Chapter IV: Part 4

I have forgotten to describe what the Samoan hut, called the Samoan house, is like. Ours is a handsome one, not exactly the finest, but still very well built. Its plan is a long oval. Its length is not far from fifty feet; its greatest height something like twenty. It is set upon a foundation of stones, and its flooring of fine pebbles is only raised a few inches above the ground, which slopes in all directions from it. It is made of a series of high posts placed at considerable distances from each other, in the shape of an ellipse. They are connected at the top by a series of double beams, which receive great rafters running from every set of posts to the peaked centre. These rafters are connected by other great rafters and tie beams. At the centre they are supported by two or more great pillars, which at intervals are braced together. Beside these pillars, in the direction of each end of the house, are two holes in the ground; made to receive the cocoanut fire used for lighting, or for the slight warmth that is occasionally needed. Walls there are none in the true Samoan house. Mats of the cocoanut leaf hang from the cross-beams, between the posts, to the floor, or rather to the edge of large stones that make a sort of rim to the building, and serve to steady the posts and keep off the wash of the rain. In certain very elegant buildings some of these openings, instead of being filled with these movable mats that are pulled up or down for protection from light or rain, are enclosed by a fine wattling. It is a manner of limiting the numbers of entrances, which otherwise, you see, would be a little everywhere.

In such a residence as that of Mataafa, a great man, a sovereign prince and sacred personage, no one would think of entering otherwise than at some defined place.

For the furniture of our residence and that of other people, mats of different degrees of fineness are spread upon the small fine pebbles that make the floor. If we want great elegance and great comfort, we put on more and finer mats. Some of the furniture lies about; some of it consists in the Samoan pillow, a long bamboo, supported at the ends by four little sticks. There are also boxes in which clothes are put away. There are large rolls of native cloth called _tappa_. Some of it is made up into curtains to be used as screens and partitions. Sometimes, but not in our hut, these curtains are made into indoor tents for keeping off the mosquitoes, and, otherwise, increasing privacy. All these things are stowed away among the rafters, or upon the sticks curved like tusks, which project beyond the centre posts and serve to brace them.

For our European habits we have two tables and three chairs. Most of the day when we are idle we sit on the mats with our guests. But working is better done at the accustomed table.

Toward noontime we hear violent and savage shouts, and see through the square opening of the lifted mats three or four brown savages, with big girdles of green leaves and crowns of verdure, come running and dancing to us from Mataafa’s house, which is only a few yards away. They carry a big wooden bowl, partly filled with crushed cocoanut and arrowroot, and some big bread-fruits. They sit down on the edge of our outside stones, and proceed to break the bread-fruit, steaming hot, with great force and violence, holding it by the stem, pounding it and mashing it into the cocoanut milk. This quivering pudding, _palusami_, is then neatly dropped upon banana leaves, made into little packages, and tendered to us with the respects of Mataafa. Sometimes we eat, sometimes we distribute to more Samoan-minded people; but for the first few times it is very nice. I like it better than the raw fish and salt water, which is pleasant also occasionally, though apparently more suited to the habits of that ancestral totem, the shark. But tastes and habits differ, and the Samoan language, extraordinarily rich in words that describe physical sensations, has a special word for that state of weakness and languor wherein such a dish as raw fish is all that the invalid can tolerate.

Mataafa sometimes calls at this hour, sometimes a little earlier, on his return from church, if it be a holy day: for Mataafa is very strict in religious duty. But usually he has chosen the afternoon. He speaks no English, and we have varying interpreters; but still, owing in part to his kindness and courtesy, we have learned a great deal from him. He is not so easily questioned as an inferior might be. When Tofae’s tall daughter is called in hurriedly to help out, because we have not had sufficient warning (Tofae’s daughter, who fears no man, whose neck carries her head as a column does a capital), she interprets with extreme respect and reticence, as it were, “by your leave,” bending her head, looking only sidewise at the great chief, holding her breath when she speaks to him, and almost whispering. Every phrase is prefaced with “The King says,” all of which gives us the measure of proper respect, but does not hasten the conversation.

Mataafa is not interested in facts as mere curiosities. I doubt if he would approve of my interest in most things, if he could guess it. Information with regard to the world abroad he cares for only as it affects Samoa--that is to say, in conversation with us. He would like to know that we have some messages of advantage to his country. It has taken a long time to make him sympathize with our questionings about Samoan ways and manners and their origins, which involve, of course, history and social law. And yet if he could appreciate it, in that way we get at an understanding of what he is, and of the difficulties that beset him!

