OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14758, 30 August 1913, Page 9

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

A WIZARD OF YAP.

mt PBoresscß J Macmillan Bhown w,, LL.D.)

Recently I spent away to the south imongst the more primitive natives of y a p and 1 took with mo the only book ♦hat' has ever been written about tins jol'itary island in tho Pacific, hundreds fl f miles from everywhere. It is the Island of Stone Money. Its author, j>r. Famous, of tho Free Museum of Philadelphia, spent two months ten wars ago down in tli« very district to wh ; ch I wns gerne. although the book '" was only published three years ago. Ho )jad taken -with him n camera, a phonograph, ar.d a cinematograph. About a score of photographs that he took appear in the book, and thereto attaches tome of the interest of my visit. When it was discovered that the book I had brought had pictures of tho . natives of th« neighbouring villages, 1 had strings of visitors who hung about oil day either to get their photographs taken or to sec the pictures of themselves or their relatives and acquaintances as they wore many years ago. ' The first and most constant of visitors • had been also the first and most constant of Furncss's visitors. It was Fatnmak, tho hunchback sorcerer. Ho . W as little moved at seeing the portrait of himself as he had boon ten years before. As far as I could sec ho had not jhanged or aged in the least; and he seeniod always to take up the same position and attitude as he had in tho picture; he squatted crosslegged or knees ' ap on the verandah, and hid his hunched back from scrutinising eyes as he leaned against a post. There was concentrated pathos, if not tragedy, in iiis fine face and eyes, and had he Wretched out his arms, there would ■ liare leapt with still more emphasis into * tho European mind the suggestion of primitive crucifixion. '■'■. Thero was the suKTued look of agony in the eyes, combined with a penetrating wisdom that seemed to, peer past one into tho dim future; r.nd there was in the face and attitude the mark of long suffering endurance that seemed to focus years of solitude and pitying meditation. Ho had fallen from a cocoanut palm in hie boyhood, and hurt his 'spine, and so he had laid up for himself that sense of the scorn, and pity .of his fellows which dominated his life, and had turned him into an unrecluse and given him a repu- " Nation for the predictive wisdom, and for power over tho "Kans" or supernatural beings that fill the universe and fortune the body and the soul of poor man. WIZARDRY. One of, my fascinating entertainjnents when he came was to watch the queues of clients who "waited on his nod as he looked into their future or into the etato of relatives or friends far over tho sea.. They tied knots on four strips of the green cocoanut fronds, and stuck them between the fingers of their right hand, thus armed they approached; he scarcely condes- j cended to look their way as he asked ;-theni, : ,ythe number of -knots on each :: strip and rapped out bis answers. One ':had relatives in Angaur in the Pelew ■• Islands who at last news were sick; the smile on his face told that the ■answer was favourable, and the sor- : cerer turned to mc and, though he Chad forgotten most of the pidgin ifingvlish in which ho used to converse with • he whispered hoarsely, telegraph," there is a station |>£ tho Telefunkon ~bn the island, and $io had found the analogy for his own £f unction in this new conquest of ;f Others wanted to know something in ;their immediate future that troubled . 'them; tho answer in somo cases left .the trouble unsolved, in others threw over it. We resolved, my host ,JHid I, to test his powers; we had Written that morning to a friend In - and knew that ho would not }come down to visit us; so we asked ; [ Fatumak whether this friend would next day or the day after, our were tied, and the sybilline came, "Perhaps he would come next day, perhaps the day after, but not." Our faith in the wizard .was, to begin with but weak, at his »; answer I am afraid it wholly vanished. I tried to suppress my laugh; : /.not so my host. Our scepticism . '/tSxil not in the ieast perturb ;l»is other clients; there was ..the .look of tho profoundest faith ■in their eyes. Whether the wizard believed in his own predictions, or 6aw .their frequent futility, it was impossible to say. Ho had certainly experience i enough of his immediate world, and '.intelligence keen enough to ccc more ; than these random knots on a green strip could fathom. But if he had reached the scepticism of the Roman augurs, no smile- ever passed over his face to reveal it. Once he smiled; but that was over his own portrait; what the smile meant I never discovered. Over the other pictures ho betrayed little or no .emotion; all of those who were portrayed were, or had been, clients of Hβ, some of them dead, others still active in consulting his knowledge of the knots, the "Kans" or spirits they represented, and the light their matings tbrew unon tho distant and the future. HIS KNOWLEDGE OF THE PRESENT NOT ALWAYS SURE. Much of the information he gave mc about tho customs and beliefs of tho natives was correct; it was in accord Trith what he had siven to Dr. Furness. But a percentage of what he gave mc was bewildering; it had changed or shifted its meaning from visit to risit. Many of the. gods he had given the Jiitnes of ten years before he now knew . nothing of; and somo of the answers to my questions did not escape eelfwhilst others disagreed with the information I got from , the Capuchin Friars, who had a mission station a few miles off. They smiled orer tho source of my facts when I :. mentioned who had given mc them. He retained always the same imperturbable gravity, the same penetrative melancholy in his eyes, however clearly I put hie own self-contradictions or the contradictions of my various informants. - , Hβ weight of years was on his 6pirit

