Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (807 page)

But his business that morning in Anaho is what concerns us here.  The devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon the reef; it was judged fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for that end, in Polynesia, a tapu (vulgarly spelt ‘taboo’) has to be declared, and who was to declare it?  Taipi might; he ought; it was a chief part of his duty; but would any one regard the inhibition of a Beggar on Horse-back?  He might plant palm branches: it did not in the least follow that the spot was sacred.  He might recite the spell: it was shrewdly supposed the spirits would not hearken.  And so the old, legitimate cannibal must ride over the mountains to do it for him; and the respectable official in white clothes could but look on and envy.  At about the same time, though in a different manner, Kooamua established a forest law.  It was observed the cocoa-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green nuts impoverishes and at last endangers the tree.  Now Kooamua could tapu the reef, which was public property, but he could not tapu other people’s palms; and the expedient adopted was interesting.  He tapu’d his own trees, and his example was imitated over all Hatiheu and Anaho.  I fear Taipi might have tapu’d all that he possessed and found none to follow him.  So much for the esteem in which the dignity of an appointed chief is held by others; a single circumstance will show what he thinks of it himself.  I never met one, but he took an early opportunity to explain his situation.  True, he was only an appointed chief when I beheld him; but somewhere else, perhaps upon some other isle, he was a chieftain by descent: upon which ground, he asked me (so to say it) to excuse his mushroom honours.

It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for thoroughly sensible ends.  With surprise, I say, because the nature of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe.  It is taken usually in the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such as that which to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking, or yesterday prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on Sunday.  The error is no less natural than it is unjust.  The Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought of ancient Rome; with them the idea of law has not been disengaged from that of morals or propriety; so that tapu has to cover the whole field, and implies indifferently that an act is criminal, immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say) ‘not in good form.’  Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough, such as those which deleted words out of the language, and particularly those which related to women.  Tapu encircled women upon all hands.  Many things were forbidden to men; to women we may say that few were permitted.  They must not sit on the paepae; they must not go up to it by the stair; they must not eat pork; they must not approach a boat; they must not cook at a fire which any male had kindled.  The other day, after the roads were made, it was observed the women plunged along margin through the bush, and when they came to a bridge waded through the water: roads and bridges were the work of men’s hands, and tapu for the foot of women.  Even a man’s saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting lady dares to use.  Thus on the Anaho side of the island, only two white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles; and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one or other.  It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of them, to an increased reserve between the sexes.  Regard for female chastity is the usual excuse for these disabilities that men delight to lay upon their wives and mothers.  Here the regard is absent; and behold the women still bound hand and foot with meaningless proprieties!  The women themselves, who are survivors of the old regimen, admit that in those days life was not worth living.  And yet even then there were exceptions.  There were female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses besides; nice customs curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a High Place, Father Siméon Delmar was shown a stone, and told it was the throne of some well-descended lady.  How exactly parallel is this with European practice, when princesses were suffered to penetrate the strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land in which they were denied the control of their own children.

But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful restrictions.  We have seen it as the organ of paternal government.  It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to enforce them, rights of private property.  Thus a man, weary of the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to this day you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great-grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn.  Or take another case.  Anaho is known as ‘the country without popoi.’  The word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main food of the people: thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in the Marquesas, of breadfruit.  And a Marquesan does not readily conceive life possible without his favourite diet.  A few years ago a drought killed the breadfruit trees and the bananas in the district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the open-handed customs of the island, a singular state of things arose.  Well-watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho accordingly crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, ‘gave him his name’ - an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected - and from this improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all the world as though he had paid for them.  Hence a continued traffic on the road.  Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and glistening with sweat, may be seen at all hours of the day, a stick across his bare shoulders, tripping nervously under a double burthen of green fruits.  And on the far side of the gap a dozen stone posts on the wayside in the shadow of a grove mark the breathing-space of the popoi-carriers.  A little back from the beach, and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to find a cluster of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest.  ‘Why do you not take these?’ I asked.  ‘Tapu,’ said Hoka; and I thought to myself (after the manner of dull travellers) what children and fools these people were to toil over the mountain and despoil innocent neighbours when the staff of life was thus growing at their door.  I was the more in error.  In the general destruction these surviving trees were enough only for the family of the proprietor, and by the simple expedient of declaring a tapu he enforced his right.