With such talk, much desultoriness, sketching, writing, smoking, and eating of bananas, a length of which hangs from a beam above, the heat of the afternoon passes away. The shadows begin to fall across the _malae_ or village green. The villagers come out and wander about socially, attend to little matters, or sit here and there in favourite corners. Weeding goes on with the more orderly housewives, who keep an eye meanwhile upon the children wandering about. A good many domestic interests receive attention. Sometimes, under the bananas and orange trees behind my house, I see hair-dressing, a serious and difficult operation. The pleasure of the Samoans in turning their beautiful black hair to brown or yellow or auburn, necessitates a peculiar process which is also extremely curious to the eye. For this they use coral lime, plastered upon the hair and remaining there a couple of days or more; so that they go about with white hair, like people of the last century.

Tofae’s daughter is charming, with her hair all of this silver-grey and big crimson flowers in it. It sets out a certain nobility of feature, and is, like powder, aristocratic in its very nature. The rather heavy faces become either stronger or more refined. Each young man has some female who especially understands just how to fashion his hair into certain curls and twists, which are retained during a week or so; for the operation answers all the purposes of curling besides, and of cleaning absolutely. When this application is brushed away the curls will remain; but meanwhile, as he sits with his head bent way down and the lady lathering it, he has that woebegone, submissive look that we see in the barber shop.

Our good people are passionately fond of adorning their persons with flowers and leafage: flowers about the waist, flowers about the neck, flowers and leaves in the hair. Every little while I see rearrangements which make, as it were, a form of conversation. The steps of my house offer a convenient seat for just the proper number of persons. So that as soon as the shade comes down, some girl is seated there with some youngster, and they rearrange each other’s flowers. A flower behind the ear means a “going of courting” or readiness that way.

In little separate houses the cooking for the evening meal begins. This separation of the household work from the residence or living apartments is a little elegance and refinement which does a great deal to keep up the charm and holiday look of life about us. When, however, great meals are to be prepared, I hear considerable noise on the outskirts of the village, the chasing of hens, whose eggs, by the by, are, as you may imagine, difficult to obtain, as the hens have the surrounding tropical scenery of the bush to lay in. Owing to the scurry after the hens, the only place that seemed safe to them was my apartment; and my open trunks were very good places to look into for possible eggs.

The cooking of any importance, as you probably know, is a method of baking in the earth: stones heated by fire, in a trench upon which leaves are placed, and then the food, wrapped in more leaves, is placed upon them and covered up with twigs, branches and earth. After a skilfully prolonged residence in the earth, the mound is opened, and the food is found cooked. With fish the results are certainly excellent; but vegetables and meats are often a little raw.

It seems marvellous that the brown Polynesian, apparently a member of the great “Aryan” race, intelligent, often adventurous, has never been willing, when his race was pure, to invent such a thing as a pot to hold hot water, even when clay was all about him. He knew that in far-off islands, from which occasionally came invaders or returning adventurers, there was such a thing as pottery; yet he preferred, as he does to-day, to import a few specimens, rather than spend a few moments in starting this, to us, necessary beginning of what

scientific men call the passage from savagery to barbaric life. You will remember that with us one of the present definitions of the savage is that he does not make pottery, nor know the bow and arrow. Well: the higher Polynesian never used pottery, and used the bow and arrow, one of the most deadly of weapons, only to shoot for amusement at the forest rat. This violation of certain rules of the game of science is one of the most amusing fragments of contradiction that one meets. When we came to other islands, where there is a mixture of what we deem a lower race--the Papuan, negro or black, we find pottery, the use of the bow, intelligent fortification in war. And the beginnings of decorative art are shown by a keener sense of colour and contrast of form. The high Polynesian, who invariably invaded and defeated the mixed race superior to him in these important details, and brought back the “stuff” has lived with a sort of classic severity. Precedent is everything; new patterns of ornament come in most slowly, and there is an apparent indifference to the picturesque. But owing to this conservation such a Bœotian set of islands as Samoa gives to the artist--the man who remembers the beauty of classical representations, the only fit recall of what he has seen in the Greek sculpture, the Pompeiian fresco and the vases of antiquity.

The rather countrified good taste of these people leads them to simple methods of dress and adornment, and to keeping the same unchangeable except by small variations. There is nothing nearer to the drapery of the Greek statue than the Samoan wrap of cloth or of _tappa_, which is merely a long rectangle wrapped about the body, either as high as the chest, like the cloak of the Greek orator, or merely around the waist and thighs, always carefully arranged in special sets of folds which designate both the sex and the social position of the wearer; with this the wreaths and flower and leaf girdles and the anointed body, which belong to our vague conception of the Greek and Roman past. There is little more for war time; a great barbarous head-dress of hair, and occasionally some neck ornament of wild beasts’ teeth.

In draperies such as I have described, in the shady afternoon, the chiefs sit about the lawn of the village the malae or green in places which I suppose are reserved to them by habit. They sit far apart; one of the Samoan characteristics being the habit and the skill of conversing distinctly without raising the voice, and of so speaking as to be heard far off. The hereditary orators, the _tulafales_, who made speeches to us in our wanderings, at the receptions given to us by the villagers, invariably chose to speak at great distances. A couple of hundred feet in the open air seemed to them a fair average. Their voices were never raised above a certain modulation. In fact one imagined that the next word would not be heard. But a peculiar inflection for each sentence wherein the most important points are placed at the end, seemed to force the sound upwards as the phrase dragged on. Seumanu our Apia chief who acted as our _tulafale_, when we travelled, liked to repeat “sotto voce” what the other _tulafale_ was sure to say.