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTER.

NOTES ON BOOKS AND AUTHORS. &■.

and tho weight of that hump he had carried witii such pain throughout the years. Never once did iiis eeftcouiidence break down, never once that certainty of belief in all ho said and did. Ho never failed in any of his. promises; if ho said he wouid come any afternoon or evening, his hour of appearance might be a little uncertain: natives are no: born with watches in their insidrs like so many civilised J men anil children; but as sure as fate tile wizard's "barco," a raft with a ■ raised platform on it, would pole round : the mangrove point as soon as tho tide J -.va.s iit. PUE-HISTORIC FIRE-MAKING. Once lie brought mc two specimens of tho. ancient iire-driil of the island, which has been uisplaccd except in certain ceremonial acts by Swedish and Japanese, maicnes (a word long incorporated in tho Yap language as •'iii.issce"). and in Fatnmak's own practice by Hint and steel with the old tinder from the hibiscus. He and some Yap youths of our household tried hard to make firo with it, but failed till next morning. It is not a bow-driil or putnp-driil or any other mechanical contrivance relieving the fire-maker of bard labour; it is exactly like the firedrill of the Australians: an upright round stick or bamboo twirled between the ha mis in a tinder-filled hole or notch in a soft horizontal stick that is held down by the feet or legs. It took three minutes to bring efficient .smoke, niv! nearly four before the tinder had the red snot in it. This "is not much longer than a Samoan takes to make fire with his fire-plough; but the energy needed for the one is infinitesimal compared with that of the other; the Polynesian has to concentrate tremendous ■ effort into the few minutes: the Yap : fire-maker needs less energy than thickness of palm-skin. Yet tho wizard evidently looked upon it as an antiquity worthy only of a museum; there was a certain scorn in his voice as he pronounced its name -"lirrok," making tho "r" a guttural deep in his throat, and he brought with his two specimens a corrugated shell with sharp edge hung round the wrist by a sinnet string as the knife of far past generations, thrust into oblivion by the iron ■ axe and hatchet. The traaers, long I before the Spaniards or the missionaries had planted Western civilisation in this Patmos in tho shape of a passion for iron, and many a good ship had her crow massacred in order to secure the bolts and nails and screws as well as the hatchets and the guns of Europe. STRATIFICATION IN THE CULTURE AND PEOPLE. How often the past had boon antiquated in this little solitude of the ocean by immigrant ideas or methods or men it is difficult to say. But if analysis of tho vocabulary and grammar of the Spanish friar published at Manilla in j 1883, imperfect though they are, and the analysis of what Fatumak gave mc corrected and appendixod by brother Paulinus and Brother Sixtus are to be j trusted, at least half a dozen pasts have been thrust into scorn and oblivion. The numerals alone show three or four periods, some of which must go back into the earliest ages of pre-his-tory. Up to three the ancient people of Yap had intercourse with the Polynesian languages. They reached a quinary system, i.e., got as far as five by aid of the language tho Pnumotans had as contrasted with the leter Polynesian; for five is in Yap "lal," which is the same I as the Paumotan one, "rari," evidently "one hand," hand being the most frermont source of tho word for five. New mfmigrants brought in a word for ten, "ragak," and tho Yap people began to count back from ten to fivo by subtraction ; nine was "minus one," eight "minus two," and so on. The social customs and polity reveal similar stratification