Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 30

"It was the whole code," said he, "and when the French broke it down they destroyed us. There is Teriieroo a Teriierooterai, whose family were chiefs of Punaauia for generations, s.h.i.+fted to Papenoo. Each governor or admiral made these transfers here, as in the Marquesas and all the islands, with the primary object of lessening native cohesion, of Frenchifying us. They ruined our highest aspirations and our manners."

I had seen something of the same sweeping away of a code and the resultant evils and degradation in j.a.pan. When Bus.h.i.+do imposed itself on all above the herd, they had a sense of honor not surpa.s.sed by the people of any nation; but commerce, the destruction of the castes of samurai, heimin, and eta, the plunging of a military people into business and compet.i.tion with Western cunning, and the lacquer of Christianity which had done little more than Occidentalize to a considerable degree a few thousands, without giving them the practice of the golden rule, or an appreciation of the Sermon on the Mount, had robbed the j.a.panese of an ancient code of morality and honor, and replaced it with nothing worth while--an insatiable ambition to equal Occidental peoples and to conquer Oriental ones, and a thousand factories which killed women and children.

"We were divided into three distinct castes," said Tetuanui. "The Arii, or princes; Raatira, or small chiefs and simple landed proprietors; and the Manahune, or proletariat. Alliances between Arii and Raatira made an intermediate cla.s.s--Eietoai. There was also a caste of priests subject to the chief, their power all derived from him, but yet tending to become hereditary by the priests instructing their sons in the ceremonies and by taking care of the temple."

"That's the way the Aaron family got control of the Jewish priesthood,"

I interpolated. "They gave the people what they wanted, first a golden calf G.o.d, and then an ark, and they had charge of both."

The chief frowned. He was a confirmed Bible reader, and the Old Testament was so much like the Tahitian legends that he believed every word of it.

"The Arii," he said, "were sacred and had miraculous strength and powers. The food they touched was for others poison. There was a head in each Arii family to whom the others were subject; he was often an infant, and almost always a young man, for the eldest son of the chief was chief and the father only regent. This custom continued until comparatively recently in most families besides those of the Arii. The Arii were the descendants of the last conquerors of these islands. But their advent must have been ancient, for their power was uncontested, and their rights were so many, their duties so few, and the devotion of the people to them was so great, that only centuries could have established them so firmly. Probably they came after the Raatira. The Raatira were separated by too great a barrier to have a.s.sisted in the conquest. No Raatira could become an Arii; no Arii a Raatira. The latter were closer to the commoners, and paid the same respect to the Arii as did the Manahune.

"If an Arii woman wedded a Raatira man, the marriage was said to be with a taata ino, ino meaning literally bad, and taata man. This term applied to all not Arii, and indicated the contempt of the Arii for all below them. The Arii had many words solely for their own use, and tapu, or prohibited, to all others; they had a hundred privileges. The Raatira were probably the power broken by the Arii. The Raatira had conquered the Manahune, and were themselves bested by the Arii, the newest come."

The chief sighed. He was like an old Irish storyteller recounting the departed glories of Erin.

I read to him in French Bovis' opinions that the Raatira, defeated, retained part of their lands, served the new masters, and kept in subjection the people they had themselves beaten. They attached themselves to the Arii of their district, fought for them in their quarrels or wars, and were consulted in a.s.semblies, and allowed to speak to the crowd. I recalled that this was a privilege dearly prized by all Polynesians, the lack of reading and writing having, as in Greece, developed oratory and orators to a remarkable excellence. I was in Hawaii when the offices of the first legislature under the American flag were campaigned for, after years of repression by the sugar planters' oligarchy, and I had heard the natives speak a score of times, and always with delight and wonder. They valued free speech.

"The Arii were shrewd," said Chief Tetuanui, "and early invented a plan for keeping the Raatira in subjection. If two Raatira disputed possession of land, the one who believed himself defrauded could yield to the king or a member of the royal family the land, to which he usually had no right at all. The Arii thus got possession of more and more land from time to time, and the Raatira were loath to contend among themselves.

"The Manahune owned nothing by law, but they lived on the lands of Arii and Raatira, and were seldom evicted. They had the fruits of their labor with a t.i.the or so for their masters; they left to their children their acc.u.mulations, tentative, but actual, and their service was pleasant; more in the nature of gifts than rent. The Manahune could not rise above his caste except by the rare nomination of the king, but they could become Teuteu Arii, or servants of an Arii, and might thus acquire immense importance.

