Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1083 page)

This was Nukahiva, the island of Herman Melville’s Typee, and here for three weeks they lay in Anaho Bay, where there lived only natives and one white trader. They then sailed round to the south coast of the same island, to Taiohae, the port of entry and the capital of the group.

The two special features of the Marquesas which differentiate them from the other islands which Stevenson saw are, first, that the natives were till very recently the most inveterate cannibals of Polynesia, and second, that their population was melting away like snow off a dyke, so that extinction seemed imminent within the next few years.

Into the details of his visit I have no intention of going — partly they may be read in his own volume In the South Seas — but I would draw attention to Stevenson’s attitude toward the native races, for though I shall have occasion to return to it again in Samoa, there was but little growth or development of his essential In the South Seas, pp. 2-6. feelings or principles in dealing with them. Intelligent sympathy was the keynote, and the same kindliness to them as to all men. He never idealised them, and his view was but rarely affected by sentiment. His sense of history, combined with his power of seeing things in a new light and the refusal to accept commonplaces without examination, here stood him in good stead.

Five years before, in the Riviera, he had written:1 “There is no form of conceit more common or more silly than to look down on barbarous codes of morals. Barbarous virtues, the chivalrous point of honour, the fidelity of the wild Highlander or the two-sworded Japanese, are of a generous example. We may question the utility of what is done; the whole-hearted sincerity of the actors shuts our mouth. Nor can that idea be merely dishonourable for which men relinquish the comforts and consideration of society, the love of wife and child and parent, the light of the sun, and the protection of the laws. The seductions of life are strong in every age and station; we make idols of our affections, idols of our customary virtues; we are content to avoid the inconvenient wrong and to forego the inconvenient right with almost equal self-approval, until at last we make a home for our conscience among the negative virtues and the cowardly vices.”

This was of the Japanese in their recent feudal period: here is one of his earliest notes in the Marquesas, after meeting the natives face to face: —

“August3rd. — Tropical Night Thoughts. I awoke this morning about three; the night was heavenly in 1 Magazine of j4rt, November, 1883, a propos of the story of the “ Forty-seven Ronins.”

scent and temperature; the long swell brimmed into the bay and seemed to fill it full and then subside; silently, gently, and deeply the Casco rolled; only at times a block piped like a bird. I sat and looked seaward toward the mouth of the bay at the headlands and the stars; at the constellation of diamonds, each infi- nitesimally small, each individual and of equal lustre, and all shining together in heaven like some old-fashioned clasp; at the planet with the visible moon, as though he were beginning to re-people heaven by the process of gemination; at many other lone lamps and marshalled clusters. And upon a sudden it ran into my mind, even with shame, that these were lovelier than our nights in the north, the planets softer and brighter, and the constellations more handsomely arranged. I felt shame, I say, as at an ultimate infidelity: that I should desert the stars that shone upon my father; and turning to the shore-side, where there were some high squalls overhead, and the mountains loomed up black, I could have fancied I had slipped ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when day came and made clear the superimpending slopes, it would show pine and the red heather and the green fern, and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats, and the alien speech that should next greet my ears should be Gaelic, not Kanaka.1

“The singular narrowness of this world’s range, and, above all, the paucity of human combinations, are forced alike upon the reader and the traveller. The one rang-

1 Kanaka, the Hawaiian word for a man, is used by white men throughout the Pacific as equivalent to “ native,” “ Polynesian.” In Australia and Fiji it generally means Melanesian — black boy. ing through books, the other over peopled space, comes with astonishment on the same scenery, the same merry stories, the same fashion, the same stage of social evolution. Under cover of darkness here might be a Hebridean harbour; and if I am to call these men savages (which no bribe would induce me to do), what name should I find for Hebridean man? The Highlands and Islands somewhat more than a century back were in much the same convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesas to-day. In the one, the cherished habit of tattooing; in the other, a cherished costume, proscribed; in both, the men disarmed, the chiefs dishonoured, new fashions introduced, and chiefly that new pernicious fashion of regarding money as the be-all and end-all of existence; the commercial age, in each case, succeeding at a bound to the age militant: war, with its truces and its courtesies, succeeded by peace, with its meanness and its unending effort: the means of life no longer wrested with a bare face from hereditary enemies, but ground or cheated out of next-door neighbours and old family friends; in each case, a man’s luxury cut off, beef driven under cover of night from lowland pastures denied to the meat-loving Highlander, long-pig pirated from the next village to the man-eating Kanaka.”

