White Shadows in the South Seas Part 16

To omit a vowel, to say too many, or to mix their order, would be disrespect to the spirit of the dead, and a reflection on the mourner.

Nine times the "ke," fourteen "a's," fifteen "e's," eighteen "i's" and fifteen "o's" and "u's."

Aumia was carried to Calvary in the afternoon and put in the grave for which the pig had been paid. So strongly did the old feeling still prevail that only three or four of her friends could be persuaded by the nuns to accompany the coffin up the trail.

Exploding Egg's consignment of Aumia to Havaii, the underworld, spoke strongly of the clinging of his people to their old beliefs in the destiny of the spirit after death. They share with the Ainos of j.a.pan--a people to which they have many likenesses, being of the same division of man--a faith in a subterranean future.

Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of "going to the world below," where he hopes to find real wisdom?

Havaii or Havaiki is, of course, the fabled place whence came the Polynesians, as it is also the name of that underworld to which their spirits return after death. One might read into this fact a dim groping of the Marquesan mind toward "From dust he came, to dust returneth," or, more likely, a longing of the exiled people for the old home they had abandoned. Ethnologists believe that the name refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed.

Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no suffering, either for good or bad souls. It is simply the place where the dead go. It is ruled by Po, the Darkness.

There is, however, a paradise in an island in the clouds, where beautiful girls and great bowls of _kava_, with pigs roasted to a turn, await the good and brave. The old priests claimed to be able to help one from Po to this happy abode, but the living relatives of the departed spirit had to pay a heavy price for their services. The Christianized Marquesan fancies that he finds these old beliefs revived when Pere David tells him of purgatory, from which prayers and certain good acts help one's friends, or may be laid up in advance against the day when one must himself descend to that middle state of souls.

All Marquesans live in the shadow of that day. They see it without fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it is indescribable.

"I have seen many go as Aumia has gone," said Father David to me.

"All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is pa.s.sing. Some day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of the dead."

A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one hundred.

A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults. I visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me.

Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva. One of the tribe of merciless American whaling captains having sent ash.o.r.e a sailor dying of tuberculosis, the tattooed cannibals received him in a Christ-like manner, soothed his last hours, and breathed the germs that have carried off more than four-fifths of their race, and to-day are killing the remnant.

The white man brought the Chinese, and with them leprosy. The Chinese were imported to aid the white in stealing the native land of the Marquesan, and to keep the Chinese contented, opium was brought with him. Finding it eagerly craved by the ignorant native, the foolish white fastened this vice also upon his other desired slave. The French Government, for forty thousand francs, licensed an opium farmer to sell the drug still faster, and not until alarmed by the results and shamed by the outcry in Europe, did it forbid the devastating narcotic. Too late!

Smallpox came with a Peruvian slave-ship that stole thousands of the islanders and carried them off to work out their lives for the white in his own country. This ship left another more dread disease, which raged in the islands as a virulent epidemic, instead of running the slow chronic course it does nowadays when all the world has been poisoned by it.

The healthy Marquesans had no anti-toxins in their pure blood to overcome the diseases which with us, hardened Europeans and descendants of Europeans, are not deadly. Here they raged and destroyed hundreds in a few days or weeks.

The survivors of these pestilences, seeing their homes and villages desolated, their friends dying, their people perishing, supposed that these curses were inflicted upon them by the G.o.d of the foreigners and by the missionaries, who said that they were his servant. In their misery, they not only refused to listen to the gospels, but accused the missionaries in prayer before their own G.o.d, begging to be saved from them. Often when the missionaries appeared to speak to the people, the deformed and dying were brought out and laid in rows before them, as evidences of the evilness and cruelty of their white G.o.d.

But after one has advanced all tangible reasons and causes for the depopulation of the Marquesas, there remains another, mysterious, intangible, but it may be, more potent than the others. The coming of the white has been deadly to all copper-colored races everywhere in the world. The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the red races of America perished or are going fast. The numbers of those dead from war and epidemics leave still lacking the full explanation of the fearful facts. Seek as far as you will, pile up figures and causes and prove them correct; there still remains to take into account the shadow of the white on the red.

Prescott says:

The American Indian has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Even when this foreign influence comes in the form of civilization, he seems to sink and pine under it. It has been so with the Mexicans. Under the Spanish domination their numbers have silently melted away. Their energies are broken. They live under a better system of laws, a more a.s.sured tranquillity, a purer faith. But all does not avail.

Their civilization was of the hardy character that belongs to the wilderness. Their hardy virtues were all their own. They refused to submit to European culture--to be engrafted on a foreign stock.

Free! Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, in this earth.

I am persuaded that the Polynesians, from Hawaii to Tahiti, are dying because of the suppression of the play-instinct, an instinct that had its expression in most of their customs and occupations.

Their dancing, their tattooing, their chanting, their religious rites, and even their warfare, had very visible elements of humor and joyousness. They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic feeling, emotional, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. The rule of the trader crushed all these native feelings.

To this restraint was added the burden of the effort to live. With the entire Marquesan economic and social system disrupted, food was not so easily procurable, and they were driven to work by commands, taxes, fines, and the novel and killing incentives of rum and opium.

The whites taught the men to sell their lives, and the women to sell their charms.

Happiness and health were destroyed because the white man came here only to gratify his cupidity. The priests could bring no inspiration sufficient to overcome the degradation caused by the traders. The Marquesan saw that Jesus had small influence over their rulers.

Civilization lost its opportunity because it gave precept, but no example.

Even to-day, one white man in a valley sets the standard of sobriety, of kindness, and honor. Jensen, the frank and handsome Dane who works for the Germans at Taka-Uka who was in the breadline in New York and swears he will never return to civilization, told me that when he kept a store in Hanamenu, near Atuona, to serve the bare handful of unexterminated tribesmen there, the people imitated him in everything, his clothes, his gestures, his least-studied actions.