The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness.  A slow disease follows on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the bones of the same fish burned with the due mysteries.  The cocoa-nut and breadfruit tapu works more swiftly.  Suppose you have eaten tapu fruit at the evening meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy; in the morning, swelling and a dark discoloration will have attacked your neck, whence they spread upward to the face; and in two days, unless the cure be interjected, you must die.  This cure is prepared from the rubbed leaves of the tree from which the patient stole; so that he cannot be saved without confessing to the Tahuku the person whom he wronged.  In the experience of my informant, almost no tapu had been put in use, except the two described: he had thus no opportunity to learn the nature and operation of the others; and, as the art of making them was jealously guarded amongst the old men, he believed the mystery would soon die out.  I should add that he was no Marquesan, but a Chinaman, a resident in the group from boyhood, and a reverent believer in the spells which he described.  White men, amongst whom Ah Fu included himself, were exempt; but he had a tale of a Tahitian woman, who had come to the Marquesas, eaten tapu fish, and, although uninformed of her offence and danger, had been afflicted and cured exactly like a native.

Doubtless the belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that they may detect a depredator by his sickness.  Or, perhaps, we should understand the idea of the hidden tapu otherwise, as a politic device to spread uneasiness and extort confessions: so that, when a man is ailing, he shall ransack his brain for any possible offence, and send at once for any proprietor whose rights he has invaded.  ‘Had you hidden a tapu?’ we may conceive him asking; and I cannot imagine the proprietor gainsaying it; and this is perhaps the strangest feature of the system - that it should be regarded from without with such a mental and implicit awe, and, when examined from within, should present so many apparent evidences of design.

We read in Dr. Campbell’s
Poenamo
of a New Zealand girl, who was foolishly told that she had eaten a tapu yam, and who instantly sickened, and died in the two days of simple terror.  The period is the same as in the Marquesas; doubtless the symptoms were so too.  How singular to consider that a superstition of such sway is possibly a manufactured article; and that, even if it were not originally invented, its details have plainly been arranged by the authorities of some Polynesian Scotland Yard.  Fitly enough, the belief is to-day - and was probably always - far from universal.  Hell at home is a strong deterrent with some; a passing thought with others; with others, again, a theme of public mockery, not always well assured; and so in the Marquesas with the tapu.  Mr. Regler has seen the two extremes of scepticism and implicit fear.  In the tapu grove he found one fellow stealing breadfruit, cheerful and impudent as a street arab; and it was only on a menace of exposure that he showed himself the least discountenanced.  The other case was opposed in every point.  Mr. Regler asked a native to accompany him upon a voyage; the man went gladly enough, but suddenly perceiving a dead tapu fish in the bottom of the boat, leaped back with a scream; nor could the promise of a dollar prevail upon him to advance.

The Marquesan, it will be observed, adheres to the old idea of the local circumscription of beliefs and duties.  Not only are the whites exempt from consequences; but their transgressions seem to be viewed without horror.  It was Mr. Regler who had killed the fish; yet the devout native was not shocked at Mr. Regler - only refused to join him in his boat.  A white is a white: the servant (so to speak) of other and more liberal gods; and not to be blamed if he profit by his liberty.  The Jews were perhaps the first to interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the Jewish virus is still strong in Christianity.  All the world must respect our tapus, or we gnash our teeth.

CHAPTER VII - HATIHEU

The bays of Anaho and Hatiheu are divided at their roots by the knife-edge of a single hill - the pass so often mentioned; but this isthmus expands to the seaward in a considerable peninsula: very bare and grassy; haunted by sheep and, at night and morning, by the piercing cries of the shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats; and on its sea-front indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced with cliffs of the colour and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack.  In one of these echoing and sunless gullies we saw, clustered like sea-birds on a splashing ledge, shrill as sea-birds in their salutation to the passing boat, a group of fisherwomen, stripped to their gaudy under-clothes.  (The clash of the surf and the thin female voices echo in my memory.)  We had that day a native crew and steersman, Kauanui; it was our first experience of Polynesian seamanship, which consists in hugging every point of land.  There is no thought in this of saving time, for they will pull a long way in to skirt a point that is embayed.  It seems that, as they can never get their houses near enough the surf upon the one side, so they can never get their boats near enough upon the other.  The practice in bold water is not so dangerous as it looks - the reflex from the rocks sending the boat off.  Near beaches with a heavy run of sea, I continue to think it very hazardous, and find the composure of the natives annoying to behold.  We took unmingled pleasure, on the way out, to see so near at hand the beach and the wonderful colours of the surf.  On the way back, when the sea had risen and was running strong against us, the fineness of the steersman’s aim grew more embarrassing.  As we came abreast of the sea-front, where the surf broke highest, Kauanui embraced the occasion to light his pipe, which then made the circuit of the boat - each man taking a whiff or two, and, ere he passed it on, filling his lungs and cheeks with smoke.  Their faces were all puffed out like apples as we came abreast of the cliff foot, and the bursting surge fell back into the boat in showers.  At the next point ‘cocanetti’ was the word, and the stroke borrowed my knife, and desisted from his labours to open nuts.  These untimely indulgences may be compared to the tot of grog served out before a ship goes into action.

