WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS
BY
FREDERICK O'BRIEN
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
T. Werner Laurie, Ltd.
1919
FOREWORD
There is in the nature of every man, I firmly believe, a longing to see and know the strange places of the world. Life imprisons us all in its coil of circumstance, and the dreams of romance that color boyhood are forgotten, but they do not die. They stir at the sight of a white-sailed ship beating out to the wide sea; the smell of tarred rope on a blackened wharf, or the touch of the cool little breeze that rises when the stars come out will waken them again. Somewhere over the rim of the world lies romance, and every heart yearns to go and find it.
It is not given to every man to start on the quest of the rainbow's end. Such fantastic pursuit is not for him who is bound by ties of home and duty and fortune-to-make. He has other adventure at his own door, sterner fights to wage, and, perhaps, higher rewards to gain. Still, the ledgers close sometimes on a sigh, and by the cosiest fireside one will see in the coals pictures that have nothing to do with wedding rings or balances at the bank.
It is for those who stay at home yet dream of foreign places that I have written this book, a record of one happy year spent among the simple, friendly cannibals of Atuona valley, on the island of Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. In its pages there is little of profound research, nothing, I fear, to startle the anthropologist or to revise encyclopedias; such expectation was far from my thoughts when I sailed from Papeite on the Morning Star. I went to see what I should see, and to learn whatever should be taught me by the days as they came. What I saw and what I learned the reader will see and learn, and no more.
Days, like people, give more when they are approached in not too stern a spirit. So I traveled lightly, without the heavy baggage of the ponderous-minded scholar, and the reader who embarks with me on the “long cruise” need bring with him only an open mind and a love for the strange and picturesque. He will come back, I hope, as I did, with some glimpses into the primitive customs of the long-forgotten ancestors of the white race, a deeper wonder at the mysteries of the world, and a memory of sun-steeped days on white beaches, of palms and orchids and the childlike savage peoples who live in the bread-fruit groves of “Bloody Hiva-oa.”
The author desires to express here his thanks to Rose Wilder Lane, to whose editorial assistance the publication of this book is very largely due.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Farewell to Papeite beach; at sea in the Morning Star; Darwin's theory of the continent that sank beneath the waters of the South Seas
CHAPTER II
The trade-room of the Morning Star; Lying Bill Pincher; M. L'Hermier des Plantes, future governor of the Marquesas; story of McHenry and the little native boy, His Dog
CHAPTER III
Thirty-seven days at sea; life of the sea-birds; strange phosphorescence; first sight of Fatu-hiva; history of the islands; chant of the Raiateans
CHAPTER IV
Anchorage of Taha-Uka; Exploding Eggs, and his engagement as valet; inauguration of the new governor; dance on the palace lawn
CHAPTER V
First night in Atuona valley; sensational arrival of the Golden Bed; Titihuti's tattooed legs
CHAPTER VI
Visit of Chief Seventh Man Who is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire; journey to Vait-hua on Tahuata island; fight with the devil-fish; story of a cannibal feast and the two who escaped
CHAPTER VII
Idyllic valley of Vait-hua; the beauty of Vanquished Often; bathing on the beach; an unexpected proposal of marriage
CHAPTER VIII
Communal life; sport in the waves; fight of the sharks and the mother whale; a day in the mountains; death of Le Capitaine Halley; return to Atuona
CHAPTER IX
The Marquesans at ten o'clock mass; a remarkable conversation about religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his idea of the devil
CHAPTER X
The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani
CHAPTER XI
Filling the popoi pits in the season of the breadfruit; legend of the mei; the secret festival in a hidden valley
CHAPTER XII
A walk in the jungle; the old woman in the breadfruit tree; a night in a native hut on the mountain
CHAPTER XIII
The household of Lam Kai Oo; copra making; marvels of the cocoanut-groves; the sagacity of pigs; and a crab that knows the laws of gravitation
CHAPTER XIV
Visit of Le Moine; the story of Paul Gauguin; his house, and a search for his grave beneath the white cross of Calvary
CHAPTER XV
Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the death of a race
CHAPTER XVI
A savage dance, a drama of the sea, of danger and feasting; the rape of the lettuce
CHAPTER XVII
A walk to the Forbidden Place; Hot Tears, the
CHAPTER XVIII
A search for rubber-trees on the plateau of Ahoa; a fight with the wild white dogs; story of an ancient migration, told by the wild cattle hunters in the Cave of the Spine of the Chinaman
CHAPTER XIX
A feast to the men of Motopu; the making of kava, and its drinking; the story of the Girl Who Lost Her Strength
CHAPTER XX
A journey to Taaoa; Kahuiti, the cannibal chief, and his story of an old war caused by an unfaithful woman
CHAPTER XXI
The crime of Huahine for love of Weaver of Mats; story of Tahia's white man who was eaten; the disaster that befell Honi, the white man who used his harpoon against his friends
CHAPTER XXII
The memorable game for the matches in the cocoanut-grove of Lam Kai Oo
CHAPTER XXIII
Mademoiselle N——
CHAPTER XXIV
A journey to Nuka-hiva; story of the celebration of the fête of Joan of Arc, and the miracles of the white horse and the girl
CHAPTER XXV
America's claim to the Marquesas; adventures of Captain Porter in 1812; war between Haapa and Tai-o-hae, and the conquest of Typee valley
CHAPTER XXVI
A visit to Typee; story of the old man who returned too late
CHAPTER XXVII
Journey on the Roberta; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss paradise in the valley of Oomoa
CHAPTER XXVIII
Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the “survival of the fittest”
CHAPTER XXIX
The white man who danced in Oomoa valley; a wild-boar hunt in the hills; the feast of the triumphant hunters and a dance in honor of Grelet
CHAPTER XXX
A visit to Hanavave; Père Olivier at home; the story of the last battle between Hanahouua and Oi, told by the sole survivor; the making of tapa cloth, and the ancient garments of the Marquesans
CHAPTER XXXI
Fishing in Hanavave; a deep-sea battle with a shark; Red Chicken shows how to tie ropes to sharks' tails; night-fishing for dolphins, and the monster sword-fish that overturned the canoe; the native doctor dresses Red Chicken's wounds and discourses on medicine
CHAPTER XXXII
A journey over the roof of the world to Oomoa; an encounter with a wild woman of the hills
CHAPTER XXXIII
Return in a canoe to Atuona; Tetuahunahuna relates the story of the girl who rode the white horse in the celebration of the fête of Joan of Arc in Tai-o-hae; Proof that sharks hate women; steering by the stars to Atuona beach
CHAPTER XXXIV
Sea sports; curious sea-foods found at low tide; the peculiarities of sea-centipedes and how to cook and eat them
CHAPTER XXXV
Court day in Atuona; the case of Daughter of the Pigeon and the sewing-machine; the story of the perfidy of Drink of Beer and the death of Earth Worm who tried to kill the governor
CHAPTER XXXVI
The madman Great Moth of the Night; story of the famine and the one family that ate pig
CHAPTER XXXVII
A visit to the hermit of Taha-Uka valley; the vengeance that made the Scallamera lepers; and the hatred of Mohuto
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son
CHAPTER XXXIX
The chants of departure; night falls on the Land of the War Fleet
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Village of Atuona, showing peak of Temetiu
Beach at Viataphiha-Tahiti
Where the belles of Tahiti lived in the shade to whiten their complexions
Lieutenant L'Hermier des Plantes, Governor of the Marquesas Islands
Entrance to a Marquesan Bay
A road in Nuka-Hiva
Harbor of Tai-o-hae
Schooner Fetia Taiao in the Bay of Traitors
André Bauda, Commissaire
The public dance in the garden
Antoinette, a Marquesan dancing girl
Marquesans in Sunday clothes
Vai Etienne
The pool by the Queen's house
Idling away the sunny hours
Nothing to do but rest all day
Catholic Church at Atuona
A native spearing fish from a rock
A volunteer cocoanut grove, with trees of all ages
Climbing for cocoanuts
Splitting cocoanut husks in copra making process
Cutting the meat from cocoanuts to make copra
A Marquesan home on a paepae
Isle of Barking Dogs
The haka, the Marquesan national dance
Hot Tears with Vai Etienne
The old cannibal of Taipi Valley
Enacting a human sacrifice of the Marquesans
Interior of Island of Fatu-hiva, where the author walked over the mountains
The plateau of Ahoa
Kivi, the kava drinker with the hetairae of the valley
A pool in the jungle
The Pekia, or Place of Sacrifice, at Atuona
Marquesan cannibals, wearing dress of human hair
Tepu, a Marquesan girl of the hills, and her sister
A tattooed Marquesan with carved canoe paddle
A chieftess in tapa garments with tapa parasol
