THE SOUTH SEAS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 998, 17 April 1891, Page 12

THE SOUTH SEAS.

[copyright.]

By Robert Louis Stevenson. Author of ‘ Treasure Island/ ‘ Kidnapped/ ‘The Strange Story of Dr Jekyll and Air Hyde,' etc. Part 1. THE MARQUESAS. CHAPTER X. A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE. Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so surely unmortars a society ; nothing we might plausibly argue will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it. And yet we our selves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and the vegetarian. We consume the carcasses of creatures of like aopstitea, passions, and organs with, ourselves ; we feed on babes, though not our own; and the slaughterhouse resounds daily with Bcreams of pain and fear. We distinguish, indeed ; but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog, an animal with whom we live an terms of the next intimacy, shows bow precariously the distinction is grounded. The pig is the main element of animal food among the islands ; and • I had many occa- \ sions, my mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe hia character and the manner of his death. Manv islanders live with their pigs as we do with our dogs ; both crowd around the hearth with equal freedom ; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and sense. He husks his own cocoanuts, and (I am told) rolls them into the sun to bnrsi ; he is the terror of the shepherd. Mrs Stevenson, senior, has seen one fleeing to the woods with a lamb in his month ; and I saw another come rapidly (and erroneously) to the conclusion that the Casco was going down, and swam through the flush water to the rail in search of an escape. It was told ns in childhood that pigs cannot swim ; I have known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to the house of his original owner. I was once, at Tautira, a pig master on a considerable scale ; at first in my pen the utmost good feeling prevailed ; a little sow with a bellyache came and appealed to us for help in the manner of a child'; and there was one shapely black' boar, whom we called Catholicns. for he was a particular present from the Catholics of the village, and who early displayed the marks of courage and friendliness ; no other animal, whether dog or pig, was suffered to approach him at his food, and for human bsings he showed a fall measure of that toadying fondness so common in the lower animals, and possibly their chief title to the name. One day on visiting my p|gggj*y J was amazed to see Catholicus draw back from n.y approach with cries of terror, and it I was amazed at the change I was truly embarrassed when I learnt its reason. One of the pigs had heen that morning killed; Catholicus had Been the murder, he had discovered he was dwelling in the shambles,' and from that time his confidence and his delight in life were ended. We still reserved him a long while, bnt he could not endure the sight of any two-legged creature, nor could we, under the circumstances, encounter his eye without confusion. I have assisted besides, bv the ear, at the act of butchery itself ; the victim’s cries of pain I think I could have borne, but the execution was mismanaged, and his expression of teiror was contagious : that Bmall heart moved to the same tuae with ours. Upon Bach “dreadful foundations ” the life of the European reposes, and yet the European is among the less cruel of races. The paraphernalia of murder, the preparatory brutalities of his existence, are all hid away ; an extreme sensibility reigns upon the surface; and ladies will faint at the recital of one tithe of what they daily expect of their butchers. Some will be even orying out upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of thia paragraph. And so with the island cannibals. They were not cruel ; apart from thi9 custom, they are a race of the most kindly ; rightly speaking, to cut a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him whilst he lives; and even the victims of their appetite were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at last. In inland circles of refinement, it was doubtless thought bad taste to expatiate on what was ngly in the is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the lively haunt of its exercise, there by scanty but significant survivals. How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of Buch varying civilisation, and. with whatever intermixture, of such different blood ’ What circumstance is common to them all, but that they li/ed on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food . x can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables only. When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed ns to open another tin of miserable mutton. And in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes that a man is *i hungry for fish,” having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews in the desert, begins to Inst after fleßh-pots. Add to this the evidences of overpopulation and imminent famine already adduced, and I think we Bee some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal. .... , It is right to look at both Bides of any question; but I am far from making the apology of this worse than bestal vice. Ihe higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiian?, and Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had m part forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a topsail in their waters. It lingered only in some low islands where life was difficnlt to maintain, and among inveterate savages like the New Zealanders or the fiiarqnesans. The Marquesas intertwined man-eating with the whole future of their lives ; long pig was in a sense their o urrenoy and sacrament; it formed the hire of the artist, illustrated public events, and the occasion and attraction of a feast.