My purpose in this visit led me first to the boys’ school, for Hatiheu is the university of the north islands.  The hum of the lesson came out to meet us.  Close by the door, where the draught blew coolest, sat the lay brother; around him, in a packed half-circle, some sixty high-coloured faces set with staring eyes; and in the background of the barn-like room benches were to be seen, and blackboards with sums on them in chalk.  The brother rose to greet us, sensibly humble.  Thirty years he had been there, he said, and fingered his white locks as a bashful child pulls out his pinafore.
‘Et point de résultats, monsieur, presque pas de résultats
.’  He pointed to the scholars: ‘You see, sir, all the youth of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu.  Between the ages of six and fifteen this is all that remains; and it is but a few years since we had a hundred and twenty from Nuka-hiva alone. 
Oui, monsieur, cela se dépérit
.’  Prayers, and reading and writing, prayers again and arithmetic, and more prayers to conclude: such appeared to be the dreary nature of the course.  For arithmetic all island people have a natural taste.  In Hawaii they make good progress in mathematics.  In one of the villages on Majuro, and generally in the Marshall group, the whole population sit about the trader when he is weighing copra, and each on his own slate takes down the figures and computes the total.  The trader, finding them so apt, introduced fractions, for which they had been taught no rule.  At first they were quite gravelled but ultimately, by sheer hard thinking, reasoned out the result, and came one after another to assure the trader he was right.  Not many people in Europe could have done the like.  The course at Hatiheu is therefore less dispiriting to Polynesians than a stranger might have guessed; and yet how bald it is at best!  I asked the brother if he did not tell them stories, and he stared at me; if he did not teach them history, and he said, ‘O yes, they had a little Scripture history - from the New Testament’; and repeated his lamentations over the lack of results.  I had not the heart to put more questions; I could but say it must be very discouraging, and resist the impulse to add that it seemed also very natural.  He looked up - ‘My days are far spent,’ he said; ‘heaven awaits me.’  May that heaven forgive me, but I was angry with the old man and his simple consolation.  For think of his opportunity!  The youth, from six to fifteen, are taken from their homes by Government, centralised at Hatiheu, where they are supported by a weekly tax of food; and, with the exception of one month in every year, surrendered wholly to the direction of the priests.  Since the escapade already mentioned the holiday occurs at a different period for the girls and for the boys; so that a Marquesan brother and sister meet again, after their education is complete, a pair of strangers.  It is a harsh law, and highly unpopular; but what a power it places in the hands of the instructors, and how languidly and dully is that power employed by the mission!  Too much concern to make the natives pious, a design in which they all confess defeat, is, I suppose, the explanation of their miserable system.  But they might see in the girls’ school at Tai-o-hae, under the brisk, housewifely sisters, a different picture of efficiency, and a scene of neatness, airiness, and spirited and mirthful occupation that should shame them into cheerier methods.  The sisters themselves lament their failure.  They complain the annual holiday undoes the whole year’s work; they complain particularly of the heartless indifference of the girls.  Out of so many pretty and apparently affectionate pupils whom they have taught and reared, only two have ever returned to pay a visit of remembrance to their teachers.  These, indeed, come regularly, but the rest, so soon as their school-days are over, disappear into the woods like captive insects.  It is hard to imagine anything more discouraging; and yet I do not believe these ladies need despair.  For a certain interval they keep the girls alive and innocently busy; and if it be at all possible to save the race, this would be the means.  No such praise can be given to the boys’ school at Hatiheu.  The day is numbered already for them all; alike for the teacher and the scholars death is girt; he is afoot upon the march; and in the frequent interval they sit and yawn.  But in life there seems a thread of purpose through the least significant; the drowsiest endeavour is not lost, and even the school at Hatiheu may be more useful than it seems.