Our chiefs often drank their _kava_ in these afternoon conversations. Sometimes, but very rarely, it was made by the girls. Usually any young men of the village, of refined dress and manners, were called upon to serve. I have a vague recollection--though I may have heard it of some other island, and may be confusing facts--that the ancient custom allowed any man who wished his _kava_ made to call upon the first young woman who passed, no matter how high her rank might be; this of course to be at his peril, like all society privileges. But however it may be, almost invariably our own _kava_, that is to say the _kava_ to which we were treated, was made by the women.

You will remember that this was one of the very first of South Sea habits that we came across on our very first day, in that other island of Tutuila.

_Kava_, more properly _ava_, is the universal drink of all Polynesia. Abolished by the missionary in many places, it still persists here. _Kava_ is a drink made by adding water to the crushed and pressed root of a plant of the pepper family, the Piper Methysticum, which has a narcotic power. Here in this nest of civilization the root is grated upon an ordinary tin grater, before being put in the large, four-legged wooden bowl, from which it is to be ladled in cocoanut cups, after water has been properly added, and with a strainer of bark fibres, the filaments and splinters have been removed.

But in certain far-away places, we have had the pleasure of drinking it in the ancient and orthodox way preferred by all epicures. According to this more aboriginal method, the _kava_ root was chewed to a mass of woody pulp, instead of being grated. Young ladies of great personal delicacy were chosen for this purpose; but, there must have been many occasions when one had not time to be fastidious. I cannot say that I have noticed any advantage in the older form, and I am glad that all about us it seems to be forgotten.

The entire preparation and serving of the drink makes a ceremonial form; most absolute in detail and of hereditary and ancestral accuracy.[4] It belongs to all receptions, and is the manner of showing the distinctions of rank and precedence.

The gestures of the girls when they move their hands around in the water of the bowl, so as to extract the essence of the root, are regulated by long established custom, and are beautiful as the movements of a dance. The handing of the strainer to another attendant, and her swinging it out to cleanse it, make another series of most ravishing pictures. Finally the third attendant sweeps an arm down with an empty bowl, and, curving the wrist inward, brings it full to the most honoured guest, and to the others in turn. With each handing the name of the guest is announced.

Mataafa sometimes gives us _kava_, and occasionally has done us the honour to come and drink it in our own hut. In that case he has his own bowl, a most intimate and personal property, from which no one else must drink; and with all courtesy he apologizes to us for this necessity of position. For as he explains guardedly he is in some sense sacred--having been a form of the divine. And he is the most religious of men in our meanings.

In one princely place that we visited, in Savii, we found a lady who occupied by ancestry the position of “_kava divider_”; that is to say that it was her duty and privilege to determine the sequence in presenting the cup according to dignity. And she appeared without warning and claimed the right.

From this circle of the chiefs drinking _kava_ on the green, even the children know enough to keep away. Even the young man who hands the cups is careful in his walk not to appear to turn his back to any one of the chiefs. Respect for the chief is the basis of everything. It is probably the foundation of their extreme courtesy, only broken by natural exuberance, impatience, or simplicity. The chief was sacred, even in war. It was a terrible thing for a commoner of the enemy to kill him. In legends of Tahiti there are tales of how men deliberated whether they were of high enough birth to take the life of a vanquished chieftain. The very language indicates this division between class of the chief and everything else outside. For the chief and everything relating to him there is a special language. The chief’s head, the chief’s body and all its parts, the chief’s food, all that he does, his feelings, his possessions, his dog, his wife and her actions, even when she breaks the Seventh Commandment, have special names. In many instances the common name of a thing is changed for another when that thing is spoken of in his presence. In some cases the particular grade of his rank is indicated by the word used; so that you speak of a _tulafale’s_ eating as _tausami_; of a chief’s eating as _taumafa_; of such a chief as Mataafa’s eating as _taute_. But it would not be polite of a chief to use these words with reference to himself.

When passers-by draw toward the end of our village and reach the highway in front of Mataafa’s hut, they keep to the further side of the path, leaving as large a space as it is possible to make, out of respect for the privileges of the chief of chiefs.

On all the fringes of the village, however, the children play quiet games. Our spaces are too restricted for the young men to have their games; but further down they collect at times to play, by throwing a stick so as to make it touch the ground and skim along to the goal. So with us there is very little. Occasionally some of the boys gallop wildly up and down the beach; but there are very few horses in this immediate neighbourhood at which we are not displeased, however beautiful the sight may be, because they ride the horses too young, and push them beyond their strength.