And here is the practical outcome of his experience as a traveller, written in 1890, a passage specially selected for praise by so able and original an investigator as Mary Kingsley: —

“When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism: Michael Scott, Lord Derwent- water’s head, the second-sight, the Water Kelpie, — each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the black bull’s head of Stirling procured me the legend of Rahero; and what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the Tevas of Tahiti. The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown.” 1

It is interesting to compare his portrait of Vaekehu, the refined and aged queen of the Marquesas spending a devout old age after a stormy youth of cannibalism, with the similar picture in the Mariage de Loti.2

“Her house is on the European plan: a table in the midst of the chief room; photographs and religious pictures on the wall. It commands to either hand a charming vista: through the iront door, a peep of green lawn, scurrying pigs, the pendent fans of the coco- palm, and the splendour of the bursting surf; through the back, mounting forest glades and coronals of precipice. Here, in the strong through-draught, her Majesty received us in a simple gown of print, and with no mark of royalty but the exquisite finish of her tattooed mittens, the elaboration of her manners, and the gentle falsetto in which all the highly refined among Mar- quesan ladies (and Vaekehu above all others) delight to 1            In the South Seas, p. 14.

2     Le Mariage de Loti, 49th edition, p. 101. Paris, Calmann- Levy, 1893.

sing their language. . . . Vaekehu is very deaf; merci is her only word of French; and 1 do not know that she seemed clever. An exquisite, kind refinement, with a shade of quietism, gathered perhaps from the nuns, was what chiefly struck us. . . . She came with Stanilao (her son) and his little girl to dine on board the Casco. She had dressed for the occasion: wore white, which very well became her strong brown face; and sat among us, eating or smoking her cigarette, quite cut off from all society, or only now and then included through the intermediary of her son. It was a position that might have been ridiculous, and she made it ornamental; making believe to hear and to be entertained; her face, whenever she met our eyes, lighted with the smile of good society; her contributions to the talk, when she made any, and that was seldom, always complimentary and pleasing. No attention was paid to the child, for instance, but what she remarked and thanked us for. Her parting with each when she came to leave was gracious and pretty, as had been every step of her behaviour. When Mrs. Stevenson held out her hand to say good-bye, Vaekehu took it, held it, and a moment smiled upon her; dropped it, and then, as upon a kindly afterthought, and with a sort of warmth of condescension, held out both hands and kissed my wife upon both cheeks. Given the same relation of years and rank, the thing would have been so done upon the boards of the Com6die Fran^aise; just so might Madame Brohan have warmed and condescended to Madame Broisat in the Marquis de Ville- mer. It was my part to accompany our guests ashore: when I kissed the little girl good-bye at the pier-steps, Vaekehu gave a cry of gratification reached down her hand into the boat, took mine, and pressed it with that flattering softness which seems the coquetry of the old lady in every quarter of the earth. The next moment she had taken Stanilao’s arm, and they moved off along the pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed frorn hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Taiohae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while the drums were going twenty strong and the priests carried up the blood-stained baskets of long-pig. And now behold her, out of that past of violence and sickening feasts, step forth in her age, a quiet, smooth, elaborate old lady, such as you might find at home (mittened also, but not often so well-mannered) in a score of country- houses. Only Vaekehu’s mittens were of dye, not of silk; and they had been paid for, not in money, but the cooked flesh of men. It came in my mind like a clap, what she could think of it herself, and whether at heart, perhaps, she might not regret and aspire after the barbarous and stirring past. But when I asked Stanilao: ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘she is content; she is religious, she passes all her days with the sisters.’ “ 1