Launching the whale-boat
Père Simeon Delmas' church at Tai-o-hae
Gathering the feis in the mountains
Near the Mission at Hanavave
Starting from Hanavave for Oomoa
Feis, or mountain bananas
Where river and bay meet at Oomoa, Island of Fatu-hiva
Sacred banyan tree at Oomoa
Elephantiasis of the legs
The Koina Kai, or feast in Oomoa
Beach at Oomoa
Putting the canoe in the water
Pascual, the giant Paumotan pilot and his friends
A pearl diver's sweetheart
Spearing fish in Marquesas Islands
Pearl shell divers at work
Catholic Church at Hanavave
A canoe in the surf at Oomoa
The gates of the Valley of Hanavave
A fisherman's house of bamboo and cocoanut leaves
Double canoes
Harbor sports
Tahaiupehe, Daughter of the Pigeon, of Taaoa
Nataro Puelleray and wife
Author's Note. Foreign words in a book are like rocks in a path. There are two ways of meeting the difficulty; the reader may leap over them, or use them as stepping stones. I have written this book so that they may easily be leaped over by the hasty, but he will lose much enjoyment by doing so; I would urge him to pronounce them as he goes. Marquesan words have a flavor all their own; much of the simple poetry of the islands is in them. The rules for pronouncing them are simple; consonants have the sounds usual in English, vowels have the Latin value, that is, a is ah, e is ay, i is ee, o is oh, and u is oo. Every letter is pronounced, and there are no accents. The Marquesans had no written language, and their spoken tongue was reproduced as simply as possible by the missionaries.
WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS
CHAPTER ONE
Farewell to Papeite beach; at sea in the Morning Star; Darwin's theory of the continent that sank beneath the waters of the South Seas.
By the white coral wall of Papeite beach the schooner Fetia Taiao (Morning Star) lay ready to put to sea. Beneath the skyward-sweeping green heights of Tahiti the narrow shore was a mass of colored gowns, dark faces, slender waving arms. All Papeite, flower-crowned and weeping, was gathered beside the blue lagoon.
Lamentation and wailing followed the brown sailors as they came over the side and slowly began to cast the moorings that held the Morning Star. Few are the ships that sail many seasons among the Dangerous Islands. They lay their bones on rock or reef or sink in the deep, and the lovers, sons and husbands of the women who weep on the beach return no more to the huts in the cocoanut groves. So, at each sailing on the “long course” the anguish is keen.
“Ia ora na i te Atua! Farewell and God keep you!” the women cried as they stood beside the half-buried cannon that serve to make fast the ships by the coral bank. From the deck of the nearby Hinano came the music of an accordeon and a chorus of familiar words:
It was the Himene Tatou Arearea. Kelly, the wandering I.W.W., self-acclaimed delegate of the mythical Union of Beach-combers and Stowaways, was at the valves of the accordeon, and about him squatted a ring of joyous natives. “Wela ka hao! Hot stuff!” they shouted.
Suddenly Caroline of the Marquesas and Mamoe of Moorea, most beautiful dancers of the quays, flung themselves into the upaupahura, the singing dance of love. Kelly began “Tome! Tome!” a Hawaiian hula. Men unloading cargo on the many schooners dropped their burdens and began to dance. Rude squareheads of the fo'c'sles beat time with pannikins. Clerks in the traders' stores and even Marechel, the barber, were swept from counters and chairs by the sensuous melody, and bareheaded in the white sun they danced beneath the crowded balconies of the Cercle Bougainville, the club by the lagoon. The harbor of Papeite knew ten minutes of unrestrained merriment, tears forgotten, while from the warehouse of the navy to the Poodle Stew café the hula reigned.
Beach at Viataphiha-Tahiti
Where the belles of Tahiti lived in the shade to whiten their complexions.
Under the gorgeous flamboyant trees that paved their shade with red-gold blossoms a group of white men sang:
The anchor was up, the lines let go, and suddenly from the sea came a wind with rain.
The girls from the Cocoanut House, a flutter of brilliant scarlet and pink gowns, fled for shelter, tossing blossoms of the sweet tiati Tahiti toward their sailor lovers as they ran. Marao, the haughty queen, drove rapidly away in her old chaise, the Princess Boots leaning out to wave a slender hand. Prince Hinoi, the fat spendthrift
So we left Papeite, the gay Tahitian capital, while a slashing downpour drowned the gay flamboyant blossoms, our masts and rigging creaking in the gale, and sea breaking white on the coral reef.