"Like the eunuchs at courts or the mistresses of the n.o.ble and rich,"

I remarked.

The chief shrugged his shoulders.

"The Manahune might become a priest or even join the society of the Arioi," he rejoined. "The government was simple. The will of the prince was supreme, but by custom things ran smoothly, and the prince, or Arii, had seldom to urge his power. There were, of course, instances of extortion, of bursts of anger, of feuds, of jealousies; but most of the time the Raatira saw that the Arii were well served, and were their intermediates with the commoners. The regular obligations of the inferior cla.s.ses were to meet at certain times to hand to the chiefs presents, food, clothing or useful instruments, and they sought to exceed one another in generosity. They met to build houses, to repair them, or to construct the rock foundations of houses, according to the importance of the chief, or Arii. They built the canoes, made the nets, and did the fis.h.i.+ng. The sea was divided into properties, as was the land. The Arii had the reefs where the fish most abounded.

"War was declared with religious ceremonies. Sacrifices were the basis of these ceremonies, and a human victim the most efficacious. The augurs examined the entrails, the auspices, much as did the pagans of old. Certain priests had certain duties. The Tahua Oripo, night runners, reported the movements of the enemy. They were professional war spies, and they acquired a marvelous ability. Sometimes they were able to lead their party so as to surprise the enemy and slaughter them, but usually there were preliminaries to war which warned the other side. A herald was sent in the costume of a great warrior. He was of high birth or famous for his fighting. He delivered himself of his mission ceremoniously, and was never attacked. Every locality had its war-chants, its songs of defiance. Today only a few fragments survive. Wars were waged mostly on account of the ambitions of princes, as to-day in Europe and Asia. But the effort of Christianity to oust paganism in Tahiti brought about many sanguinary conflicts, and plainly G.o.d was with the missionaries, who caused the battles. In 1815 the Battle of Feipi gave Tahiti to Pomare the Great, and to the Protestant ministers, who were his backers. Over three hundred were killed. A woman, the queen of the island of Huahine, commanded in the absence of Pomare.

"Sometimes after a battle the vanquished sent heralds to signify their yielding and to know the wish of the victor; they disbanded their troops, left their arms on the field, and the war was over. Usually the defeated warriors were allowed to return home without more ado after their confession of failure, but when the rage was great, the victors, with furious cries, gave the signal of carnage, and slew all they met. If the prince beaten escaped the first consequences of the rout, he was safe and lost only a portion of his territory, and in some wars only his prestige. He remained respected, and his privileges were about the same as before. The Arii were all of the same tribe, all related, and though they ruled different districts and valleys, and fought one another, they would not degrade one of their own family and rank. Thus power remained in the same families, princes, chiefs, and priests, and only the Raatira and the Manahune, the bourgeoisie and the commoners, really suffered.

"We copied you in Europe," I interposed. "There the kings, kaisers, and czars took care not to lower the dignity of monarchy, and are virtually all related. None of them ever deposed another of long enthroning, and none of them has been killed in a battle in centuries."

"Aue!" exclaimed the chief. "Ioba said, 'Wisdom is no longer with the old.'"

"Job talked like a revolutionist," I said. "That would be treason among the diplomats and lawyers of Europe and America. How did women get along in your father's day?"

Tetuanui got up to stretch his huge body. He had been squatting on his haunches for an hour.

"Let Haamoura, my wife, say as to them," he returned laughingly. "She knows all the old ways. I must see if the nets are to be stretched to-day."

Mme. Tetuanui and I had a lengthy confabulation. No Tahitian was better informed than she upon the former status of her s.e.x in Tahiti, and from her I gained a lively summary.

Woman was inferior among the old Tahitians. Man had here as everywhere so ordained, and religion had fixed her position by taboos, as among the Hebrews. She was often merely a servant, yet she maintained a unique s.e.x freedom. Her body was her own, and not her husband's as in the English common law. She prepared the man's food and never sat at meals with him. If she ate at the same time, which was seldom, she sat at a distance, but near enough to hear his commands. It is so to-day when Tahitian men gather for feasting without foreigners, as in the Philippines, j.a.pan, and China, and in many European countries. The Hausfrau of the small merchant, laborer, or farmer is a drudge. In j.a.pan the woman remains subject to the hourly whims and wants of her husband, and to his frequent infidelity, though she is true to him.