"I was the only white. I planted a fern in a box. Every one came to my store and, feigning other reasons, asked for boxes. Soon every _paepae_ had its box of ferns. I asked a man to snare four or five goats for me in the hills. They were the first goats tethered or enclosed in the valley. Within a week the mountains were harried for goats, and the village was noisy with their bleating. I ate my goats; they ate theirs. Not one was left. When I forsook Hanamenu, the whole population moved with me. Sure, I was decent to them, that was all.

"I never want to see the white man's country again. I have starved in the big cities, and worked like a dog for the banana trust in the West Indies. I have begged a cup of coffee in San Francisco, and been fanned by a cop's club. Here I make almost nothing, I have many friends and no superiors, and I am happy."

Had these lovable savages had a few fine souls to lead them, to shield them from the dregs of civilization heaped on them for a century, they might have developed into a wonder race to set a pace in beauty, courage, and natural power that would have surprised and helped Europe.

They needed no physical regeneration. They were better born into health and purity--b.l.o.o.d.y as were some of their customs--than most of us. Their bodies had not become a burden on the soul, but, light and strong and unrestrained, were a part of it. They did not know that they had bodies; they only leaped, danced, flung themselves in and out of the sea, part of a large, happy, and harmonious universe.

If to that superb, almost perfect, physical base that nature had given these Marquesans, to that sweetness simplicity, generosity, and trust acknowledged by all who know them, there could have been added a knowledge of the things we have learned; if by example and kindness they could have been given rounded and informed intelligence, what living there would have been in these islands!

All they needed was a brother who walked in the sunlight and showed the way.

CHAPTER XVI

A savage dance, a drama of the sea, of danger and feasting; the rape of the lettuce.

Drums were beating all the morning, thrilling the valley and mountain-sides with their barbaric _boom-boom_. The savage beat of them quickened the blood, stirring memories older than mankind, waking wild and primitive instincts. Toho's eyes gleamed, and her toes curled and uncurled like those of a cat, while she told me that the afternoon would see an old dance, a drama of the sea, of war, and feasting such as the islands had known before the whites came.

The air thrummed with the resonance of the drums. All morning I sat alone on my _paepae_, hearing them beat. The sound carried one back to the days when men first tied the skins of animals about hollow tree-trunks and thumped them to call the naked tribes together under the oaks of England. Those great drums beaten by the hands of Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale made one want to be a savage, to throw a spear, to dance in the moonlight.

Erase thirty years, and hear it in Atuona when the "long pig that speaks" was being carried through the jungle to the dark High Place!

Then it was the thunder of the heavens, the voice of the old G.o.ds hungry for the flesh of their enemies.

We who have become refined and diverse in our musical expression, using a dozen or scores of instruments to interpret our subtle emotions, cannot know the primitive and savage exaltation that surges through the veins when the war-drum beats. To the Marquesans it has ever been a summons to action, an inspiration to daring and b.l.o.o.d.y deeds, the call of the war-G.o.ds, the frenzy of the dance.

Born of the thunder, speaking with the voice of the storm and the cataract, it rouses in man the beast with quivering nostrils and lashing tail who was part of the forest and the night.

Music is ever an expression of the moods and morals of its time. The bugle and the fife share with the drum the rousing of martial spirit in our armies to-day, but to our savage ancestors the drum was supreme. Primitive man expressed his harmony with nature by imitating its sounds. He struck his own body or a hollow log covered with skin.

Uncivilized peoples crack their fingers, snap their thighs, or strike the ground with their feet to furnish music for impromptu dancing. In Tonga they crack their fingers; in Tahiti they pound the earth with the soles of their feet; here in Atuona they clap hands.

The Marquesans have, too, bamboo drums, long sections of the hollow reed, slit, and beaten with sticks. For calling boats and for signaling they use the conch-sh.e.l.l, the same that sounded when "the Tritons blew their wreathed horn." They also have the jew's-harp, an instrument common to all Polynesia; sometimes a strip of bark held between the teeth, sometimes a bow of wood strung with gut.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The _haka_, the Marquesan national dance]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hot Tears (on the left) with Vai Etienne]

Civilization is a process of making life more complex and subtle. We have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time, which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was free. There is release and exhilaration in the barbaric, syncopated songs and in the animal-like motions of the jazz dances with their wild and pa.s.sionate att.i.tudes, their unrestrained rhythms, and their direct appeal to s.e.x. These rag-time melodies, coming straight from the jungles of Africa through the negro, call to impulses in man that are stifled in big cities, in factory and slum and the nerve-wearing struggle of business.

So in the dance my Marquesan neighbors returned to the old ways and expressed emotions dying under the rule of an alien people. With the making light of their reverenced _tapus_, the proving that their G.o.ds were powerless, and the ending of their tribal life, the dance degraded. They did not care to dance now that their joy in life was gone. But the new and jolly governor, craving amus.e.m.e.nt, sought to revive it for his pleasure. So the drums were beating on the palace lawn, and afternoon found the trails gay with _pareus_ and brilliant shawls as the natives came down from their _paepaes_ to the seat of government.

Chief Kekela Avaua, adopted son of the old Kekela, and head man of the Paamau district, called for me. He was a dignified and important man of forty-five years, with handsome patterns in tattooing on his legs, and Dundreary whiskers. He was quite modishly dressed in brown linen, beneath which showed his bare, prehensile-toed feet.

Kirio Patuhamane, a marvelous specimen of scrolled ink-marks from head to foot, who sported Burnside whiskers, an English cricket cap, and a scarlet loin-cloth, accompanied us down the road.