As the evening comes on the sun goes down rapidly, and the afterglow, the most beautiful moment of the South Sea day, begins its long continuance. The girls gather together or sit with the young men, either on the grass or on little raised benches under trees, or very late again on still smaller benches, holding at the most two people, which they ingeniously fit between the divergent stems of the cocoanuts. This half siesta, half conversazione, is carried on as long as there is light, and if there be moonlight, through any number of hours that may escape the darkness disliked by the Polynesian.

Our little friend Taēlē leaves her hut and sits far apart in her accustomed place, all alone, immovable, looking toward the sea, thinking perhaps; but how do I know?

Some of the little children, the little girls especially, repeat in a small way the native songs and the native dance the _siva_. Sometimes a bigger girl sketches out some steps for them; but we are extremely proper in our village, and the _siva_, of which the Samoan is passionately fond, is not looked upon with favour by the missionary or the brown members of the church. However, we succeed now and then in getting girls and young men from the neighbourhood, or passing villagers and travellers, to favour us with this entertainment. The _siva_ dances about which I wrote you at length, upon the day of my arrival, are yet to us always novel. By and by I suppose that they will be, like everything else, accepted by us as an ordinary form of social dissipation. But it is certainly worth coming all this way, even to see one of them. The beautiful rhythm of song and movement, the accuracy of time kept, the evidently absorbing delight of the performers, who become more and more insatiate, until one wonders that they are not exhausted by such gymnastics, the pictorial disposition of the scene, usually at night or in dark places, the dancers dressed in flowers and leaves in contrasts and harmonies of colour that are nature’s own, with bodies and limbs glistening with oil, the spectators all absorbed, and as Robinson Crusoeish as the spectacle itself--all these things are the _siva_. If I do not refrain and cut short at once, I shall become entangled in trying to give you word pictures that are utterly inadequate. I feel, too, that the drawings and paintings I have made are so stupid from their freezing into attitudes the beauties that are made of sequence. These beauties do not touch the missionary. The invariable objection to amusement, to dissipation, to that weakening of purpose which our indulgences bring, make this natural of course, and we can understand it. But these kindly natives need, I think, every possible excuse for innocent occupation. There is so little for them to do to-day, and we feel that by lending our countenance to the _siva_ we are rescuing both the native and the missionary from a false position. The condemnation of the dance had gone from the white missionary to his brown brother, the local Polynesian clergyman or deacon; and when we arrived we learned that even our excellent Sunday-school, church-keeping friend, Faatulia, the wife of the chief Seumanu, himself also a most excellent and worthy member of the church, had been excommunicated for having danced a European cotillion at the Fourth of July ball given by our American Consul. The revulsion is beginning, and we are glad to help in forwarding it.

We could scarcely have _sivas_ of our own--that is to say that our village could not give them properly. They should be under the direction of the right social leader, and we have no _taupo_. The _taupo_ is a young woman elected by the village for the purpose of directing all social amenities in which women can take part. It is for her to receive the guests, to know who they are and what courtesies should be extended to them; to provide for their food and lodging. If they are great people like ourselves, for their being attended, for their having all small comforts of bath and soft mats and tappa, for their being talked to and sung to and danced to. She is invariably chosen of good descent, and she is beautiful if fate allows it, but she must be a lady above all. She must also be a virgin, and be continually protected, escorted, watched, investigated, by one or many duennas, who never for a single instant lose sight of her. Her position in that way is a trying one. Contrary to all feminine instincts, she is rarely allowed to have her own way in the adornment of her person. Her expert attendants insist upon having a voice in dressing her on all show occasions; notwithstanding, it seemed to me that I recognized in each individual _taupo_ a something that had escaped the levelling influence of so much interest taken in her attire. Remember that she dances in front of the warriors in battle.

When the time comes, the village that has chosen her, also chooses her husband, and makes her gifts, as a dowry. Sometimes, and this is one of the terrors of the situation, the village is very hard to please, and rejects offers which the _taupo_ might perhaps have accepted if a less important and freer agent. She can always escape by bolting, and marry as she pleases, thereby forfeiting her position and the respect of well-thinking people. A match not well thought of by society is as much deplored here as in our very best circles. Marriage, apparently lightly entered into, is a very serious matter. Rank, position, is only transmitted by blood; and a mésalliance in Samoa entails consequences still more disastrous than in the court life of Germany. Perhaps my South Sea Islander is not sentimental. He is simple and natural, but he looks at everything in a practical way, and his ideas, having always been the same, enable him to keep this natural simplicity without any protest in favour of that freedom that brings on love tragedies.

As the day draws to its last close in the fairy colouring of the long afterglow, people come back to their evening meal--a regular hour and moment, here where divisions of time seem so uncared for that no older man or woman could accurately know their age; unless they date from some well-known event recorded by the foreigner.

