Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (806 page)

Here, then, we have one side of the case.  Man-eating among kindly men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm.  And to-day we are face to face with the reverse.  To-day in the Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter Island, we find the same race perishing like flies.  Why this change?  Or, grant that the coming of the whites, the change of habits, and the introduction of new maladies and vices, fully explain the depopulation, why is that depopulation not universal?  The population of Tahiti, after a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary.  I hear of a similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as healthy and at least as fruitful as before the change.  Grant that the Tahitians, the Maoris, and the Paumotuans have become inured to the new conditions; and what are we to make of the Samoans, who have never suffered?

Those who are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be ready with solutions.  Thus I have heard the mortality of the Maoris attributed to their change of residence - from fortified hill-tops to the low, marshy vicinity of their plantations.  How plausible!  And yet the Marquesans are dying out in the same houses where their fathers multiplied.  Or take opium.  The Marquesas and Hawaii are the two groups the most infected with this vice; the population of the one is the most civilised, that of the other by far the most barbarous, of Polynesians; and they are two of those that perish the most rapidly.  Here is a strong case against opium.  But let us take unchastity, and we shall find the Marquesas and Hawaii figuring again upon another count.  Thus, Samoans are the most chaste of Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely fertile; Marquesans are the most debauched: we have seen how they are perishing; Hawaiians are notoriously lax, and they begin to be dotted among deserts.  So here is a case stronger still against unchastity; and here also we have a correction to apply.  Whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, neither friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived the time of danger.  One last example: syphilis has been plausibly credited with much of the sterility.  But the Samoans are, by all accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is not seriously to be argued that the Samoans have escaped syphilis.

These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any particular cause, or even from many in a single group.  I have in my eye an able and amiable pamphlet by the Rev. S. E. Bishop: ‘Why are the Hawaiians Dying Out?’  Any one interested in the subject ought to read this tract, which contains real information; and yet Mr. Bishop’s views would have been changed by an acquaintance with other groups.  Samoa is, for the moment, the main and the most instructive exception to the rule.  The people are the most chaste and one of the most temperate of island peoples.  They have never been tried and depressed with any grave pestilence.  Their clothing has scarce been tampered with; at the simple and becoming tabard of the girls, Tartuffe, in many another island, would have cried out; for the cool, healthy, and modest lava-lava or kilt, Tartuffe has managed in many another island to substitute stifling and inconvenient trousers.  Lastly, and perhaps chiefly, so far from their amusements having been curtailed, I think they have been, upon the whole, extended.  The Polynesian falls easily into despondency: bereavement, disappointment, the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from life.  The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life are striking; and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas.  In Samoa, on the other hand, perpetual song and dance, perpetual games, journeys, and pleasures, make an animated and a smiling picture of the island life.  And the Samoans are to-day the gayest and the best entertained inhabitants of our planet.  The importance of this can scarcely be exaggerated.  In a climate and upon a soil where a livelihood can be had for the stooping, entertainment is a prime necessity.  It is otherwise with us, where life presents us with a daily problem, and there is a serious interest, and some of the heat of conflict, in the mere continuing to be.  So, in certain atolls, where there is no great gaiety, but man must bestir himself with some vigour for his daily bread, public health and the population are maintained; but in the lotos islands, with the decay of pleasures, life itself decays.  It is from this point of view that we may instance, among other causes of depression, the decay of war.  We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary business of war on the great scale, trailing epidemics and leaving pestilential corpses in its train, that we have almost forgotten its original, the most healthful, if not the most humane, of all field sports - hedge-warfare.  From this, as well as from the rest of his amusements and interests, the islander, upon a hundred islands, has been recently cut off.  And to this, as well as to so many others, the Samoan still makes good a special title.

Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:- Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives.  Where there have been most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes.  Each change, however small, augments the sum of new conditions to which the race has to become inured.  There may seem,
a priori
, no comparison between the change from ‘sour toddy’ to bad gin, and that from the island kilt to a pair of European trousers.  Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of pin-pricks.  We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the missionary.  In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent authority; the king becomes his
mairedupalais
; he can proscribe, he can command; and the temptation is ever towards too much.  Thus (by all accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own knowledge) the Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more or less degree unliveable to their converts.  And the mild, uncomplaining creatures (like children in a prison) yawn and await death.  It is easy to blame the missionary.  But it is his business to make changes.  It is surely his business, for example, to prevent war; and yet I have instanced war itself as one of the elements of health.  On the other hand, it were, perhaps, easy for the missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard every change as an affair of weight.  I take the average missionary; I am sure I do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago.  Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands) that change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.

There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet criticism.  I have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during fevers, mistaken treatment of children, native doctoring, or abortion - all causes frequently adduced.  And I have said nothing of them because they are conditions common to both epochs, and even more efficient in the past than in the present.  Was it not the same with unchastity, it may be asked?  Was not the Polynesian always unchaste?  Doubtless he was so always: doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably chaste visitors from Europe.  Take the Hawaiian account of Cook: I have no doubt it is entirely fair.  Take Krusenstern’s candid, almost innocent, description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider the disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war of lust) the American missionaries were once shelled by an English adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas, and carry off a complement of women for the cruise; consider, besides, how the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods, as appears plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii; and again, in the story of the discovery of Tutuila, when the really decent women of Samoa prostituted themselves in public to the French; and bear in mind how it was the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the business of the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.  Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even in the most degraded islands, has been further degradation.  Mr. Lawes, the missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity had declined there since the coming of the whites.  In heathen time, if a girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or brother would dash the infant down the cliffs; and to-day the scandal would be small.  Or take the Marquesas.  Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection, the young were strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to look upon one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it) like dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a fortnight in promiscuous liberty.  Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my authority, and declare themselves better informed.  I should prefer the statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood alone, which it is far from doing) to the report of the most honest traveller.  A ship of war comes to a haven, anchors, lands a party, receives and returns a visit, and the captain writes a chapter on the manners of the island.  It is not considered what class is mostly seen.  Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge England by the ladies who parade Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen who share with them their hire.  Stanislao’s opinion of a decay of virtue even in these unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his very example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii.  And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners.  I do not think that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count paternal kinship.  It is not possible to give details; suffice it that their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy, reason, and almost life itself are in abeyance.

CHAPTER VI - CHIEFS AND TAPUS

We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the chief called Taipi-Kikino.  An elegant guest at table, skilled in the use of knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun and started for the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable, always ingratiating and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he found his cheerfulness.  He had enough to sober him, I thought, in his official budget.  His expenses - for he was always seen attired in virgin white - must have by far exceeded his income of six dollars in the year, or say two shillings a month.  And he was himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest in the village.  It was currently supposed that his elder brother, Kauanui, must have helped him out.  But how comes it that the elder brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho?  That the one should be wealthy, and the other almost indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for comparatively few children are brought up in the house or succeed to the estates of their natural begetters.  That the one should be chief instead of the other must be explained (in a very Irish fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at all.

Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed.  We have seen, in the same house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such extruded island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life and death, now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours.  So when the French overthrew hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the Marquesas freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with a vote for a
conseiller-général
at Tahiti, they probably conceived themselves upon the path to popularity; and so far from that, they were revolting public sentiment.  The deposition of the chiefs was perhaps sometimes needful; the appointment of others may have been needful also; it was at least a delicate business.  The Government of George II. exiled many Highland magnates.  It never occurred to them to manufacture substitutes; and if the French have been more bold, we have yet to see with what success.

Our chief at Anaho was always called, he always called himself, Taipi-Kikino; and yet that was not his name, but only the wand of his false position.  As soon as he was appointed chief, his name - which signified, if I remember exactly,
Prince born among
flowers
- fell in abeyance, and he was dubbed instead by the expressive byword, Taipi-Kikino -
Highwater man-of-no-account
- or, Englishing more boldly,
Beggar
on horseback
- a witty and a wicked cut.  A nickname in Polynesia destroys almost the memory of the original name.  To-day, if we were Polynesians, Gladstone would be no more heard of.  We should speak of and address our Nestor as the Grand Old Man, and it is so that himself would sign his correspondence.  Not the prevalence, then, but the significancy of the nickname is to be noted here.  The new authority began with small prestige.  Taipi has now been some time in office; from all I saw he seemed a person very fit.  He is not the least unpopular, and yet his power is nothing.  He is a chief to the French, and goes to breakfast with the Resident; but for any practical end of chieftaincy a rag doll were equally efficient.

We had been but three days in Anaho when we received the visit of the chief of Hatiheu, a man of weight and fame, late leader of a war upon the French, late prisoner in Tahiti, and the last eater of long-pig in Nuka-hiva.  Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder.  ‘So does Kooamua to his enemies!’ he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh.  And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes.  He was the man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s - only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief’s tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue.  Further acquaintance increased our opinion of his sense.  He viewed the
Casco
in a manner then quite new to us, examining her lines and the running of the gear; to a piece of knitting on which one of the party was engaged, he must have devoted ten minutes’ patient study; nor did he desist before he had divined the principles; and he was interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he learned to work.  When he departed he carried away with him a list of his family, with his own name printed by his own hand at the bottom.  I should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little of a humbug.  He told us, for instance, that he was a person of exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate: the commons might be sots, but the chief could not stoop so low.  And not many days after he was to be observed in a state of smiling and lop-sided imbecility, the
Casco
ribbon upside down on his dishonoured hat.