To-day they are paying the penalty of this bloody commixture. The civil power, in its crusade against man-eating, has bad to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element, and one after another has placed thern on | the proscript list. Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution exquisite, the I designs most beautiful and intricate ; • nothing more handsomely sets off a handI some man; it may cost some pain in the I beginning, but 1 doubt if it be near so pain I ful in the long run, and I am sure it is far ! more than the ignoble European practice of tight lacing among women. And | now it has bsen found needlnl to forbid the } art. Their songs and dances were numer* I ons (and the law has had to abolish them 1 by the dozen). They now face emptyJ handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity them? The least rigorous will say that they were justly served. Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance —the flesh must be eaten. The chief who seized Mr Whalon preferred to eat him ; and he thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a vengeance. Two or three years ago, the people of a vaT ley seized and slew a wretch who had offended them. His offence, it is supposed, was dire ; they could not bear to leave their vengeance incomplete, and under the eyes of the French they did not dare to hold a public festival. The body was accordingly divided ; and every man retired to hia own house to consummate the rite in secret, carrying hia proportion of the dreadful meat in a Swedish match-box. The barbarous substance of the dr >ma and the European properties employed offer a strikiug contrast to the imagination. Yet more striking is another incident of the veiy year when I was there myself, 18S3. In the spring, a ( man and woman skulked about the schoolhouse in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child alone. Him they approached with honeyed words and carneying manners—- “ You are So-and-so, son of So and-ao ?” they asked ; and caressed and beguiled him deeper in the woods. Some instinct woke in the child’s bosom, or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of his deceivers. He sought to break trom them ; he screamed ; and they casting oft the mask, seized him the more strongly and began to run. His cries were heard ; his schoolmates playing not far off, came Tuning to the rescue ; and the sinister couple flad and vanished in the woods. They were never identified ; no prosecution followed ; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge against the boy’s father, and designed to eat him in revenge. All over the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be observed that the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an individual. A family, a class, a village, a whole valley or island, a whole race of inan* kind, share equally the guilt of any mamher. So, in the above story, the son was to pay the penalty for his father ; so Mr Whalon, the mate of an American whaler, was to bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian slaver. I am reminded of an incident in Jaluifc, in the Marshall Group, which was told me by an eye witness, and which I tell here again for the strangeness of the scene. Two men awakened the ani* mosity of the Jaluit chiefs ; and it was their wives who were selected to be punished. A i ingle native served as exeeutioner. Early in the morning, in face of a large concourse of spectators, he waded out upon the reef between his victims. These neither complained nor resisted; accompanied their destroyer patiently ; stooped down, when they had waded deep enough, at his command ; and he (laying one hand upon the shoulders of each) held them under water till they drowned. Doubtless, although my informant did not tell me so, their families would he lamenting aloud upon the beaoh. It was from Hatibeu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high place. The day was sultry and clouded. Drenching tropical showers succeeded bursts of sweltering Bunßhine. The green pathway of the road wound steeply upward. As we went, our little schoolboy guide a little ahead of us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hahd, and named the trees for me, and read aloud from his notes the abstract of their virtues. Presently, the road mounting, showed us the vale of Hatiheu on a larger scale; and the priest, with occasional reference to our guide, pointed out the boundaries and told me the names of the larger tribes that lived at perpetual war in the old days; one on the north-east, one aloug the beach, one behind upon the mountain. With a survivor of thia latter clan, Father Simeon had spoken ; until the pacification he had never been to the sea’s edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea fish. Each in itß own district, the sept 3 lived cantoned and beleagured. One step without the boundaries was to affront death, If famine came, the men must out to the woods to gather chestnuts and small fruits ; even as to this day, if the parents are backward in their weekly doles, school must be broken up and the scholars sent foraging. But in the old days, when there was trouble in one clan, there would be activing in all its neighbours ; the woods would be laid full of atnbußhes ; and he who went after vegetables for himself, might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes. Nor was the pointed occasion needful. A dozen different natural signs and social junctures called this people to the warpath and the cannibal hunt. Let one of chiefly rank have finished hi 3 tattooing, the wife of one be near upon her time, two of the debouching streams have deviated nearer on the beach of Hatiheu, a certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain ominous forma, tion of cloud observed above the northern sea ; and instantly the arras were oiled, and tho man-hunters swarmed into the bush to lay their fratricidal ambuscades. It appears besides that occasionally, perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house, where he lay for a stated period like a person dead. When he came forth it was to run for three days through the territory of the clan, naked and starving, and to sleep at night alone in the high place. It was now the turn of the others to keep the house, for to encounter the priest upon hia rounds was death. On the eve of the fourth day the time of the running was over ; the