The Tahiti wife had the care of the canoe, the paddles, and all the fis.h.i.+ng and hunting things, and she accompanied her husband often in these pursuits. The husband had to make the fire, prepare the oven, kill the pig or dog or fowl, and do the outside ch.o.r.es; but she had a lesser position than he at all public observances. She could not become a priest or enter the temple, but must remain always at a distance from the marae. Yet she could be a queen or a chiefess, and as such was as powerful as a man, making war in person, and often leading her troops valiantly. The Tahitian women were nearly as strong as the men and mentally their full equal. They wound their husbands around their fingers or treated them cruelly in many instances, astonis.h.i.+ng the whites by their independence. Only religion, the taboos, held them in any restraint.

If a queen bore a child by an unknown father, the child was as royal as if the descendant of a long line of kings; but if the father was notoriously a commoner, the child remained a prince, though not so high of rank as if his father had been an Arii. If a king had children by a woman beneath his rank, they had no rights from their father, but held a mixed position proportioned to the power of the father. He established their rank by his personal prestige, as the kings of Europe forced their b.a.s.t.a.r.ds on the courts. Sixty years ago Tamatoa, King of Raiatea of the Society Islands, himself the highest born of all the chiefs of the archipelago, was forced to adopt a child of King Pomare of Tahiti to succeed him because his own children were by a woman of the people.

The woman thus had an advantage over the man in being able to transmit her rank to her children, a survival of the matriarchate custom once ruling the world. Polygamy was rarely indulged, though not forbidden. A chief here and there might have two or three wives. Women were allowed only one husband, but often avowed lovers were tolerated, if not feared, by the husband. Mr. Banks, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, was horrified after he had made love to Queen Oberea of Papara in the absence of her husband to find her attendant was a cavaliere servente. His Anglican morals were shocked. He had thought himself the only male sinner by her complacence.

Before Christianity was forced on them, the Tahitians married in the same rank, and with considerable right to choice. The tie might be dissolved by the same authority binding it, the chief or head of the clan. Inequality of rank, or near consanguinity, were the only obstacles to marriage. Rank might be overcome, but never the other. It was as in China, where Confucius himself laid down the law: "A man in taking a wife does not choose one of the same surname as himself." And in one of the Chinese commentaries the following reason is given for this law: "When husband and wife are of the same surname, their children do not do well and multiply." The prohibited degrees were more distant than among us. It was a horror of incest that had led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children for adoption. Only this explanation could reconcile it with the almost superst.i.tious love the Polynesian father and mother have for children. Their feeling surpa.s.ses the parental affection prevailing in the remainder of the world, yet adoption is a stronger bond than blood. No child was raised by its own genitors. The Tetuanuis had brought up twenty-five, all freely given them at birth or after weaning. The taboo was strict.

Illegitimate children were as welcome as others. The husband might have been so jealous as to meditate killing his wife; but when her child was born, although he knew it to be a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he gave it the same love and care as his own. There were exceptions, but one might cite on the opposite side innumerable cases where, despite the most open adultery, the husband has taken his wife's offspring for his own. It was well that this was so, for adultery was so habitual that were b.a.s.t.a.r.ds not made welcome, there would have been much suffering by children, innocent themselves. Here, as in civilization, men love their b.a.s.t.a.r.ds often more than their legitimate sons and daughters.

This prohibition against keeping one's own must have arisen when there were very few inhabitants in Tahiti, for it is the outcome of a natural guarding against s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p in tribes or communities where all are thrown together intimately, and stringent opposition to such practices needed to prevent promiscuity. One must look, as in the case of taboos, deeper than the surface for the beginning of this custom of trading babies, for that is what it often amounted to--friends exchanging offspring as they might canoes.

It is said that the powerful sentiment among historical nations opposing marriage between brother and sister and other close kindred originated in the desire to make such connections odious, to preserve virtue and decency among those in hourly intimacy. Monarchs and nations long refused to bend to it. The Ptolemies and Pharaohs married incestuously; Cleopatra, her brother. The Ptolemies married their daughters, as did Artaxerxes, who wedded Atossa. The Ballinese married twins of different s.e.x. Abraham married his half-sister by the same father. Moses's father married his aunt. Jacob took to wife two sisters, his own cousins. In Great Russia until this century a father married his son to a young woman, and then claimed her as his concubine. When a son grew up, he followed his father's example, though his wife was old and with many children. The Tamils of southeast India, the Malaialais of the Kollimallais hills, have the same custom. Inbreeding maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost of its vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. Examples to the contrary are numerous in human and animal life. More than nine hundred residents of Norfolk Island are descendants of the mutineers of the British s.h.i.+p Bounty. They were begat by eight of the mutineers, and intermarried for a century. They show no deterioration from this cause.