(In other places people have told me, it was so many bread-fruit seasons ago; it was when such a ship was here.)

Magongi, the owner of our hut, returning from his fishing, drops a fish or two at our posts, according to Samoan etiquette and in honour to guests and chiefs like ourselves. Faces are turned from gazing at the sea, toward the houses where meals are getting ready. The young people give up their seats on the little platforms, or “lookouts” by the sea, and the lover confides his courtship, in Polynesian way, to others to continue for him.

This evening, as every evening, with the last afterglow, in each hut of the village, with the lighting of fire or lamp, comes the sound of the evening prayer before meal. In pagan days, with the lighting of the evening fire (meant for light), in the hollow basin scooped out in the centre of the hut, after a libation to the gods _outside_, thrown out between the posts, the Samoan prayed a prayer like this:

“Sail by, O Gods! and let us be:
Ye unknown Gods, who haunt the sea.”

When I hear the sound of the evening hymn, fixed and certain like all their habits, I recall this prayer, so full of the future that has come upon these dwellers in islands, and has brought with our faith and our ideas--the latter certainly misunderstood--a slow extinction of their past and of their very existence. For in all Polynesia, though arrested now for a time, there has been within the hundred years from discovery a fading away. As the Tahitian song says:

“The coral will grow and man must perish.”

I have been telling of the influence of missionaries upon old customs, such as dances. Let me say something further.

I want to note that it was easier to get the Samoans to accept any form of Christian worship because their religion was simpler than that of the other islands. They were free from a great many horrors--the belief in the necessity of human sacrifice. They hated cannibalism. Their heavier nature had never led them to such immorality as tempted other South Sea Islanders, who thereby resemble us more.

Then the missionaries came to them so late--at the end of the thirties--that the Samoans had already been able to learn about this religion that fixed everything--this desirable law called Lotu, which was to settle everything for them, and make everything straight. (Lotu[5] also means church, Lotu Tonga, the Tongan Church, etc.) So that within the very shortest possible time the missionaries succeeded in converting them, in fact, were waited for and expected, one might say, by the next chance ship. The terrible reputation of savageness of these islanders, owing to their having murdered La Peyrouse’s men in Tutuila, on first acquaintance, so guarded them that even so far back as 1836, and later, very little was known of them--they were carefully avoided. But certain outcasts, escaped convicts, terrors of the sea, had come among them, and had even begun to instruct them to expect this law of Good. It is one of the most touching, as well as one of the most atrocious, of small facts. Old Samasone was telling us the stories of these old times: how some stranded ruffian, unable to return to white lands, had felt obliged, upon being questioned, to assert his value and knowledge by some imitation that might not later conflict with the outside facts. Some brutal, drunken, murderous wretch would choose, some day, to simulate a Sunday, and sing obscene or brutal forecastle songs, all the same to those who did not understand a word, as representing the church service of song which he described.

Samasone, whose American name is Hamilton, and who has been here for the third of a century, tells us lengthily and in detail such stories, and gives us long accounts of Samoan manners, in the same way that might be his if he were still in native New England. And when I shut my eyes, I can fancy myself sitting on the edge of some Newport wharf, and listening to Captain Jim or Captain Sam, discoursing wisely, with infinite detail.

Fifty years have passed since those things, paralleled more or less elsewhere in the South Seas; and now from the hut of Mataafa, the great chief, which is next to mine, with the sunset, comes the Angelus, sung by the people yet nearer to nature than Millet’s peasants. I hear also the Ave Maria Stella; the cry of the exiled sons of Eve for help in this vale of tears, for whether Catholic like Mataafa, or Protestant like my good neighbour Tofae, they are all very Christian. Indeed, my other neighbour is a preacher, an eloquent one, like a true Samoan, a race where eloquence is hereditary in families. I hear him thundering on Sundays against the Babylonians, and all the bad people of Scripture.

They are all steeped in a knowledge of the words of the Bible. In any serious conversation, in political discussion, we hear the well-known types of character referred to, and all the analogies pushed to the furthest extreme.[6] The rather light-minded girls whom we have about us amuse themselves on Sunday with capping verses from the Bible. The young men of our boat crew, whose moral views on many subjects would bring a blush to the cheek of the most hardened clubman, are fond of leading in prayer, are learned in hymnology, and are apt to be fairly strict sabbatarians. Here and elsewhere, in many other islands, it is often very difficult on Sunday to obtain the use of a boat, the only vehicle possible. Remember that I am, and shall be for a long time, writing from islands, where all life is along the shore, where only occasionally are there roads, or what we would call roads; where there are few horses, somtimes none at all; where the natural road is over the beach, when it is uninterrupted by rock and cliffs, and where the boat can take you quietly along inside of the reef. But as I shall make it out clearly later, the Polynesian likes to have things settled one way or the other, as all sensible people do.

