White Shadows in the South Seas Part 36

Grelet said that the conch I had heard at night sounding off Oomoa must have been in a canoe or whale-boat bound for Hanavave, a valley a dozen miles away over the mountains, but only an hour or so by sea.

It might have brought a message of interest, or perhaps would be a conveyance to my own valley, so in mid-forenoon we launched Grelet's whale-boat for a journey to Hanavave.

Eight men carried the large boat from its shelter to the water, slung on two short thick poles by loops of rope through holes in prow and stern. It was as graceful as a swan, floating in the edge of the breakers. Driving it through the surf was cautious, skilful work, at which Grelet was a master. Haupupuu, who built the boat, a young man with the features of Bonaparte and a _blase_ expression, was at the bow, and three other Marquesans, with the two Paumotan boys, handled the oars. There was no wind and they rowed all the way, spurting often for love of excitement.

We skirted a coast of almost vertical cliffs crowned by cocoas, the faces of the rock black or covered above the waterline with vines and plants, green and luxuriant. Long stretches of white curtains and huge pictures in curious outlines were painted on the sable cliffs by encrusted salt. The sea surged in leaping fountains through a thousand blow-holes carved from the black basalt, and the ceaseless wash of the waves had cut the base of the precipices into _paniho_, or teeth, as the Marquesans say.

There were half a dozen indentations in the bleak and rugged coast, each a little valley guarded by cliffs on both sides, the natural obstacle to neighborliness that made enemies of the clans.

Inhabitants of plains are usually friendly. Mountains make feuds.

We pa.s.sed the valley of Hana Ui, inhabited when Grelet came, and full of rich cotton-fields, now a waste with never a soul in it. We pa.s.sed Eue, Utea, Tetio, Nanifapoto, Hana Puaea and Mata Utuoa, all empty of the living; graveyards and deserted _paepaes_. Thousands made merry in them when the missionaries first recorded their numbers.

Death hung like a cloud over the desolate wilderness of these valleys, over the stern and gloomy cliffs, black and forbidding, carved into monstrous shapes and rimmed with the fantastic patterns made by the unresting sea.

Near Matu Utuoa was a great natural bridge, under which the ocean rushed in swirling currents, foam, and spray. Turning a shoulder of the cliff, we entered the Bay of Virgins and were confronted with the t.i.tanic architecture of Hanavave, Alps in ruins, once coral reefs and now thrust up ten thousand feet above the sea. Fantastic headlands, ma.s.sive towers, obelisks, pyramids, and needles were an extravaganza in rock, monstrous and portentous. Towering structures hewn by water and wind from the basalt ma.s.s of the island rose like colossi along the entrance to the bay; beyond, a glimpse of great black battlements framed a huge crater.

A dangerous bay in the lee wind with a bad holding-ground. We manoeuvered for ten minutes to land, but the shelving beach of black stone with no rim of sand proved a puzzle even to Grelet. We reached the stones again and again, only to be torn away by the racing tide.

At last we all jumped into the surf and swam ash.o.r.e, except one man who anch.o.r.ed the whale-boat before following us.

The canoe that had sounded the conch off Oomoa was lying on the shale, and those who had come in it were on the stones cooking breadfruit.

The village, half a dozen rude straw shacks, stretched along a rocky stream. Beyond it, in a few acres enclosed by a fence, were a tiny church, two wretched wooden cabins, a tumbling kiosk, five or six old men and women squatting on the ground amid a flock of dogs and cats. This was the Catholic mission, tumbledown and decayed, unpainted for years, overgrown by weeds, marshy and muddy, pa.s.sing to oblivion like the race to which it ministered.

Grelet and I found Pere Olivier sweeping out the church, cheerful, humming a cradle-song of the French peasants. He was glad to see us, though my companion was avowedly a pagan. Dwelling alone here with his dying charges, the good priest could not but feel a common bond with any white man, whoever he might be.

The kiosk, to which he took us, proved to be Pere Olivier's eating-place, dingy, tottering, and poverty-stricken, furnished with a few cracked and broken dishes and rusty knives and forks, the equipment of a miner or sheep-herder. Pere Olivier apologized for the meager fare, but we did well enough, with soup and a tin of boiled beef, breadfruit, and _feis_. The soup was of a red vegetable, not appetizing, and I could not make out the native name for it, _hue arahi_, until Grelet cried, "Ah, _j'ai trouve le mot anglais!_ Ponkeen, ponkeen!" It was a red pumpkin.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Removing the pig cooked in the _umu_, or native oven]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The _Koina Kai_ or feast in Oomoa]

"_La soupe maigre de missionaire_," murmured the priest.