Hardly any crime is more loathed than incest, but the abomination grew slowly as man progressed. Such ties have been abhorrent for long in most countries. A belief that incestuous children were weak mentally or physically came much later in the ages. The Polynesians must have remarked that inbreeding accentuated the faults in a strain, making for an acc.u.mulation of them. This would be a very far advance in human observation; but the Polynesian, by experience, or knowledge brought from his old Asiatic home, must have held such a theory, and sought in the system of adoption, and in not bringing up consanguineous children together, to ward off such misfortune. This at least is a plausible reason for such an unnatural practice among a people so unquestionably child-lovers.

The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. There were no exogamous taboos. The tribe or clan was the chief unit, not the family. The phratry tie was stronger than that of the father and mother. In the totem scheme of other islands and continental groups all the women of his mother's totem were taboo to a man, though their relations.h.i.+p might be remote. Yet as husband and wife had different totems, and children took their mothers' totems, a man might in rare instances, even with this barrier, wed his own daughter. This has happened in Buka and in North Bougainville.

The plan of adoption in Polynesia is matched to a degree by the fosterage common in Ireland in early days. There children were sent to be reared in the families of fellow-clansmen of wealth. At a year they left their own thresholds, and their fosterage ended only at marriage. Every fostered person was under obligation to provide for the old age of his foster-parents, and the affection arising from this relations.h.i.+p was usually greater and regarded more sacred than that of blood relations.h.i.+p. This is true to-day of the Tahitians.

"But children nowadays are often brought up by their own parents,"

said Mme. Tetuanui, rising to prepare the dejeuner, and I for a swim in the lagoon, "and if adopted, they go from one home to the other as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs and well-to-do. Our race is pa.s.sing so fast through the miseries the white has brought us that little ones are as precious as life itself."

Chapter XVIII

The reef and the lagoon--Wonders of marine life--Fis.h.i.+ng with spears and nets--Sponges and hermit crabs--Fish of many colors--Ancient canoes of Tahiti--A visit to Vaihiria and legends told there.

About a mile from the beach was the reef, on which the breakers beat clamorously or almost inaudibly, depending on the wind and the faraway surge of the seas. The Pa.s.se of Rautirare afforded entrance for small vessels. It was an opening in the wall about the island caused by the Vairahaha, the stream which emptied into the lagoon at our door, and the fresh waters of which had ages ago prevented the coral zoophytes from building a structure there, as at Papeete and all other pa.s.sages. Fresh water did not agree with these miraculous architects whose material was their own skeletons.

I went out toward the reef many mornings in a little canoe that Tiura, the eldest son of the chief, loaned me. I carried from the house a paddle and three harpoons of different sizes. The canoe had an outrigger and was very small, so that it moved fast through the usually still lagoon, propelled by the broad-bladed paddle. In the bottom of it might be an inch of water, for occasionally I s.h.i.+pped a tiny wave, but wetness was no bother in this delicious climate; a pareu was easily removed if vexatious and a cocoanut-sh.e.l.l was an ample bale.

Low tide was at sunrise, and warmed with my fruit and coffee, and the happy ia ora na, Maru! of the family, I paddled to the reef with never-failing expectation of new wonders. The marine life of the Tahiti reef is richer than anywhere in these seas, as the soil of the island is more bountiful.

At that state of the tide the surf barely broke upon the reef, and, almost uncovered, its treasures were exposed for a little while as if especially for me. The reef itself was a marvel of contrivance by the blind animals which had died to raise it. If I had been brought to it hooded, and known nothing of such phenomena, I would have sworn it was an old concrete levee. The top was about fifty feet wide, as level as a floor, pitted with innumerable holes, the hiding-places of millions of living forms which fed on one another, and were continually replenished by the rolling billows. The wall of the reef opposed to the sea was a rough slope from the summit to the bottom, b.u.t.tressed against the attacks of storms, and defended by chevaux-de-frise such as the Americans sank in the Hudson River in 1777. I ventured cautiously over the edge. A student of ancient tactics would have found there all the old defenses in coral--caltrops, and abatis, molded in dark-gray coral, battered and shot-marked. It was a dream of a sunken city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of the h.o.a.ry Archimedes upon it before the inundation, directing the destruction, by his burning-gla.s.s, of the enemy's s.h.i.+ps. The side of the reef toward the land was as sheer as an engineer could make it with a plumb-line. The coral animals had as accurate a measure of the vertical as of defense against the ocean.