Like the weeping women, who doubtless had already dried their tears, the sky began to smile before we reached the treacherous pass in the outer reef. Beyond Moto Utu, the tiny islet in the harbor that had been harem and fort in kingly days, we saw the surf foaming on the coral, and soon were through the narrow channel.
We had lifted no canvas in the lagoon, using only our engine to escape the coral traps. Past the ever-present danger, with the wind now half a gale and the rain falling again in sheets—the intermittent deluge of the season—the Morning Star, under reefed foresail, mainsail and staysail, pointed her delicate nose toward the Dangerous Islands and hit hard the open sea.
She rode the endlessly-tossing waves like a sea-gull, carrying her head with a care-free air and dipping to the waves in jaunty fashion. Her lines were very fine, tapering and beautiful, even to the eye of a land-lubber.
A hundred and six feet from stem to stern, twenty-three feet of beam and ten feet of depth, she was loaded to water's edge with cargo for the islands to which we were bound. Lumber lay in the narrow lanes between cabin-house and rails; even the lifeboats were piled with cargo. Those who reckon dangers do not laugh much in these seas. There was barely room to move about on the deck of the Morning Star; merely a few steps were possible abaft the wheel amid the play of main-sheet boom and traveler. Here, while my three fellow-passengers went below, I stood gazing at the rain-whipped illimitable waters ahead.
Where is the boy who has not dreamed of the cannibal isles, those strange, fantastic places over the rim of the world, where naked brown men move like shadows through unimagined jungles, and horrid feasts are celebrated to the “boom, boom, boom!” of the twelve-foot drums?
Years bring knowledge, paid for with the dreams of youth. The wide, vague world becomes familiar, becomes even common-place. London, Paris, Venice, many-colored Cairo, the desecrated crypts of the pyramids, the crumbling villages of Palestine, no longer glimmer before me in the iridescent glamor of fancy, for I have seen them. But something of the boyish thrill that filled me when I pored over the pages of Melville long ago returned while I stood on the deck of the Morning Star, plunging through the surging Pacific in the driving tropic rain.
Many leagues before us lay Les Isles Dangereux, the Low Archipelago, first stopping-point on our journey to the far cannibal islands yet another thousand miles away across the empty seas. Before we saw the green banners of Tahiti's cocoanut palms again we would travel not only forward over leagues of tossing water but backward across centuries of time. For in those islands isolated from the world for eons there remains a living fragment of the childhood of our Caucasian race.
Darwin's theory is that these islands are the tops of a submerged continent, or land bridge, which stretches its crippled body along the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues. A lost land, whose epic awaits the singer; a mystery perhaps forever to be unsolved. There are great monuments, graven objects, hieroglyphics, customs and languages, island peoples with suggestive legends—all, perhaps, remnants of a migration from Asia or Africa a hundred thousand years ago.
Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured the Caucasian people, the dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the continent fell from the sight of sun and stars save in those spots now the mountainous islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas, the survivors were isolated for untold centuries.
Here in these islands the brothers of our long-forgotten ancestors have lived and bred since the Stone Age, cut off from the main stream of mankind's development. Here they have kept the childhood customs of our white race, savage and wild, amid their primitive and savage life. Here, three centuries ago, they were discovered by the peoples of the great world, and, rudely encountering a civilization they did not build, they are dying here. With their passing vanishes the last living link with our own pre-historic past. And I was to see it, before it disappears forever.
CHAPTER II
The trade-room of the Morning Star; Lying Bill Pincher; M. L'Hermier des Plantes, future governor of the Marquesas; story of McHenry and the little native boy, His Dog.
“Come 'ave a drink!” Captain Pincher called from the cabin, and leaving the spray-swept deck where the rain drummed on the canvas awning I went down the four steps into the narrow cabin-house.
The cabin, about twenty feet long, had a tiny semi-private room for Captain Pincher, and four berths ranged about a table. Here, grouped around a demijohn of rum, I found Captain Pincher with my three fellow-passengers; McHenry and Gedge, the traders, and M. L'Hermier des Plantes, a young officer of the French colonial army, bound to the Marquesas to be their governor.