I led the talk to the work of the mission.

"We have been here thirty-five years," said Pere Olivier, "and I, thirty. Our order first tried to establish a church at Oomoa, but failed. You have seen there a stone foundation that supports the wild vanilla vines? Frere Fesal built that, with a Raratonga islander who was a good mason. The two cut the stones and shaped them.

The valley of Oomoa was drunk. Rum was everywhere, the palm _namu_ was being made all the time, and few people were ever sober. There was a Hawaiian Protestant missionary there, and he was not good friends with Frere Fesal. There was no French authority at Oomoa, and the strongest man was the law. The whalers were worse than the natives, and hated the missionaries. One day when the valley was crazed, a native killed the Raratonga man. You will find the murderer living on Tahuata now. Frere Fesal buried his a.s.sistant, and fled here.

"That date was about the last Hanavave suffered from cannibalism and extreme sorcery. The _taua_, the pagan priest, was still powerful, however, and his G.o.ds demanded victims. The men here conspired with the men of Hanahouua to descend on Oi, a little village by the sea between here and Oomoa. They had guns of a sort, for the whalers had brought old and rusty guns to trade with the Marquesans for wood, fruit, and fish. Frere Fesal learned of the conspiracy, but the men were drinking rum, and he was helpless. The warriors went stealthily over the mountains and at night lowered themselves from the cliffs with ropes made of the _fau_. There were only thirty people left in Oi, and the enemy came upon them in the dark like the wolf. Only one man escaped--There he is now, entering the mission. We will ask him to tell the story."

He stood in the rickety doorway and called, "Tutaiei, come here!" An old and withered man approached, one-eyed, the wrinkles of his face and body abscuring the blue patterns of tattooing, a shrunken, but hideous, scar making a hairless patch on one side of his head.

"I was on the beach pulling up my canoe and taking out the fish I had speared," said this wreck of a man. "Half the night was spent, and every one was asleep except me. We were a little company, for they had killed and eaten most of us, and others had died of the white man's curse. In the night I heard the cries of the Hanavave and Hanahouua men who had lowered themselves down the precipice and were using their war-clubs on the sleeping.

"I was one man. I could do nothing but die, and I was full of life.

In the darkness I smashed with a rock all the canoes on the beach save mine. In my ears were the groans of the dying, and the war-cries.

I saw the torches coming. I put the fish back in my canoe, and pushed out.

"They were but a moment late, for I have a hole in my head into which they shot a nail, and I have this crack in my head upon which they flung a stone. They could not follow me, for there were no canoes left. I paddled to Oomoa after a day, during which I did what I have no memory of."

"They had guns?" I asked him.

"They had a few guns, but they used in them nails or stones, having no b.a.l.l.s of metal. Their slings were worse. I could sling a stone as big as a mango and kill a man, striking him fair on the head, at the distance those guns would shoot. We made our slings of the bark of the cocoanut-tree, and the stones, polished by rubbing against each other, we carried in a net about the waist."

"But if that stone broke your head, why did you not die?"

"A _tatihi_ fixed my head. The nail in my leg he took out with a loop of hair, and cured the wound."

"Did you not lie in wait for those murderers?"

Tutaiei hemmed and cast down his eye.

"The French came then with soldiers and made it so that if I killed any one, they killed me; the law, they call it. They did nothing to those warriors because the deed was done before the French came. I waited and thought. I bought a gun from a whaler. But the time never came.

"All my people had died at their hands. Six heads they carried back to feast on the brains. They ate the brains of my wife. I kept the names of those that I should kill. There was Kiihakia, who slew Moariniu, the blind man; Nakahania, who killed Hakaie, husband of Tepeiu; Niana, who cut off the head of Tahukea, who was their daughter and my woman; Veatetau should die for Tahiahokaani, who was young and beautiful, who was the sister of my woman. I waited too long, for time took them all, and I alone survive of the people of Oi, or of those who killed them."

"The vendetta between valleys--called _umuhuke_, or the Vengeance of the Oven,--thus wiped out the people of Oi," commented Pere Olivier.

"The skulls were kept in banian-trees, or in the houses. Frere Fesal started the mission here and built that little church. There were plenty of people to work among. But now, after thirty years I have been here, they are nearly finished. They have no courage to go on, that is all. _C'est un pays sans l'avenir._ The family of the dying never weep. They gather to eat the feast of the dead, and the crying is a rite, no more. These people are tired of life."