And here was the farewell of Prince Stanilao, an intelligent and educated gentleman, from whom Stevenson had learned much of the history and condition of 1 In the South Seas, p. 81. the islands, and with whom he had spent a long afternoon, telling him the story of Gordon, “and many episodes of the Indian Mutiny, Lucknow, the second battle of Cawnpore, the relief of Arrah, the death of poor Spottiswoode and Sir Hugh Rose’s hotspur midland campaign.” How many white men would have been at the pains to give so much instruction or so much pleasure to a native in a foreign possession? This is the result: “Ah, vous devriez rester ici, mon cher ami. Vous etes les gens qu’il faut pour les Kanaques; vous etes doux, vous et votre famille; vous seriez obeis dans toutes les lies.”1

It was the same at Anaho, the same afterwards in Atuona: he understood the natives; he treated them with understanding, and they liked him. The higher the rank, for the most part, the greater the liking, the more complete the appreciation. Vaekehu and Stanilao were the great folk of the archipelago; Stevenson, to whom snobbishness was unknown, found them also the most estimable.

“This is the rule in Polynesia, with few exceptions; the higher the family, the better the man — better in sense, better in manners, and usually taller and stronger in body. A stranger advances blindfold. He scrapes acquaintance as he can. Save the tattoo in the Marquesas, nothing indicates the difference in rank; and yet almost invariably we found, after we had made them, that our friends were persons of station.”

But his attention was by no means limited to natives; the behaviour that he enjoined on missionaries2 he * In tie Souti Seas, pp. 81, 87.

2 Appendix B, vol. ii. p. 229 63

exercised freely himself; to white men and half-castes he was equally genial and accessible. The governor and the gendarmes, the priests and the lay-brothers, the traders and the “ Beach,” all found him kindly and courteous, and the best of company.

The Resident carried him off to show him the prison, but it was empty; the women were gone calling and the men were shooting goats upon the mountains. The gendarmes told him stories of the Franco-German war, and gave him charming French meals. Of the missionaries, the portraits of the great and good Dordillon, the veteran bishop only just dead, and of Frere Michel, the architect, may be found in the South Sea volume; from Stevenson’s notes I give the charming picture of Pere Simeon: —

“Pere Simeon, the small frail figure in the black robe drawing near under the palms; the girlish, kind and somewhat pretty face under the straw hat; the strong rustic Gascon accent; the sudden lively doffing of the hat, at once so French and so ecclesiastical; he was a man you could not look upon without visions of his peasant ancestors, worthy folk, sitting at home to-day in France, and rejoiced (I hope often) with letters from their boy. Down we sat together under the eaves of the house of Taipi-Kikino, and were presently deep in talk. I had feared to meet a missionary, feared to find the narrowness and the self-sufficiency that deface their publications, that too often disgrace their behaviour. There was no fear of it here; Pere Simeon admired these natives as I do myself, admired them with spiritual envy; the superior of his congregation had said to him on his departure: ‘You are going among a people more civilised than we — peut-itre plus cinilis6s que nous-mimes’: in spite of which warning, having read some books of travel on his voyage, he came to these shores (like myself) expecting to find them peopled with lascivious monkeys. Good Bishop Dordillon had opened his eyes: ‘ There are nothing but lies in books of travel,’ said the bishop.

“What then was Pere Simeon doing here? The question rose in my mind, and I could see that he read the thought. Truly they were a people, on the whole, of a mind far liker Christ’s than any of the races of Europe; no spiritual life, almost no family life, but a kindness, a generosity, a readiness to give and to forgive, without parallel; to some extent that was the bishop’s doing; some of it had been since undone; death runs so busy in their midst, total extinction so instantly impended, that it seemed a hopeless task to combat their vices; as they were, they would go down in the abyss of things past; the watchers were already looking at the clock; Pere Simeon’s business was the visitation of the sick, to smooth the pillows of this dying family of man.”