of antiquated pasts. The most evident appears in the existence of slave villages ("Pimlingai"), which have their own land divided up amongst the individuals as amongst the freemen and ,the aristocracy. They are the undertakers of the island; they alone touch or bury the dead, whether chief or slave, and they bury them beside or in the slave villages." The upper classes and freeircn profess to despisethe slave class, and to have no matrimonial dealings with them. But as far as I have seen the slaves they seem to have the same features, hair, and head form as those who despiso them, and would slay them if they saw them wearing the aristocratic oomb in the hair or necklace round the neck. My host assures mo that there is a distinct difference, and he ought to know,' as a trader of thirty years' experience •, but he has not been able to it. And according to aristocratic Yap. tradition, it was to a slave woman in the North that tho god of thunder (Derra) revealed the secret of the nredrill, which must be made of hibiscus wood (the wood he struck fire into), cut with shell knives or shell axes, and used at the making of fire in all new Yap houses; and it was her j ho taught first how to make and fire pottery! And the staves appeal to the same sorcerers, and have the same religious beliefs, as the upper classes. EXOGAMY. One other antiquating social stratum I could get nothing about from Fatumak ; I could discover no trace of exogamy or kin-divisions except in the custom of capturing one or more ba.ndj some maidens from somo neighbouring J but hostile village, and making them j tho "mispils" or concubines of all the • men of the huge clubhouses, from which ; all married women axe rigidly excluded, and all women during the' fishing ! sc>nson under tho fisherman taboo. This, though existing also in the Pp r ew . group some four hundred" miles off, is a ■ relic of the time when kin-divisions lived in hostile villages, and wives had to bo captured, and ware.so few tha-t tho community was co'yandrous.^ I could get no other indication of exogamy from Fatumak, though I plod him severely with questions. But from Brother Sixtus. who is intimately : acnunitiled with all the religious and i beliefs, I found that kinj divisions exist in every village, under the name of "genovg." and marked by j fish totems as a rule, and that a man ! had to take his wife from a "genong" I of which he was not a member. What I puzzled mc and, it seemed. Brother ! Sixtus. too. was that property is mdi I vidua.l, and like tbechiefship passes from f father to son: there is a ■natrilineal heredity alongside of mother-right and obscuring it: the children belong to the kin of the father. This is clearly a case of nn older social poity dying out undr>r the influence of a new immigrant polity. Tlio same confusion bei tween the pn+Hlineal and matrilineal ! exists in the PeW croup: but the lat- ? t-er has more influence than in Yap. ! Thoush so far npart. tho two have j boon subject to the same intrusion of the pntrilinrnl: nnd its greater streneth in Yap. the more eastern, seems to indicate that the immigrant J polity came from the east, and T>rob- ' aVy f rom * I, * s 1 * 0 ?* 1 r<?a lni of patriiincalitv. Polynesia, an indication i by the appearance of : ninny" Polvnesi.in elements in the cul- ' turn nnd many Polynesian words in the lannrungp. Thou~h the curious stone monoy, shaoed lilce wheels, with a hole in the entre for the axle, often 12 to 14 feet '• in diameter, comes from Babe.thnap, ! in the Pelews, and jwinfem its prim- ! arv conception to tire Asiatic continent nnd though betel-nut cWmjr and wertVinc oame to Yap from Pelew. and mu«t have come from, .Malaga, Yap dominance looks; eastward. Tho chief . of a village called Gatsepar, on the