And then the Bible--I am not speaking of the New Testament--is so near them; they read so often their own story in the life of Israel of many centuries back. They are not separated from a civilization of that form by such and so many changes as our ancestors’ minds have passed through. Their habit of life must even be said to antedate the biblical. They do not have to make excuses for the conduct of God’s chosen people. They can take all as it is written. They need not suppose some error in the account of the witch of Endor. In such a valley, buried under trees, or behind that headland where the palms toss in the roar of the trades, dwells some woman, wiser and more powerful in the solitude and in the night than we judge her by day. She can tell what things are happening elsewhere; what things are likely to come. She brings in the dead by the hand. She tells of what the dead are now doing, of their wars and their struggles in the empty outside world. What she revealed some nights ago, to a chosen few who say they were present, is murmured about the villages, and makes a feature of conversation not unlike society news. I have listened at night, in out-of-the-way places, among preachers and people of confirmed Bible piety, to the last reports from the spirit world: to the news of war there; to the tale of great fights which had occurred on such a day of the moon, when the battleground of the reef was strewn with the corpses of the dead already dead to us. And I remember once hearing how some spirit ruling over a part of our island had declined to enter into war because he had not been attacked, and his religious principles, which were Christian, confined him to the defensive. Perhaps all these things meant more to my good friends than they did to me, curious as I was to find in these reports some traits of their character, some manner of theirs of looking at the things of this world. I believe that to them these agitations of the outside world were presages of coming danger, of trouble to their earthly lives; that they saw omens of victory because the spirits of such and such possible ancestors had triumphed. But no doubt, in some way not understood by me, all these vague stories confirmed them in certain directions, or made them hesitate. At any rate, it kept the land peopled with fears. It makes the terror of the forest more vivid and more reasonable. The _po_--the dark, the night--is impressive to the Polynesian; the brave man may have all the fear of the little boy. And I own that I have never seen a nature which at night assumed more mystery, a more threatening quiet. The vegetation never rests. The plants are always growing. The sighing of the palms so deceptively like rain; the glitter of the great leaves of the banana, striking one against the other, with a half metallic clink; the fall of dead branches; the sudden drop of the cocoanut or the bread-fruit; the perpetual draught, carrying indefinite sounds from the untrodden interior; the echo of the surf from the reef, against the high mountains; the splash of the water on the shore; the flight of the “flying fox” in the branches; the ghostlike step of the barefooted passerby; the impossibility of the eye carrying far throught angles of tropical foliage--all these things make the night--the _po_, not a cessation of impressions, but a new mystery.

With such a landscape about me, I was ready to believe that handsome young men belated in the passages of the mountains had been met by the female spirit, whether her name be Sau Mai Afi or not, whose sudden love is death; and that the same being could be a man when the night traveller was a woman and beautiful. Had not the brother of one of our virgin friends been assailed by devils, in some adventurous night voyage, and had he not returned half crazed, and beaten in such a way that he had never recovered? All this had happened while we were there; we might have found him alive had we come a few weeks earlier.

And in the night-fishing how often do the dead, continuing their habits, fish on the reefs alongside of the living. They are silent, and their canoes keep apart, but they may silently step from one canoe to another, only to be known by the chill and anxiety that goes with them. I have seen with my own eyes, far out on the reef, the solitary torch pointed out to me as that of the dead. Often, when suspected, the spirit occupant of a canoe has made for shore and disappeared, _incessu patuit dea_, and has been assuredly recognized by the track of her torch through the mountains, where no living man goes. That certainly must have been our spirit disastrous to young men.

All these sides of common belief, or what perhaps we might call superstition, were shown to us little by little. On the outside our good friends believe roughly as we do, and all this that I am talking about is what remains attached to Christianity, or more properly, never disentangled from it. And I should suppose that it must have been difficult for the missionaries to expel these survivals of the past, in the same way that the old Church found it impossible, in certain corners of Europe, to wipe out the belief in fairies--the “little men,” the “good folk,” the “wee folk,” the “good neighbours”; the sacredness and influence of places. And here the practical mind of the savage, in its first reaction, after having received a set form of worship and faith as a great relief, would argue that the written Law, the Book, countenances most of the things they _cared_ for in their older worship. A very few years after the first christianization which began in the Society Islands, sects were formed, based upon the Bible, or using it as an excuse, with all the security of any theological difference. I have a vague feeling that many of my brown friends think that the Christian, even the missionary, does not carry out properly his belief, and that they themselves are nearer to the letter as well as to the spirit. If the missionaries have let loose among them the famous question of the lost tribes, I have no doubt that many of them must be imbued with the certainty of that descent. Many of their practices are so much like those of the early Jews, that, according to old-fashioned ways of historical criticism, an uninterrupted tradition might be argued. In fact, I am quite sure that many of the missionaries have so reasoned, and implanted among them a great feeling of confidence. And the Polynesian, having a perfectly healthy mind, likes to have everything settled. Anything more like the typical respectable Englishman I have never met. With the brown man one sees the natural healthy desire of having the questions of religion, of politics, of society, all settled on the same basis; there is such a thing as good form, and that settles it. After the first start, the islanders were much troubled at finding that there were many ways of looking at things, and that religion might be right and manners bad: that the wife of the missionary, who insisted on poke bonnets, was not dressing according to the most aristocratic forms of her own land. And when they find that their written religion does not provide for all their little wants, it must be very natural to supply the smaller ones, which are the everyday ones, with some of the older forms more fitted for individual and temporal advantages. It must be a comfort to many of them to know that the flight of certain birds indicates what they had better do to-morrow; that the coming of certain fish may mean, nay does mean--some change in family history; and they may still prefer to treat respectfully the animals and plants that were associated with their origins--what we might roughly call, their totem. The shark has been respected or the bread-fruit, or the owl; and in certain cases certain mysterious powers and sanctities might follow the line of descent, though concealed from the public, more especially the white men. Of this, I ought perhaps to say that I am confident; and that the powers would be recognized in certain people even when, as I have seen it, they belong to opposing Christian sects.