Over this levee rolled or slid a dozen kinds of sh.e.l.lfish spying out refuges against the breakers and their brother enemies in the troughs and holes of the coral floor. With my small spears I pried out dozens of them, Mao, starfish, clams, oysters, furbelowed clams, sea-urchins, and sponges. The mao is the turbo, the queer gastropod sold in the market in Papeete. He lives in a beautiful spiral sh.e.l.l, and has attached to him a round piece of polished sh.e.l.l, blue, green, brown, or yellow, which he puts aside when he wishes to feed on the morsels pa.s.sing his door, and pulls shut when he wants privacy. He fits himself tightly into a hollow in the reef and dozes away the hours behind his s.h.i.+eld, but ready to open it instantly at the perception of his favorite food. The mao was wedged in the recess so cleverly that it was difficult to extract him by my hand alone. His portal I kept after eating him raw or cooked, to have set in silver as an exquisite souvenir of my visit. These jewels studded the drinking cups from which the Vikings drank "Skoal to the Northland!"

The starfish were magnificent, of many colors, and one with fifteen arms covered with sharp, gray spines, and underneath pale yellow, fleshy feelers with suckers like a sea-anemone. These were as pliant as rubber in the water, but, when long out, as hard as stone. The sea-urchins were of many kinds, some with large spikes, as firm as rock, and others almost as brittle as gla.s.s, their needles, half a dozen inches long and sharp, dangerous to step on even with my rubber-soled, canvas shoes. All hues were these urchins, blood-red and heavenly blue, almost black, and as white as snow, the last with a double-star etched upon his sh.e.l.l. Others were round like blow-fish, with their spickles at every angle, menacing in look.

The clams and oysters were small, except the furbelowed clam, whose sh.e.l.l is fluted, and who grows to an immense size in the atolls of the Paumotus. I always ate my fill of these delicacies raw as I walked along the reef, smas.h.i.+ng the sh.e.l.ls to get at the inmates.

When the tide was approaching high or when it began to ebb I had immortal experiences upon the reef. I went with Tiura or with the chief and a party, and found the waves das.h.i.+ng and foaming upon the natural mole, sweeping over it with the noise of thunder, cras.h.i.+ng upon the sloping front, and riding their white steeds over the solid flagging to the lower lagoon. In this smother of water we stood knee-deep, receiving its buffets upon our waists and the spray upon our faces, and watched for the fish that were carried upon its crests. With spears couched, we waited the flying chance to arrest them upon the points, a hazardous game, for often they were powerful creatures, and were hurled against us with threatening impact.

But inspiring as was this sport at sunset or by moonlight, it was even more exciting when we trod the reef with torches of dried reeds or leaves or candlenuts threaded upon the spines of cocoanut-leaves, and lanced the fish that were drawn by the lure of the lights, or which we saw by their glare pa.s.sing over the reef. The gleam of the torches, the blackness all about, the masterful figures of the Tahitians, the cries of warning, the laughter, the shouts of triumph, and the melancholy himenes, the softness and warmth of the water, the uncanny feel of living things about one's feet and body, the imaginative shudder of fear at shark or octopus or other terrible brute of the sea, the singing journey home in the canoes, and the joyous landing and counting of the catch--all these were things never to be forgotten, pictures to be unveiled in drabber scenes or on white nights of sleeplessness.

The sponges were oddities hard to recognize as the tender toilet article. Some were soft and some were full of grit. The grit was their skeletons, for every sponge has a skeleton except three or four very low specimens, and some without personal skeletons import them by attraction and make up a frame from foreign bodies. I examined and admired them, reasoning that I myself, in the debut of living creatures, was close in appearance to one; but my basic interest in them was to sit on them.

Many times I went only to where the coral began, half-way to the reef. This was away from the path of the Vairahaha River, and where the coral souls had manifestly indulged a thousand fancies in contour and color. After the million years of their labor in throwing up the bastion of the reef, with all its architectural niceties, they had found in the repose behind it opportunities for the indulgence of their artistry. They were the sculptors, painters, and gardeners of the lagoon.