east coast of, « tho suzerain of many islands to the east, who look upon him as a wizard capable of causinf earthquakes and raum-j storms to punish disobedience. And tattooing, which is practised by both sexes of the upper o.asses, and a complete suit of which used to be the mark of the oofoof or dandy, is not only said to have come fr° m tno east, hut many stUl go to Mukmuk. an island 90 miles to the east J to get tattooed. The slaves never tattoo. The word for tattooing in the language (go-tau) comes, all but the prefix, irom Polynesia. THE RELIGIOUS IDEAS. Tho religions ideas, as sketched by Faiumak, aau revised by Brothers Pau.inus and Sixtus, rovea. a similar stratification. He explained how the thinking part (tafenai), which leaves tho body an d wanders about in sleep, and i-s at the instigation of tho "' Kans," or spirits, striving in sickness to leave the body, goes at deatn, it it belongs to tut- U-β-, those who have respected all the taboos and the instructions of the -Machmach O'- sorcerer, goes away into the sky to Fairaman, their heaven, but often returns to earth as an atucgithoi'ghost to plague and worry the living wuiiout being seen. Fairaman means "tne houst' of the sky" (fal, Maori, whafre ami rania, tJ:e Polynesian word meaning ■ a torch or shining thing), and consists of a huge clubhouse sum as they have on earth in ev<ry viliage; there they get from "Valafath," the supreme god, somewhat of a heavenly '"roi faineant,' , ambrosia or never-dying food (ngiringir), though Fatumak added on another visit that they got cocoanuts, and that that is why a cocoanut tree is planted on every grave; they also get fish which the "kans" or supernatural beings come down to the reef to catch. A PUSUALD OLYMPUS. There arc evidently other gods like 3>tiluk, the god of fighting and dancing, Muibab, a god ot war. and Derra, the god of thuiiuer. Bufc I'acwmak seemed absolutely ignorant of some whoso names he supplied to Dr. Furness—Marapou, the * god of storms, Nagadamang, the abettor of ghosts in their mischief (probably, it was suggested, a transformation of tho word madangudang, a fearless warrior, a word akin to Polynesian mataku, to fear), and Begbalcl, tho god of the taro. ■ He fell into something like, contradiction in saying one night that the bad wander for ever, and are never admitted Jo the House of Heaven, and the next night that they are burnt up; but he assented limply to the name Boradaileng. which he had evidently supplied to Dr. Furness as that of. the god who thrusts the souls of the bad into a pit of fire, and thus seemed to endorse the latter. My kind padres answered mc that such religious ideas as the Yap people have, even where they seem to copy Christian ideas, arc original. Yet they, too. disagreed as to somo of them. Brother Paulinus told mc that there was a god above the supreme creator, Yalafath, who was called Lugelenfr. a name wo together analysed as- "'Midpoint of the sky." Brother Sixtus assured mc that this waff a mistake, and that Lugeleng was the god of the sorcerers. Fntumak, though a sorcerer himself, would not rise to tho suggestion of such a god. One thing is apparent in all these anomalies, that the Olvmnus of Yap is piebald, and reveals like all the other elements of tho culture immigrant stratification. THE OLD, OLD STORY. But all this time 1 have been keeping the ladies waiting merely to listen to the eelf-contradictions of a wizard. Tho news that I had the pictures that the "dokota" had taken of them years and years ago brought them in troops; my host assures mc that he had to repress, their enthusiasm and turn away dozens when I was busy. Those that were admitted showed their betelblackened teeth by way of laughter at every other picture; they recognised old ladies long since dead, and held their hands over the mouth to hido their giggle. They shook their heads over playmates of long ago, who had gone through romance or "tragedy in the years between. In.Furness's book two little girls appear as the •.centrepiece-of the picture, Kakofel and Pooguroo. The husband of the latter. Mangai, came to see the portrait of his wife as an innocent littlr , girl. He poled our boat back to the "Kolonie" ; she snt bunched tip in her petticoat in the bow of the boat as I listened to the story of her escapades, which had better be passed over in silence and to that of the forgiving loyalty of her husband. She did not como to see her portrait of ten years ago as . she sat and whirled cats' cradles over her ■fingers; it was bn.lv Mangni, her husband, who lingered over the picture, and to my fancy, had tears in his voice over the lost innocence. . As pathetic was the visit of Knkofel. When I turned over the leaves to the portrait of Linn, her long-dend father, the kiVid'y, much-loved chief of T>ulnkan. the laughter ceased. Sho placed her finger on the and would not let mc move on through tho book for mnny minutce. Then she swayed from side to side in silent srrief: at last the tears came into her eyes, and she could not smeak for emotion. The mischievous twinkle of her eyes that Dγ Furness tells of died out of them, and left a sweet, somewhat melnncho'y smile on her round face: p.he hnd the cares of motherhood, and the experience of lf.fo hnd mellowed the trirl's love of mischief and softened, if not suppressed, the oflpricious flash of youth". She mivlo mo return again and agnin to the ricture, and crooned over it. And next day sho sent heir brother, a boy of twelve: ho wns interested in the portrait of his fntV>pr, but not as she had been: ho had been only five or six when be had become an ornhan. How liko tlv> woof of human nature is the world over, whatever the warp may be. dcenlv impressed itself on mo as T watched these primitive men and women.