The missionaries were Wesleyans, or, rather, men of the London Missionary Society. The form seems to have suited the Samoans. It was a service in which every one took part. There was preaching and eloquence and oratory, and to a certain extent the community was invited into the church--not allowed to enter into the church as a favour. So that notwithstanding their fondness for externals, the Catholic service gives them less of their old, natural, ancestral habits by centring everything in the ministrations of the priest, and by cutting off all chance of any members of the congregation becoming themselves orators, deacons or preachers, and leading in turn themselves. The chiefs also would hesitate in a choice of humiliations; the missionary, white at first and now a native obtaining a position of equal and sometimes superior influence, and that without any civil preparation for the same--indeed with less fitness from the relative isolation of his days of study. Later on I may explain to you more fully how absolutely the chief is the pivot of all social good. He has been for indefinite ages the cause of all action; he has been personally superior both in body and mind. The entire aristocracy is a real one, the only one I know of. It is impossible to enter into it, though one may be born into it. With our ideas of more or less Germanic origin we suppose a ruler gifted with the power of bestowing part of his value upon certain men lower than himself, and actually making such people essentially different. A Polynesian knows no such metaphysical subtlety. The actual blood of physical descent is essential to supremacy, except in a most vicarious and momentary manner, or as by marriage so that the children may become entitled to whatever the sum of the blood of parents represents. With them an heir to aristocratic privileges or power or influence or prestige represents nothing more than the arithmetical sum of his father’s and mother’s blood. I have had lately a Sunday afternoon visit all to myself, from a charming little girl who is the daughter and sole child of the king; a nice little girl with pretty little royal ways, who explains to me that she does not like things here so well as she did where she was taught English, where she had been at school, in the British colony of Fiji. There she was a king’s daughter, and any English ideas around her would be more flattering to her consequence than even the kindly feeling of the subjects of her father. For her mother is not of equal blood, besides being a foreigner. The great chief Malietoa Laupepa, whom we have made a king, cannot make his wife, according to Polynesian ideas, any more than what she was before he married her; and the little daughter has only in her veins the royal blood on one side, and a certain respectability on the other. To the true Polynesian mind, such a one of her cousins, of less high descent on the father’s side, may be of higher descent on the mother’s, and the sum of those descents may be very much greater than the sum of the descents of the daughter of Malietoa Laupepa. Hence it requires a great stretch of loyalty to look at such a little person with the veneration that the Polynesian feels for “chiefy” origin; and you can understand what a disastrous and bloody muddle we have made it for them when we have told them that the word _king_ represented anything that they had themselves or could have. With them _Rex nascitur non fit_.

All this has been explained by the supposition of two different races, one of which, that of the chiefs, had subdued the other. There is no such tradition, however, and no apparent reasons to explain the enormous superiority of the aristocratic lines except the simple physical ones of choice in breeding and of better food and less suffering, continued for centuries and centuries. Even at a distance a chief can be distinguished by his size and his gait, and a successful collection at some political entertainment brings back the dream of lines in the Homeric catalogues of heroes. Great size of limb, great height, consequent strength and weight, a haughty bearing, a manner of standing, a manner of throwing his legs out in walking, like the step of a splendid animal, a habit of sitting upright--all these points tell the chief.[7]

Upon these superior beings, then, brought up to command, considered as sacred by themselves and by all below them, devolved perpetually the duty of deciding everything that was to be done. Even in a detail so minute to our minds as that of a day for fishing, the chief decided, and does yet, what the community should do. The good fortune of all was dependent upon his wise choice. As the chief has often explained to us, when the women began to talk too much, and fix their minds upon harmful gossip, a healthy diversion was that of ordering them to make the native cloth--an absorbing process. With all the refinement of political leaders, excuses would be found for such an enforcement of industry: the occasion of some visit to be made or received, when every one entitled to it should appear with many changes of dress; when the visitor or the visited should receive presents of beautiful cloth. Let me say how elsewhere, in another group of islands, the earlier missionary interfered and broke up the industry of women, without evil intention, making them idle, and opening thereby the gate to ruin. In Polynesian life, as I am trying to explain, things were intimately connected. There were religious forms or words--or shall I rather say, forms and words of good omen?--accompanying all ordinary human action. Had the missionaries realized this perfectly, they might almost have interfered with the savages’ breathing; but they fastened on the pagan forms connected with the making of cloth, and the women gave it up, and bought cotton from the white man, and paid for it the Lord knows how.

The chief, then, sent the young men to fish and the women to work, when it was needed both for physical and moral good. War, of course, they always had, as a last resource, just like the great politicians of Europe. The constant interference, involuntary very often, very often most kindly meant, of the missionary or the clergyman, diminished this influence of the chief--an unwritten, uncodified power, properly an influence, something that when once gone has to be born again.[8] And the brown clergyman, continuing the authority of the white one, has something further, less pure, a feeling of ambition, a desire to assert himself against former superiors; and he is perhaps still more a dissolvent of the body politic into which he was born.

I see no picture about me more interesting than the moral one of my next neighbour, the great Mataafa. To see the devout Christian, the man who has tried to put aside the small things that tie us down, struggle with the antique prejudices--necessary ones--of a Polynesian nobleman, is a touching spectacle. When a young missionary rides up to his door, while all others gently come up to it, and those who pass move far away, out of respect; and then when the confident youth, full of his station as a religious teacher, speaks to the great chief from his saddle, Mataafa’s face is a study. Over the sensitive countenance, which looks partly like that of a warrior, partly like that of a bishop or church guardian, comes a wave of surprise and disgust, promptly repelled, as the higher view of forgiveness and respect for holy office comes to his relief.

But Mataafa is not only a chief of chiefs, he is a gentleman among gentlemen. My companion, difficult to please, says, “La Farge, at last we have met a gentleman.”

His is a sad fate: to have done all for Samoa; to have beaten the Germans and wearied them out; to have been elected king by almost unanimous consent, including that of the present King, who wished him to reign; then to be abandoned by us; and to feel his great intellectual superiority and yet to be idle and useless when things are going wrong. And more than all, however supported by the general feeling to-day, if he moves to establish his claims, the three foreign nations who decide Samoa’s future, not for her good, but for their comfort or advantage, will certainly have to combine and crush him.

He is a hero of tragedy--a reminder of the Middle Ages, when a man could live a religious life and a political one.

And his adversaries among the natives are among our friends; and we like them also, though there is none to admire like Mataafa standing out for an idea for the legitimacy of right.

For all the soft Communism of which I spoke, the chiefs were the stiffening, and are so still in as far as the new ideas, or rather want of ideas, do not affect their real authority.

As I tried to explain, these are chiefs, lesser or greater, hereditary, essential; nothing can replace them, no commoner come into their position or a similar one. Alongside of them an European monarch is a half-caste or a parvenu. When, as you will see, we, that is to say the English and Americans, made one of them a king, we made a thing unknown before, unthinkable in reality among their social machinery.

For however true it is that the chief is so by birth, by authority of nature, you know that in Samoa he is also elective. A council of chiefs of his own race determine whether or no he shall “bear the name.” For smaller chiefs, their own names; for certain great ones, such a name as Aana or Malietoa.

With these names goes the power over certain places large or small, but each having a traditional value. Should a chief of sufficient blood have all these five names (and he cannot get them without such natural inheritance and the name may remain empty), should he have all five names, then he is of necessity king, that is to say, chief of chiefs. But if he have only three, then imagine the confusion made in the true Samoan mind by our making him king.

Mataafa has held more names than any other, and would no doubt be to-day elected king by the majority of the Samoans; and absolute agreement would probably always be impossible. But though the treaty between Germany, England, and the United States, as promulgated in the Island, decided that the Samoans should elect their king, and thereby Mataafa would be the man; yet a secret arrangement, or what is prettily called a _protocol_, not published to the Samoans, decided that Mataafa especially and alone should not be allowed. He was the only man who had successfully defended Samoan independence as far as it could be, by word and by action; he had fought the Germans and defeated them, and that was the reason.

According to American ideas Mataafa would be the only proper person, but Germany and England have arranged for some time back all matters of influence and policy; and whatever we have wished, or might have wished, we have always been obliged to vote over against them, and must continue to do so.

But the German cause is such a bad one, so foul at the origin, and so brutally helped on, that it has been impossible for Great Britain to ignore justice absolutely, and we have done something in the cause of humanity and so far served God.

Money can have no feeling; political ambition only what may help; and the cause of all this trouble which has made this little island known to the entire world is the hope of saving some money badly invested.