the labours of missionaries and native teachers. Ever since, there have been returns of the disease almost annually ... in many cases it is fatal to old people and those who have been previously weakened by pulmonary diseases."

At Niue, the natives, whose demeanour earned for them from Cook the designation of Savage Islanders, persistently repelled strangers who attempted to land among them. Captain Cook[88] says: "The endeavours we used to bring them to a parley were to no purpose; for they came with the ferocity of wild boars and threw their darts."

Dr. Turner, who visited Niue in 1848 and again in 1859, says:--

"Natives of other islands who drifted there in distress, whether from Tonga, Samoa, or elsewhere, were invariably killed. Any of their own people who went away in a ship and came back were killed; and all this was occasioned by a dread of disease. For years after they began to venture out to our ships, they would not immediately use anything obtained, but hung it up in the bush in quarantine for weeks."

He had great difficulty in landing a teacher. A native of Niue, whom he had found and trained in Samoa, could not be left, as armed crowds rushed upon him to kill him. The natives tried to send back his canoe and sea-chest to the Mission ship, saying that the foreign wood would cause disease among them. John Williams, a missionary, during his memorable voyage in 1830, recruited two Niue lads and subsequently brought them back to their island; but influenza breaking out a short time after their return the two men were accused of bringing it from Tahiti: one of them was killed, together with his father, and the other escaped on board a whaler with a man who returned to the island in 1848.

[Pageheader: MURDEROUS QUARANTINE]

Dr. Turner states that in 1846 an epidemic broke out in the island of Lifu in the Loyalty Group. Towards the end of 1846, the teachers who had just arrived were accused of having brought it. "Kill them," said their enemies, "and there will be an end to the sickness."

In New Caledonia, as elsewhere, the natives believed white men to be spirits of the dead and to bring sickness; and they gave this as a reason for killing them.

The Tahitians accused the Spaniards of introducing a disease like influenza during the visit of a Peruvian ship in 1774-5. In Tonga there is a tradition of a destructive epidemic breaking out shortly after Cook's first visit in 1773. The only symptom now recorded was a severe headache resulting in death after a few days' illness, and the native name for the disease, _ngangau_, is the word used for headache. It does not appear, however, that the Tongans a.s.sociated this visitation with the arrival of Captain Cook's ships.

The crew of the brig _Chatham_, wrecked on Penrhyn Island in 1853, were the first Europeans to land on the island. Some three months after their arrival an epidemic, accompanied by high fever and intense headache and generally ending fatally, broke out among the natives. Mr. Roser, one of the survivors, has a.s.sured me that none of the crew were suffering from the disease when they arrived, but that some of them caught it in a milder form from the natives afterwards. Besides this fever an epidemic of sores had previously broken out among the natives shortly after the wreck, but this the Europeans attributed to the unaccustomed animal food which they had obtained from the ship. Speeches were made against the visitors. "Why had we come to their land? They had never any sickness like this before we came, and if we remained we should be bringing them other complaints to carry them off. Better for us to leave. They would furnish us with canoes and we must return to our own land."[89]

The islanders of the Kau Atolls, named on the charts the Mortlock or Marqueen Group (lat. 4 45'S., long. 15630'E.), when the epidemic was prevalent on sh.o.r.e disinfected, or disenchanted, the crew of the barquentine _Lord of the Isles_ while parleying with them at sea. One man in each canoe had a handful of ashes done up in leaves, which he scattered in the air when closing the interview.[90]