Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (805 page)

The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes.  When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure - pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber - speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind.  Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity.  We must have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms.  On the main road of the island, where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr. Osbourne tells me they are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads have been made long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their desertion, and must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through the bush, the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these survivals: the gravestones of whole families.  Such ruins are tapu in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become outposts of the kingdom of the grave.  It might appear a natural and pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the rearguard of perished thousands, that their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of their fathers.  I believe, in fact, the custom rests on different and more grim conceptions.  But the house, the grave, and even the body of the dead, have been always particularly honoured by Marquesans.  Until recently the corpse was sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy.  Offerings are still laid upon the grave.  In Traitor’s Bay, Mr. Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son’s.  And the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred for the French.

The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race.  The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the reality with relief.  He does not even seek to support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave.  Hanging is now the fashion.  I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will continue popular in the Marquesas.  Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such remarkable importance.  The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house; and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like Caesar’s) adjusted for the final act.  Praise not any man till he is dead, said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners, might be the Marquesan parody.  The coffin, though of late introduction, strangely engages their attention.  It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy.  For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the woman’s soul is at rest.  I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation.  The Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body.  I was told the Tahitians have a word for it,
erimatua
, but cannot find it in my dictionary.  A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two days has seen them cured.  But this other remedy is more original: a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement - perhaps I should rather say this acquiescence - has been known, at the fulfilment of his crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his coffin - to revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be restored for years to his occupations - carving tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old men’s beards.  From all this it may be conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally.  I heard one example, grim and picturesque.  In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.

This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to the Marquesan.  What is peculiar is the widespread depression and acceptance of the national end.  Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the songs are forgotten.  It is true that some, and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit to support or to revive them.  At the last feast of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the inanimate performance of the dancers.  When the people sang for us in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.  They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the old that knew the songs.  The whole body of Marquesan poetry and music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited generation.  The full import is apparent only to one acquainted with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song following another without pause.  In like manner, the Marquesan, never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production.  The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with the death-rate of the islanders.  ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, and man departs,’ says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands.  And surely this is nature.  Fond as it may appear, we labour and refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue.  It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy.  Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the trader’s store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was near full.  So long as the circus was there, so long as the
Casco
was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his visit; and to this end every woman must have a new dress, and every man a shirt and trousers.  Never before, in Mr. Regler’s experience, had they displayed so much activity.

In their despondency there is an element of dread.  The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan.  Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night.  He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the
Cascos
by the hand as for a final separation.  Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and as the traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another described them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from none could I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or wherefore they were dreaded.  We may be sure at least they represent the dead; for the dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-pervasive.  ‘When a native says that he is a man,’ writes Dr. Codrington, ‘he means that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast.  The intelligent agents of this world are to his mind the men who are alive, and the ghosts the men who are dead.’  Dr. Codrington speaks of Melanesia; from what I have learned his words are equally true of the Polynesian.  And yet more.  Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful suspicion rests generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest cannibals of all, are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs.  I hazard the guess that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the dead, continuing their life’s business of the cannibal ambuscade, and lying everywhere unseen, and eager to devour the living.  Another superstition I picked up through the troubled medium of Tari Coffin’s English.  The dead, he told me, came and danced by night around the paepae of their former family; the family were thereupon overcome by some emotion (but whether of pious sorrow or of fear I could not gather), and must ‘make a feast,’ of which fish, pig, and popoi were indispensable ingredients.  So far this is clear enough.  But here Tari went on to instance the new house of Toma and the house-warming feast which was just then in preparation as instances in point.  Dare we indeed string them together, and add the case of the deserted ruin, as though the dead continually besieged the paepaes of the living: were kept at arm’s-length, even from the first foundation, only by propitiatory feasts, and, so soon as the fire of life went out upon the hearth, swarmed back into possession of their ancient seat?

I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions.  On the cannibal ghost I shall return elsewhere with certainty.  And it is enough, for the present purpose, to remark that the men of the Marquesas, from whatever reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts.  Conceive how this must tell upon the nerves in islands where the number of the dead already so far exceeds that of the living, and the dead multiply and the living dwindle at so swift a rate.  Conceive how the remnant huddles about the embers of the fire of life; even as old Red Indians, deserted on the march and in the snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame expiring, and the night around populous with wolves.

CHAPTER V - DEPOPULATION

Over the whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future.  We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin’s theory of coral islands, and suppose a rise of the sea, or the subsidence of some former continental area, to have driven into the tops of the mountains multitudes of refugees.  Or we may suppose, more soberly, a people of sea-rovers, emigrants from a crowded country, to strike upon and settle island after island, and as time went on to multiply exceedingly in their new seats.  In either case the end must be the same; soon or late it must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and that famine is at hand.  The Polynesians met this emergent danger with various expedients of activity and prevention.  A way was found to preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty feet in depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am told, in the Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and cannibalism.  Among the Hawaiians - a hardier people, in a more exacting climate - agriculture was carried far; the land was irrigated with canals; and the fish-ponds of Molokai prove the number and diligence of the old inhabitants.  Meanwhile, over all the island world, abortion and infanticide prevailed.  On coral atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment.  On Vaitupu, in the Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau, but one.  On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared.

This is characteristic.  For no people in the world are so fond or so long-suffering with children - children make the mirth and the adornment of their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries.  ‘Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.’  The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished.  The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous Archipelago.  I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be the better for a beating.  It is a daily matter in some eastern islands to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and the mother, so far from punishing, scarce ventures to resist.  In some, when his child was born, a chief was superseded and resigned his name; as though, like a drone, he had then fulfilled the occasion of his being.  And in some the lightest words of children had the weight of oracles.  Only the other day, in the Marquesas, if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger, I am assured the stranger would be slain.  And I shall have to tell in another place an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki having taken a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted the situation and loaded me with gifts.

With such sentiments the necessity for child-destruction would not fail to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling in the Tahitian brotherhood of Oro.  At a certain date a new god was added to the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished and made popular.  Oro was his name, and he may be compared with the Bacchus of the ancients.  His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to island; they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes; sang, danced, acted; gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength; and were the artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group.  Their life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the highest in the land aspired to join the brotherhood.  If a couple stood next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of conception.  A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave offspring - I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design seems obvious.  Famine menacing the islands, and the needful remedy repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind by these trappings of mystery, pleasure, and parade.  This is the more probable, and the secret, serious purpose of the institution appears the more plainly, if it be true that, after a certain period of life, the obligation of the votary was changed; at first, bound to be profligate: afterwards, expected to be chaste.