The captain was telling the story of the wreck in which he had lost his former ship. He had tied up to a reef for a game of cards with a like-minded skipper, who berthed beside him. The wind changed while they slept. Captain Pincher awoke to find his schooner breaking her backs on the coral rocks.
“Oo can say wot the blooming wind will do?” he said, thumping the table with his glass. “There was Willy's schooner tied up next to me, and 'e got a slant and slid away, while my boat busts 'er sides open on the reef, The 'ole blooming atoll was 'eaped with the blooming cargo. Willy 'ad luck; I 'ad 'ell. It's all an 'azard.”
He had not found his aitches since he left Liverpool, thirty years earlier, nor dropped his silly expletives. A gray-haired, red-faced, laughing man, stockily built, mild mannered, he proved, as the afternoon wore on, to be a man from whom Münchausen might have gained a story or two.
“They call me Lying Bill,” he said to me. “You can't believe wot I say.”
“He's straight as a mango tree, Bill Pincher is,” McHenry asserted loudly. “He's a terrible liar about stories, but he's the best seaman that comes to T'yti, and square as a biscuit tin. You know how, when that schooner was stole that he was mate on, and the rotten thief run away with her and a woman, Bill he went after 'em, and brought the schooner back from Chile. Bill, he's whatever he says he is, all right—but he can sail a schooner, buy copra and shell cheap, sell goods to the bloody natives, and bring back the money to the owners. That's what I call an honest man.”
Lying Bill received these hearty words with something less than his usual good-humor. There was no friendliness in his eye as he looked at McHenry, whose empty glass remained empty until he himself refilled it. Bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped by a hundred sordid adventures, McHenry clutched at equality with these men, and it eluded him. Lying Bill, making no reply to his enthusiastic commendation, retired to his bunk with a paper-covered novel, and to cover the rebuff McHenry turned to talk of trade with Gedge, who spoke little.
The traderoom of the Morning Star, opening from the cabin, was to me the door to romance. When I was a boy there was more flavor in traderooms than in war. To have seen one would have been as a glimpse of the Holy Grail to a sworn knight. Those traderooms of my youthful imagination smelt of rum and gun-powder, and beside them were racks of rifles to repel the dusky figures coming over the bulwarks.
The traderoom of the Morning Star was odorous, too. It had no window, and when one opened the
Trade business, McHenry's monologue explained, is not what it was. When these petty merchants dared not trust themselves ashore their guns guarded against too eager customers. But now almost every inhabited island has its little store, and the trader has to pursue his buyers, who die so fast that he must move from island to island in search of population.
“Booze is boss,” said McHenry. “I have two thousand pounds in bank in Australia, all made by selling liquor to the natives. It's against French law to sell or trade or give 'em a drop, but we all do it. If you don't have it, you can't get cargo. In the diving season it's the only damn thing that'll pass. The divers'll dig up from five to fifteen dollars a bottle for it, depending on the French being on the job or not. Ain't that so, Gedge?”
“C'est vrai,” Gedge assented. He spoke in French, ostensibly for the benefit of M. L'Hermier des Plantes. That young governor of the Marquesas was not given to saying much, his chief interest in life appearing to be an ample black whisker, to which he devoted incessant tender care. After a few words of broken English he had turned a negligent attention to the pages of a Marquesan dictionary, in preparation for his future labors among the natives. Gedge, however, continued to talk in the language of courts.
It was obvious that McHenry's twenty-five years in French possessions had not taught him the white man's language. He demanded brusquely, “What are you oui-oui-ing for?” and occasionally interjected a few words of bastard French in an attempt to be jovial. To this Gedge paid little attention.
Gedge was chief of the commercial part of the expedition, and his manner proclaimed it. Thin-lipped, cunning-eyed, but strong and self-reliant, he was absorbed in the chances of trade. He had been twenty years in the Marquesas islands. A shrewd man among kanakas, unscrupulous by his own account, he had prospered. Now, after selling his business, he was paying a last visit to his long-time home to settle accounts.
“'Is old woman is a barefoot girl among the cannibals,” Lying Bill said to me later. “'E 'as given a 'ole army of ostriches to fortune, 'e 'as.”
One of Captain Pincher's own sons was assistant to the engineer, Ducat, and helped in the cargo work. The lad lived forward with the crew, so that we saw nothing of him socially, and his father never spoke to him save to give an order or a reprimand. Native mothers mourn often the lack of fatherly affection in their white mates. Illegitimate children are held cheap by the whites.