It was Stevenson who though that "the ending of the most healthful, if not the most humane, of field sports--hedge warfare--" had much to do with depopulation. Either horn of the dilemma is dangerous to touch. It is unthinkable, perhaps, that white conquerors should have allowed the Marquesans to follow their own customs of warfare. But changes in the customs of every race must come from within that race or they will destroy it. The essence of life is freedom.

Any one who has read their past and knows them now must admit that the Marquesans have not been improved in morality by their contact with the whites. Alien customs have been forced upon them. And they are dying for lack of expression, nationally and individually.

Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death half way, the grave a haven.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Beach at Oomoa]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Putting the canoe in the water]

In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the Marquesas. The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone, makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the archipelago for centuries. Now it is one of the few places where even a feeble survival of those industries give the newcomers a glimpse of their methods and ideals now sinking, like their originators, in the mire of wretchedness.

Outside the mission gates, in the edge of the jungle, Pere Olivier and I came upon two old women making _tapa_ cloth. Shrunken with age, toothless, decrepit, their only covering the ragged and faded _pareus_ that spoke of poverty, they sat in the shade of a banian-tree, beating the fibrous inner bark of the breadfruit-tree.

Over the hollow log that resounded with the blows of their wooden mallets the cloth moved slowly, doubling on the ground into a heap of silken texture, firm, thin, and soft.

This paper-cloth was once made throughout all the South Sea Islands.

Breadfruit, banian, mulberry, and other barks furnished the fiber.

The outer rough bark was sc.r.a.ped off with a sh.e.l.l, and the inner rind slightly beaten and allowed to ferment. It was then beaten over a tree-trunk with mallets of iron-wood about eighteen inches long, grooved coa.r.s.ely on one side and more finely on the other. The fibers were so closely interwoven by this beating that in the finished cloth one could not guess the process of making. When finished, the fabric was bleached in the sun to a dazzling white, and from it the Marquesans of old wrought wondrous garments.

For their caps they made remarkably fine textures, open-meshed, filmy as gauze, which confined their abundant black hair, and to which were added flowers, either natural or beautifully preserved in wax. Their princ.i.p.al garment, the _cahu_, was a long and flowing piece of the paper-cloth, of firmer texture, dyed in brilliant colors, or of white adorned with tasteful patterns. This hung from the shoulders, where it was knotted on one shoulder, leaving one arm and part of the breast exposed. Much individual taste was expressed in the wearing of this garment; sometimes the knot was on one shoulder, sometimes on the other, or it might be brought low on the chest, leaving the shoulders and arms bare, or thrown behind to expose the charms of a well-formed back or a slender waist. Beneath it they wore a _pareu_, which pa.s.sed twice around the waist and hung to the calves of the legs.

Clean and neat as these garments always were, shining in the sun, leaving the body free to know the joys of sun and air and swift, easy motion, it would be difficult to imagine a more graceful, beautiful, modest, and comfortable manner of dressing.

For dyeing these garments in all the hues that fancy dictated, the women used the juices of herb and tree. Candlenut-bark gave a rich chocolate hue; scarlet was obtained from the _mati_-berries mixed with the leaves of the _tou_. Yellow came from the inner bark of the root of the _morinda citrifolia_. Hibiscus flowers or delicate ferns were dipped in these colors and impressed on the _tapas_ in elegant designs.

The garments were virtually indestructible. Did a dress need repairing, the edges of the rent were moistened and beaten together, or a handful of fiber was beaten in as a patch. Often for fishermen the _tapas_ were made water-proof by added thicknesses and the employment of gums, and waterproof cloth for wrappings was made thick and impervious to rain as the oilcloth it resembled.

Hardly one of these garments survives in the Marquesas to-day. They have been driven out by the gaudy prints of Germany and England brought by the traders, and by the ideas of dress which the missionaries imported together with the barrels of hideous night-gown garments contributed by worthy ladies of American villages.

The disappearance of these native garments brought two things, idleness and the rapid spread of tuberculosis. The _tapa_ cloth could not be worn in the water or the rain, as it disintegrated.

Marquesans therefore left their robes in the house when they went abroad in stormy weather or bathed in the sea. But in their new calicos and ginghams they walked in the rain, bathed in the rivers, and returned to sleep huddled in the wet folds, ignorant of the danger.

As the _tapa_ disappeared, so did the beautiful carvings of canoes and paddles and clubs, superseded by the cheaper, machine-made articles of the whites. Little was left to occupy the hands or minds of the islanders, who, their old merrymakings stopped, their wars forbidden, their industry taken from them, could only sit on their _paepaes_ yawning like children in jail and waiting for the death that soon came.