priest returned to his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the morning the number of the victims was announced. I have this tale of the priest on one authority—l think a good one—but I set it dowD with diffidence. Tho particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I almost think 1 must have heard them oftener referred to. Upon one point there seems to be no question : that the feast was sometimes furnished from within the elan. In times of scarcity, all who were not protected by their family connections — in the highland expression, all the commons of the clan—had cause to tremble. It was vain to resist, it was useless to flee. They were begirt upon all hands by cannibals ; and the oven was ready to smoke for them abroad in the country of their foes, or at homo in the valley of their fathers.

At a certain corner of the road, our scholar-guide struck off to his left into the twilight of the forest. We were now on one of the native ancient roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and clambering, it seemed at random over boulders and dead trees ; but the lai wound in and out and up and down without a check, foi these paths are to the natives as marked as the king’s highway is to us, insomuch that, in the days of the man hunt, it was their labour rather to block and deface than to improve them. In the crypt of the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold ; overhead, upon tho leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but only hero and there, a 3 through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop would fall, and make a spot upon my mackintosh. Presontly the huge trunk of a banyan hove in sight, standing upon what eeemed the ruins of an ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm, anuounced that we had reached the paepae tapn. Paepao signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is built on ; and even such a paepae—a paepae hae—may be called a paepae tapu in a lesser sense k whsn it is deserted and becomes the haunt of spirits ; but the public high place, such as I was now treading, was a thing on a great scale. As far as my eyes could pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was all paved. Three tiers of terrace ran on the slope of the hill; in front, a crumbliug parapet contained the main arena ; and the pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with several wells and small enclosures. No trace remained of any superstructure, and the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to seize. I visited another, in Hiva oa, smaller, but more perfect, where it was easy to follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of honour for eminent persons , and where, on the upper platform, a single joist of the temple or dead house still remained, its uprights richly carved. In the old days, the high place was sedulous’y tended. No tree except tho sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly Ret, and I am told they wore kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it. No other foot of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there to sleep—perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand ; but, in the time of the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body, and each had his appointed seat. Thera were places for the chiefs, the drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests. The drums—perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high—continuously throbbed in time. In time the singers kept up their longdrawn, lugubrious, ululating, song ; in time, too, the dancers, tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and gesticulated —theit plumed fingers fluttering in the air like butterflies. The sense of time, in all these ocean races is extremely perfect ; and I conceive, in such a festival, that almost every sound and movement fell in one. So much the more unanimously must have grown the agitation of the feasterß ; bo much the more wild must have been the scene to Any European who could have beheld them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo ; the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost European ; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old man s beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner of island food was meanwhile spread for the women and the commons ; and, for those who. were privileged to eat of it, there were carried up to the dead house the baskets of long pig. It iB told that the feasts were long kept up ; the people came from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy with their beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we call emphatically human—denying the honour of that name to those who lack them.. In such feasts—particularly where the victims had been slain at home, and men banqueted on the poor clay of a comrade with whom they had played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared —the whole body of these sentiments is outraged. To. consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, those fervours of self-righteous old ship [captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, on a cannibal island. And yet it was strange. There, upon the spot, as I stood under tho high dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the one hand, in his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan schoolboy on the other, the whole business appeared infinitely distant; and, fallen in the cold perspective and dry light of history, the bearing of the priest, perhaps, affected me. He smiled ; he jested with the boy, the heir both of these feastera and their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave of one of. the old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come and gone since this slimy theatre was last in operation ; and I beheld the place with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge. In Hive-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still living and latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their jooular attitude ;

rallying the canuibals as upon an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible ; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the practice by good natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing sugar. We may here recognise the temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon.