We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses (lilac, red, and green) of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed, he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. "Will you be at school to-morrow?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like school?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like bathing?" "No, ma'am," with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden, of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a pound-master's notice on a board told of the reign of law.

At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre, melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell, and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable's length beyond the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge.

The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places, the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts—the greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the heiau, or temple, the so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured here; but whether as the founder of the shrine, or because he had been more renowned in life, Keawe was the reigning and the hallowing saint. And Keawe can produce at least one claim to figure on the canon, for since his death he has wrought miracles. As late as 1829, Kaahumanu sent messengers to bring the relics of the kings from their long repose at Honaunau. First to the keeper's wife, and then to the keeper, the spirit of Keawe appeared in a dream, bidding them prevent the desecration. Upon the second summons, they rose trembling; hasted with a torch into the crypt; exchanged the bones of Keawe with those of some less holy chieftains; and were back in bed but not yet asleep, and the day had not yet dawned, before the messengers arrived. So it comes that to this hour the bones of Keawe, like those of his great descendant, sleep in some unknown crevice of that caverned isle.

When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the dead, the temple still preserved some shadow of its ancient credit and presented much of its original appearance. He has sketched it, rudely in a drawing, more effectively in words. "Several rudely carved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of 'the mighty dead' reposing in the house adjoining.... Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness.... The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness. We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were told it was strictly prohibited.... However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in and saw many large images, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks' teeth, and pearl-shell eyes. We also saw several bundles, apparently of human bones, cleaned, carefully tied up with sinnet made of cocoa-nut fibre, and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the bones belonged." Thus the careless eyes of Ellis viewed and passed over the bones of sacrosanct Keawe, in his house which he had builded.

Cities of refuge are found not only in Hawaii but in the Gilberts: where their name is now invariably used for a mosquito-net. But the refuge of the Gilberts was only a house in a village, and only offered, like European churches, a sanctuary for the time. The hunted man might harbour there, and live on charity: woe to him if he stepped without. The City of Refuge of Honaunau possessed a larger efficacy. Its gate once passed, an appearance made before the priest on duty, a hasty prayer addressed to the chief idol, and the guilty man was free to go again, relieved from all the consequences of his crime or his misfortune. In time of war, its bulwarks were advertised by pennons of white tapa; and the aged, the children, and the poorer-hearted of the women of the district awaited there the issue of the battle. But the true wives followed their lords into the field, and shared with them their toil and danger.

The city had yet another function. There was in Hawaii a class apart, comparable to the doomed families of Tahiti, whose special mission was to supply the altar. It seems the victim fell usually on the holy day, of which there were four in the month; between these, the man was not only safe, but enjoyed, in virtue of his destiny, a singular licence of behaviour. His immunities exceeded those of the mediaeval priest and jester rolled in one; he might have donned the King's girdle (the height of sacrilege and treason), and gone abroad with it, unpunished and apparently unblamed; and with a little care and some acquaintance in priests' families, he might prolong this life of licence to old age. But the laws of human nature are implacable; their destiny of privilege and peril turned the men's heads; even at dangerous seasons, they went recklessly abroad upon their pleasures; were often sighted in the open, and must run for the City of Refuge with the priestly murderers at their heels. It is strange to think it was a priest also who stood in the door to welcome and protect them.

The enclosure of the sanctuary was all paved with the lava; scattered blocks encumbered it in places; everywhere tall cocoa-palms jutted from the fissures and drew shadows on the floor; a loud continuous sound of the near sea burthened the ear. These rude monumental ruins, and the thought of that life and faith of which they stood memorial, threw me in a muse. There are times and places where the past becomes more vivid than the present, and the memory dominates the ear and eye. I have found it so in the presence of the vestiges of Rome; I found it so again in the City of Refuge at Honaunau; and the strange, busy, and perilous existence of the old Hawaiian, the grinning idols of the Heiau, the priestly murderers and the fleeing victim, rose before and mastered my imagination.

Some dozen natives of Honaunau followed me about to show the boundaries; and I was recalled from these scattering thoughts by one of my guides laying his hand on a big block of lava.

"This stone is called Kaahumanu," said he. "It is here she lay hid with her dog from Kamehameha."

And he told me an anecdote which would not interest the reader as it interested me, till he has learned what manner of woman Kaahumanu was.



CHAPTER IV

KAAHUMANU

Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat; as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes, cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were astonished. "You are old," they argued; "soon you will die; what use will it be to you?" "Let the bird go," said the King. "It will be for my children afterwards." Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions.

The attitude of this brave old fellow to the native religion was, for some while before his death, ambiguous. A white man (tradition says) had come to Hawaii upon a visit; King Kalakaua assures me he was an Englishman, and a missionary; if that be so, he should be easy to identify. It was this missionary's habit to go walking in the morning ere the sun was up, and before doing so, to kindle a light and make tea. The King, who rose early himself to watch the behaviour of his people, observed the light, made inquiries, learned of and grew curious about these morning walks, threw himself at last in the missionary's path, and drew him into talk. The meeting was repeated; and the missionary began to press the King with Christianity. "If you will throw yourself from that cliff," said Kamehameha, "and come down uninjured, I will accept your religion: not unless." But the missionary was a man of parts; he wrote a deep impression on his hearer's mind, and after he had left for home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King's servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other's; and when both were finished, a game of what we call French and English or The Tug of War was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King's men were dragged in a body into the opposite temple; and the tabus were maintained. None employed in this momentous foolery were informed of its significance; the King's misgivings were studiously concealed; but there is little doubt he continued to cherish them in secret. At his death, he had another memorable word, testifying to his old preoccupation for his son's estate: implying besides a weakened confidence in the island deities. His sickness was heavy upon him; the time had manifestly come to offer sacrifice; the people had fled already from the then dangerous vicinity, and lay hid; none but priests and chiefs remained about the King. "A man to your god!" they urged—"a man to your god, that you may recover!" "The man is sacred to (my son) the King," replied Kamehameha. So much appeared in public; but it is believed that he left secret commands upon the high chief Kalanimoku, and on Kaahumanu, the most beautiful and energetic of his wives, to do (as soon as he was dead) that which he had spared to do while living.

No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a conditional successor: "If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the kingdom and preserve it." The priests met in council of diviners; and by a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the King's death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain. Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him. "(Son of) heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns, here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together." He must have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But Liholiho (the poor drunkard who died in London) was incapable of so much daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger spirits, and was seen (perhaps scarce conscious of his acts) to eat of a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the missionary Ellis.

The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came (April 1820), all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on 5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy.

Kaahumanu was a woman of the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty; Bingham admits she was "beautiful for a Polynesian"; and her husband cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, and paid the penalty of life; she cynically surviving. Some twenty years later, one of the missionaries had written home denouncing the misconduct of an English whaler. The whaler got word of the denunciation and, with the complicity of the English consul, sought to make a crime of it against the mission. Party spirit ran very violent in the islands; tears were shed, threats flying; and Kaahumanu called a council of the chiefs. In that day stood forth the native historian, David Malo (though his name should rather have been Nathan), and pressed the regent with historic instances. Who was to be punished?—the whaler guilty of the act, the missionary whose denunciation had provoked the scandal? "O you, the wife of Kamehameha," said he, "Kanihonui came and slept with you Luheluhe declared to Kamehameha the sleeping together of you two. I ask you, which of these two persons was slain by Kamehameha? Was it Luheluhe?" And she answered: "It was Kanihonui!" Shakespeare never imagined such a character; and it would require none less than he to represent her sublimities and contradictions.

After this heroine, the stone in the precinct of Honaunau had been named. Here is the reason, and the tale completes her portrait. Kamehameha was, of course, polygamous; the number of his wives rose at last to twenty-five; and out of these no less than two were the sisters of Kaahumanu. The favourite was of a jealous habit; and when it came to a sister for a rival, her jealousy overflowed. She fled by night, plunged in the sea, came swimming to Honaunau, entered the precinct by the sea-gate, and hid herself behind the stone. There she lay naked and refused food. The flight was discovered; as she had come swimming, none had seen her pass; the priests of the temple were bound, it seems, to silence; and Kona was filled with the messengers of the dismayed Kamehameha, vainly seeking the favourite. Now, Kaahumanu had a dog who was much attached to her, who had accompanied her in her long swim, and lay by her side behind the stone; and it chanced, as the messengers ran past the City of Refuge, that the dog (perhaps recognising them) began to bark. "Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!" said the messengers, and returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations was restored.

A king preferred this woman out of a kingdom; Kanihonui died for her, when she was fifty; even her dog adored her; even Bingham, who did not see her until 1820, thought her "beautiful for a Polynesian," and while she was thus in person an emblem of womanly charm, she made her life illustrious with the manly virtues. There are some who give to Mary Queen of Scots the place of saint and muse in their historic meditations; I recommend to them instead the wife and widow of the island conqueror. The Hawaiian was the nobler woman, with the nobler story; and no disenchanting portrait will be found to shatter an ideal.



CHAPTER V

THE LEPERS OF KONA

A step beyond Hookena, a wooden house with two doors stands isolated in a field of broken lava, like ploughed land. I had approached it on the night of my arrival, and found it black and silent; yet even then it had inmates. A man and a woman sat there captive, and the man had a knife, brought to him in secret by his family. Not long, perhaps, after I was by, the man, silencing by threats his fellow-prisoner, cut through the floor and escaped to the mountain. It was known he had a comrade there, hunted on the same account; and their friends kept them supplied with food and ammunition. Upon the mountains, in most islands of the group, similar outlaws rove in bands or dwell alone, unsightly hermits; and but the other day an officer was wounded while attempting an arrest. Some are desperate fellows; some mournful women—mothers and wives; some stripling girls. A day or two, for instance, after the man had escaped, the police got word of another old offender, made a forced march, and took the quarry sitting: this time with little peril to themselves. For the outlaw was a girl of nineteen, who had been two years under the rains in the high forest, with her mother for comrade and accomplice. How does their own poet sing?

In the land of distress My dwelling was on the mountain height, My talking companions were the birds, The decaying leaves of the Ki my clothing.

It is for no crime this law-abiding race flee to the woods; it is no fear of the gallows or the dungeon that nerves themselves to resist and their friends to aid and to applaud them. Their liability is for disease; they are lepers; and what they combine to combat is not punishment but segregation. While China, and England, and France, in their tropical possessions, either attempt nothing or effect little, Hawaii has honourably faced the problem of this ancient and apparently reviving malady. Her small extent is an advantage; but the ruggedness of the physical characters, the desert woods and mountains, and the habit of the native mind, oppose success. To the native mind, our medical opinions seem unfounded. We smile to hear of ghosts and gods; they, when they are told to keep warm in fevers or to avoid contagion. Leprosy in particular they cannot be persuaded to avoid. But no mere opinion would exalt them to resist the law and lie in forests did not a question of the family bond embitter and exasperate the opposition. Their family affection is strong, but unerect; it is luxuriously self-indulgent, circumscribed within the passing moment, without providence, without nobility, incapable of healthful rigour. The presence and the approval of the loved one, it matters not how purchased, there is the single demand of the Polynesian. By a natural consequence, when death intervenes, he is consoled the more easily. Against this undignified fervour of attachment, marital and parental, the law of segregation often beats in vain. It is no fear of the lazaretto; they know the dwellers are well used in Molokai; they receive letters from friends already there who praise the place; and could the family be taken in a body, they would go with glee, overjoyed to draw rations from Government. But all cannot become pensioners at once; a proportion of rate-payers must be kept; and the leper must go alone or with a single relative; and the native instinctively resists the separation as a weasel bites. A similar reluctance can be shown in Molokai itself. By a recent law, clean children born within the precinct are taken from their leper parents, sent to an intermediate hospital, and given a chance of life and health and liberty. I have stood by while Mr. Meyer and Mr. Hutchinson, the luna and the sub-luna of the lazaretto, opened the petitions of the settlement. As they sat together on the steps of the guest-house at Kalawao, letter after letter was passed between them with a sneer, and flung upon the ground; till I was at last struck with this cavalier procedure, and inquired the nature of the appeals. They were all the same; all from leper parents, all pleading to have their clean children retained in that abode of sorrow, and all alleging the same reason—aloha nuinui—an extreme affection. Such was the extreme affection of Kaahumanu for Kanihonui; by which she indulged her wantonness in safety and he died. But love has a countenance more severe.

The scenes I am about to describe, moving as they were to witness, have thus an element of something weak and false. Sympathy may flow freely for the leper girl; it may flow for her mother with reserve; it must not betray us into a shadow of injustice for the government whose laws they had attempted to evade. That which is pathetic is not needfully wrong.

I walked in a bright sun, after a grateful rain, upon the shore beyond Hookena. The breeze was of heavenly freshness, the surf was jubilant in all the caves; it was a morning to put a man in thought of the antiquity, the health and cleanness of the earth. And behold! when I came abreast of the little pest-house on the lava, both the doors were open. In front, a circle of some half-a-dozen women and children sat conspicuous in the usual bright raiment; in their midst was a crouching and bowed figure, swathed in a black shawl and motionless; and as I drew more near, I was aware of a continuous and high-pitched drone of song. The figure in the midst was the leper girl; the song was the improvisation of the mother, pouring out her sorrow in the island way. "That was not singing," explained the schoolmaster's wife on my return, "that was crying." And she sketched for me the probable tenor of the lament: "O my daughter, O my child, now you are going away from me, now you are taken away from me at last," and so on without end.

The thought of the girl so early separated from her fellows—the look of her lying there covered from eyesight, like an untimely birth—perhaps more than all, the penetrating note of the lament—subdued my courage utterly. With the natural impulse, I began to seek some outlet for my pain. It occurred to me that, after two years in the woods, the family affairs might well have suffered, and in view of the transplantation, clothes, furniture, or money might be needful. I believe it was not done wisely, since it was gone about in ignorance; I dare say it flowed from a sentiment no more erect than that of Polynesians; I am sure there were many in England to whom my superfluity had proved more useful; but the next morning saw me at the pest-house, under convoy of the schoolmaster and the policeman.

The doors were again open. A fire was burning and a pot cooking on the lava, under the supervision of an old woman in a grass-green sacque. This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals—the girl in the same black weed and bowed in the same attitude as yesterday. It was painfully plain she would conceal, if possible, her face. Perhaps she had been beautiful: certainly, poor soul, she had been vain—a gift of equal value. Some consultation followed; I was told that nothing was required for outfit, but a gift in money would be gratefully received; and this (forgetting I was in the South Seas) I was about to make in silence. The confounded expression of the schoolmaster reminded me of where I was. We stood up, accordingly, side by side before the lepers; I made the necessary speech, which the schoolmaster translated sentence by sentence; the money (thus hallowed by oratory) was handed over and received; and the two women each returned a dry "Mahalo," the girl not even then exhibiting her face.

Between nine and ten of the same morning, the schooner lay-to off Hookena and a whaleboat came ashore. The village clustered on the rocks for the farewell: a grief perhaps—a performance certainly. We miss in our modern life these operatic consolations of the past. The lepers came singly and unattended; the elder first; the girl a little after, tricked out in a red dress and with a fine red feather in her hat. In this bravery, it was the more affecting to see her move apart on the rocks and crouch in her accustomed attitude. But this time I had seen her face; it was scarce horribly affected, but had a haunting look of an unfinished wooden doll, at once expressionless and disproportioned; doubtless a sore spectacle in the mirror of youth. Next there appeared a woman of the middle life, of a swaggering gait, a gallant figure, and a bold, handsome face. She came, swinging her hat, rolling her eyes and shoulders, visibly working herself up; the crowd stirred and murmured on her passage; and I knew, without being told, this was the mother and protagonist. Close by the sea, in the midst of the spectators, she sat down, and raised immediately the notes of the lament. One after another of her friends approached her. To one after the other she reached out an arm, embraced them down, rocked awhile with them embraced, and passionately kissed them in the island fashion, with the pressed face. The leper girl at last, as at some signal, rose from her seat apart, drew near, was inarmed like the rest, and with a small knot (I suppose of the most intimate) held some while in a general clasp. Through all, the wail continued, rising into words and a sort of passionate declamatory recitation as each friend approached, sinking again, as the pair rocked together, into the tremolo drone. At length the scene was over; the performers rose; the lepers and the mother were helped in silence to their places; the whaleboat was urged between the reefs into a bursting surge, and swung next moment without on the smooth swell. Almost every countenance about me streamed with tears.

It was odd, but perhaps natural amongst a ceremonious, oratorical race, that the boat should have waited while a passenger publicly lamented on the beach. It was more odd still that the mother should have been the chief, rather the only, actor. She was leaving indeed; she hoped to be taken as a Kokua, or clean assistant, and thus accompany her daughter to the settlement; but she was far from sure; and it was highly possible she might return to Kona in a month. The lepers, on the other hand, took leave for ever. In so far as regarded their own isle and birthplace, and for their friends and families, it was their day of death.

The soldier from the war returns, The sailor from the main:

but not the sick from the gray island. Yet they went unheeded; and the chief part, and the whole stage and sympathy, was for their travelling companion.

At the time, I was too deeply moved to criticise; mere sympathy oppressed my spirit. It had always been a point with me to visit the station, if I could: on the rocks of Hookena the design was fixed. I had seen the departure of lepers for the place of exile; I must see their arrival, and that place itself.[6]

FOOTNOTE:

[6] For an account of the writer's visit to the leper settlement, see Letters, section x.



PART IV

THE GILBERTS



CHAPTER I

BUTARITARI

At Honolulu we had said farewell to the Casco and to Captain Otis, and our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy trading schooner, the Equator, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a fair wind for Micronesia.

The whole extent of the South Seas is desert of ships, more especially that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in these islands; communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive another. It was my hope, for instance, to have reached the Carolines, and returned to the light of day by way of Manila and the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were destined to re-appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of mountains. Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome shark' flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.

The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near the line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness. Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava, measuring perhaps (at the widest) a quarter of a mile from beach to beach. In both, a coarse kind of taro thrives; its culture is a chief business of the natives, and the consequent mounds and ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye. In all else they show the customary features of an atoll: the low horizon, the expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and interest of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points like life on shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken for granted; and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon the centre of attention. The isles are populous, independent, seats of kinglets, recently civilised, little visited. In the last decade many changes have crept in: women no longer go unclothed till marriage; the widow no longer sleeps at night and goes abroad by day with the skull of her dead husband; and, fire-arms being introduced, the spear and the shark-tooth sword are sold for curiosities. Ten years ago all these things and practices were to be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old society will have entirely vanished. We came in a happy moment to see its institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed.

Populous and independent—warrens of men, ruled over with some rustic pomp—such was the first and still the recurring impression of these tiny lands. As we stood across the lagoon for the town of Butaritari, a stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with the brown roofs of houses; those of the palace and king's summer parlour (which are of corrugated iron) glittered near one end conspicuously bright; the royal colours flew hard by on a tall flagstaff; in front, on an artificial islet, the gaol played the part of a martello. Even upon this first and distant view, the place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a village; rather of that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city rustic and yet royal.

The lagoon is shoal. The tide being out, we waded for some quarter of a mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a flagrant stagnancy of sun and heat. The lee side of a line island after noon is indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the trade will be still blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon it will be blowing also, speeding the canoes; but the screen of bush completely intercepts it from the shore, and sleep and silence and companies of mosquitoes brood upon the towns.

We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise. A few inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed. As we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to explore a city of the dead. Only, between the posts of open houses, we could see the townsfolk stretched in the siesta, sometimes a family together veiled in a mosquito net, sometimes a single sleeper on a platform like a corpse on a bier.

The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of churches. Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they could scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when the toys are mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds; some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled and the walls pierced with little windows. A few were perched on piles in the lagoon; the rest stood at random on a green, through which the roadway made a ribbon of sand, or along the embankments of a sheet of water like a shallow dock. One and all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree wood and palm-tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no hammer sounded, in their building, and they were held together by lashings of palm-tree sinnet.

In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island, a lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of framing sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the street shows in a vista. The proportions of the place, in such surroundings, and built of such materials, appeared august; and we threaded the nave with a sentiment befitting visitors in a cathedral. Benches run along either side. In the midst, on a crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king and queen when they shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop, apparently from a hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the hoop (which hangs askew) is dressed with streamers of the same material, red and white.

This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and presently we stood before its seat and centre. The palace is built of imported wood upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron, the yard enclosed with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of lych-house. It cannot be called spacious; a labourer in the States is sometimes more commodiously lodged; but when we had the chance to see it within, we found it was enriched (beyond all island expectation) with coloured advertisements and cuts from the illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the treasures of the crown stand public: a bell of a good magnitude, two pieces of cannon, and a single shell. The bell cannot be rung nor the guns fired; they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade of the royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square. A straight gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace door; the containing quay-walls excellently built of coral; over against the mouth, by what seems an effect of landscape art, the martello-like islet of the gaol breaks the lagoon. Vassal chiefs with tribute, neighbour monarchs come a-roving, might here sail in, view with surprise these extensive public works, and be awed by these mouths of silent cannon. It was impossible to see the place and not to fancy it designed for pageantry. But the elaborate theatre then stood empty; the royal house deserted, its doors and windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence. On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing moving.

The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a parapet. At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands into an oblong peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and summer parlour of the king. The midst is occupied by an open house or permanent marquee—called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now pronounced, a maniap'—at the lowest estimation forty feet by sixty. The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of coral, within by a frame of wood. The floor is of broken coral, divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.

It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright shed, we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful people, some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of Butaritari. The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull; he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension: a pepper rajah muddled with opium, and listening for the march of the Dutch army, looks perhaps not otherwise. We were to grow better acquainted, and first and last I had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet always to hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is no doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.

The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming. But the queen, who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible; and there was present an interpreter so willing that his volubility became at last the cause of our departure. He had greeted us upon our entrance:—"That is the honourable King, and I am his interpreter," he had said, with more stateliness than truth. For he held no appointment in the court, seemed extremely ill-acquainted with the island language, and was present, like ourselves, upon a visit of civility. Mr. Williams was his name: an American darkey, runaway ship's cook, and bar-keeper at "The Land we Live in" tavern, Butaritari. I never knew a man who had more words in his command or less truth to communicate; neither the gloom of the monarch, nor my own efforts to be distant, could in the least abash him; and when the scene closed, the darkey was left talking.

The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence. So much the more vivid was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the islet, the Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his unmelodious David, Mr. Williams, chattering through the drowsy hours.



CHAPTER II

THE FOUR BROTHERS

The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little Makin; some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-independent chieftains do him qualified homage. The importance of the office is measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be absolute; and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents.

On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa's father, Nakaeia, the eldest son, succeeded. He was a fellow of huge physical strength, masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some intelligence of men and business. Alone in his islands it was he who dealt and profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and his subjects toiled for his behoof in servitude. When they wrought long and well their task-master declared a holiday, and supplied and shared a general debauch. The scale of his providing was at times magnificent; six hundred dollars' worth of gin and brandy was set forth at once; the narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry; and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the forehatch of a wrecked vessel, king and commons howling and singing as they went. At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel ended; Makin became once more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot eye.

The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity of justice was affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and midnight murder were the forms of process. The king himself would play the executioner; and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help and countenance of none but his own wives. These were his oarswomen; one that caught a crab, he slew incontinently with the tiller; thus disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance, which he would then execute alone and return well pleased with his connubial crew. The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to conceive. Beasts of draught, and driven by the fear of death, they were yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign's life; they were still wives and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold their faces. They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms, which commanded the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal. But during the remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms, accessories to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise. And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem. He was at that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a pleasure-house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one day he summoned a new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him; that is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets. She would be arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded, decked with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed; for death, as she well knew. "Tell me the man's name, and I will spare you," said Nakaeia. But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover; and the queens strangled her between the mats.

Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice; his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed and kept at arm's-length, give him the name (in the canonical South Sea phrase) of "a perfect gentleman when sober."

When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign. The warning was taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia's. Nanteitei dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag. To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered. The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief means of buttressing the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for instance, Messrs. Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the town. The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some time already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari—Maka and Kanoa, two brave child-like men. Nakaeia would none of their doctrine; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some affection for their persons. In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some expressions of respect. Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more completely under the spell. Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the king which soon grew paramount. Nanteitei, with the royal house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced. It was a compendious act. The throne was thus impoverished, its influence shaken, the queen's relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market. I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married to two of these impromptu widows, and successively divorced by both for misconduct. That two great and rich ladies (for both of these were rich) should have married "a man from another island" marks the dissolution of society. The laws besides were wholly remodelled, not always for the better. I love Maka as a man; as a legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime, stern to repress innocent pleasures.

War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the storm burst. The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain and perhaps alternated with monarchy. The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king's chief superiority is a form of closure—"The Speaking is over." After the long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous of the influence of Maka. Calumny, or rather caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings. In the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the dust. The king sat in the maniap' before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the succours as they came. They came singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about his neck. "Where are you going?" asked the chief. "The king called us," they would reply. "Here is your place. Sit down," returned the chief. With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was summoned and surrendered. About this period, in almost every part of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia, and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt.

He died some months before my arrival in the islands, and no one regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This was by repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers, he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia. Nantemat', Mr. Corpse, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned it well. Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man's character was much commented on in the island, and variously explained by opium and Christianity. To my eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency. Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men. Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice that put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre of a king.

A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my observation, depict him in his two capacities. A chief in Little Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, "Who is Kaeia?" A bird carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three. Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second commissioner died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem. Mr. Corpse was troubled with a scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse than awkward. "I will strike the blow," said the venerable Abou; and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise. The quarry was decoyed into the bush; he was set carrying a log; and while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow. Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror, turned to flee. But their victim recalled them to his side. "You need not run away now," he said. "You have done this thing to me. Stay." He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare. All the stages of a violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr. Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery. I was never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the king's thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at unawares. I had once an errand for his ear. It was once more the hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers abroad, and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where Tebureimoa lay unguarded. We entered without ceremony, being in some haste. He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his Gilbert Island Bible with compunction. On our sudden entrance the unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats. So Eglon looked on Ehud.

The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just: Nakaeia, the author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity. Not the nature, but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed. At home, in a quiet by-street of a village, the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is, he shows some private virtues. He has no lands, only the use of such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and he knows and uses it. Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a shilling for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total of three hundred pounds a year. He had been some nine months on the throne: had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent his brother's photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother's legacy of debt; and had still sovereigns in his pocket. An affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace. It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues: that Tebureimoa should have a diversion filled me with surprise.



CHAPTER III

AROUND OUR HOUSE

When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and within the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six foreign houses of Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by Maka, the Hawaiian missionary. Two San Francisco firms are here established, Messrs. Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the first hard by the palace of the mid town, the second at the north entry; each with a store and bar-room. Our house was in the Wightman compound, betwixt the store and bar, within a fenced enclosure. Across the road a few native houses nestled in the margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose solid, shutting out the breeze. A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens' hands. Here, when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when the tide was low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and an endless series of natives descended the pier stair, tailed across the sand in strings and clusters, waded to the waist with the bags of copra, and loitered backward to renew their charge. The mystery of the copra trade tormented me, as I sat and watched the profits drip on the stair and the sands.

In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at night, the folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the road: families going up the island to make copra on their lands; women bound for the bush to gather flowers against the evening toilet; and, twice a day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife and shell. In the first grey of the morning, and again late in the afternoon, these would straggle past about their tree-top business, strike off here and there into the bush, and vanish from the face of the earth. At about the same hour, if the tide be low in the lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the island for a bath, and may enter close at their heels alleys of the palm wood. Right in front, although the sun is not yet risen, the east is already lighted with preparatory fires, and the huge accumulations of the trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the coming day. The breeze is in your face; overhead in the tops of the palms, its playthings, it maintains a lively bustle; look where you will, above or below, there is no human presence, only the earth and shaken forest. And right overhead the song of an invisible singer breaks from the thick leaves; from farther on a second tree-top answers; and beyond again, in the bosom of the woods, a still more distant minstrel perches and sways and sings. So, all round the isle, the toddy-cutters sit on high, and are rocked by the trade, and have a view far to seaward, where they keep watch for sails and like huge birds utter their songs in the morning. They sing with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we anticipate the chattering of fowls. And yet in a sense these songs also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred; few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was understood the cutters "prayed to have good toddy, and sang of their old wars." The prayer is at least answered; and when the foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage well "worthy of a grace." All forenoon you may return and taste; it only sparkles, and sharpens, and grows to be a new drink, not less delicious; but with the progress of the day the fermentation quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it will be yeast for bread, in two days more a devilish intoxicant, the counsellor of crime.

The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and moustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets, all stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty lip. The hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise in a frizzled bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese, a pointed stick (used for a comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls. The women from this bush of hair look forth enticingly: the race cannot be compared with the Tahitian for female beauty; I doubt even if the average be high, but some of the prettiest girls, and one of the handsomest women I ever saw, were Gilbertines. Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group, is Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common wear, the latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with flowers, fruit, and ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the characteristic female dress of the Gilberts no longer universal. The ridi is its name: a cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not unlike tarry string; the lower edge not reaching the mid-thigh, the upper adjusted so low upon the haunches that it seems to cling by accident. A sneeze, you think, and the lady must surely be left destitute. "The perilous, hairbreadth ridi" was our word for it; and in the conflict that rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that must be her costume. In that, and naked otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia. Bundle her in a gown, the charm is fled, and she wriggles like an Englishwoman.

Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous. The men broke out in all the colours of the rainbow—or at least of the trade-room,—and both men and women began to be adorned and scented with new flowers. A small white blossom is the favourite, sometimes sown singly in a woman's hair like little stars, now composed in a thick wreath. With the night, the crowd sometimes thickened in the road, and the padding and brushing of bare feet became continuous; the promenades mostly grave, the silence only interrupted by some giggling and scampering of girls; even the children quiet. At nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral, and the life of the town ceased. At four the next morning the signal is repeated in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for seven hours all must lie—I was about to say within doors, of a place where doors, and even walls, are an exception—housed, at least, under their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-nets. Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants. I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him. But the rogue was privileged.

Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain cast anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out. This was owing to our position between the store and the bar—the "Sans Souci," as the last was called. Mr. Rick was not only Messrs. Wightman's manager, but consular agent for the States. Mrs. Rick was the only white woman on the island, and one of the only two in the archipelago; their house besides, with its cool verandahs, its bookshelves, its comfortable furniture, could not be rivalled nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu. Every one called in consequence, save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea quarrel, hingeing on the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a difference about poultry. Even these, if they did not appear upon the north, would be presently visible to the southward, the "Sans Souci" drawing them as with cords. In an island with a total population of twelve white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem superfluous; but every bullet has its billet, and the double accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient by the captains and the crews of ships: "The Land we Live in" being tacitly resigned to the forecastle, the "Sans Souci" tacitly reserved for the afterguard. So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding was my fear of Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first; but in the other, which was the club or rather the casino of the island, I regularly passed my evenings. It was small, but neatly fitted, and at night (when the lamp was lit) sparkled with glass and glowed with coloured pictures like a theatre at Christmas. The pictures were advertisements, the glass coarse enough, the carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that incongruous isle, was of unbridled luxury and inestimable expense. Here songs were sung, tales told, tricks performed, games played. The Ricks, ourselves, Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats or by the road on foot, made up the usual company. The traders, all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business; "South Sea Merchants" is the title they prefer. "We are all sailors here"—"Merchants, if you please"—"South Sea Merchants,"—was a piece of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed to lose in savour. We found them at all times simple, genial, gay, gallant, and obliging; and, across some interval of time, recall with pleasure the traders of Butaritari. There was one black sheep indeed. I tell of him here where he lived, against my rule; for in this case I have no measure to preserve, and the man is typical of a class of ruffians that once disgraced the whole field of the South Seas, and still linger in the rarely visited isles of Micronesia. He had the name on the beach of "a perfect gentleman when sober," but I never saw him otherwise than drunk. The few shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has singled out with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of his original baseness. He has been accused and acquitted of a treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me to suppose him innocent. His daughter is defaced by his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to disfigure, and, in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-brandy, fastened on the wrong victim. The wife has since fled and harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands from deaf ears her forcible restoration. The best of his business is to make natives drink, and then advance the money for the fine upon a lucrative mortgage. "Respect for whites" is the man's word: "What is the matter with this island is the want of respect for whites." On his way to Butaritari, while I was there, he spied his wife in the bush with certain natives and made a dash to capture her; whereupon one of her companions drew a knife and the husband retreated: "Do you call that proper respect for whites?" he cried. At an early stage of the acquaintance we proved our respect for his kind of white by forbidding him our enclosure under pain of death. Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his English lips incredibly incongruous.

Our enclosure, round which this composite of degradations wandered, was of some extent. In one corner was a trellis with a long table of rough boards. Here the Fourth of July feast had been held not long before with memorable consequences, yet to be set forth; here we took our meals; here entertained to a dinner the king and notables of Makin. In the midst was the house, with a verandah front and back, and three rooms within. In the verandah we slung our man-of-war hammocks, worked there by day, and slept at night. Within were beds, chairs, a round table, a fine hanging lamp, and portraits of the royal family of Hawaii. Queen Victoria proves nothing; Kalakaua and Mrs. Bishop are diagnostic; and the truth is we were the stealthy tenants of the parsonage. On the day of our arrival Maka was away; faithless trustees unlocked his doors; and the dear rigorous man, the sworn foe of liquor and tobacco, returned to find his verandah littered with cigarettes and his parlour horrible with bottles. He made but one condition—on the round table, which he used in the celebration of the sacraments, he begged us to refrain from setting liquor; in all else he bowed to the accomplished fact, refused rent, retired across the way into a native house, and, plying in his boat, beat the remotest quarters of the isle for provender. He found us pigs—I could not fancy where—no other pigs were visible; he brought us fowls and taro; when we gave our feast to the monarch and gentry, it was he who supplied the wherewithal, he who superintended the cooking, he who asked grace at table, and when the king's health was proposed, he also started the cheering with an English hip-hip-hip. There was never a more fortunate conception; the heart of the fatted king exulted in his bosom at the sound.

Take him for all in all, I have never known a more engaging creature than this parson of Butaritari: his mirth, his kindness, his noble, friendly feelings, brimmed from the man in speech and gesture. He loved to exaggerate, to act and overact the momentary part, to exercise his lungs and muscles, and to speak and laugh with his whole body. He had the morning cheerfulness of birds and healthy children; and his humour was infectious. We were next neighbours and met daily, yet our salutations lasted minutes at a stretch—shaking hands, slapping shoulders, capering like a pair of Merry-Andrews, laughing to split our sides upon some pleasantry that would scarce raise a titter in an infant school. It might be five in the morning, the toddy-cutters just gone by, the road empty, the shade of the island lying far on the lagoon: and the ebullition cheered me for the day.

Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy; these jubilant extremes could scarce be constantly maintained. He was besides long, and lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and his Sabbath countenance was even saturnine. On that day we made a procession to the church, or (as I must always call it) the cathedral: Maka (a blot on the hot landscape) in tall hat, black frock-coat, black trousers; under his arm the hymn-book and the Bible; in his face, a reverent gravity:—beside him Mary his wife, a quiet, wise, and handsome elderly lady, seriously attired:—myself following with singular and moving thoughts. Long before, to the sound of bells and streams and birds, through a green Lothian glen, I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a minister in whose house I lodged; and the likeness, and the difference, and the series of years and deaths, profoundly touched me. In the great, dusky, palm-tree cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty: the men on one side, the women on the other, myself posted (for a privilege) amongst the women, and the small missionary contingent gathered close around the platform, we were lost in that round vault. The lessons were read antiphonally, the flock was catechised, a blind youth repeated weekly a long string of psalms, hymns were sung—I never heard worse singing,—and the sermon followed. To say I understood nothing were untrue; there were points that I learned to expect with certainty; the name of Honolulu, that of Kalakaua, the word Cap'n-man-o'-wa', the word ship, and a description of a storm at sea, infallibly occurred; and I was not seldom rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the bargain. The rest was but sound to the ears, silence for the mind; a plain expanse of tedium, rendered unbearable by heat, a hard chair, and the sight through the wide doors of the more happy heathen on the green. Sleep breathed on my joints and eyelids, sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom. In vain the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by name particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my successful struggles against sleep—and I hope they were successful—cheered the flight of time. He, when he was not catching flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours, gloated with a fixed, translucent eye upon the stages of my agony; and once when the service was drawing towards a close he winked at me across the church.

I write of the service with a smile; yet I was always there—always with respect for Maka, always with admiration for his deep seriousness, his burning energy, the fire of his roused eye, the sincere and various accents of his voice. To see him weekly flogging a dead horse and blowing a cold fire was a lesson in fortitude and constancy. It may be a question whether if the mission were fully supported, and he was set free from business avocations, more might not result; I think otherwise myself; I think not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock, that rigour which has once provoked a revolution, and which to-day, in a man so lively and engaging, amazes the beholder. No song, no dance, no tobacco, no liquor, no alleviative of life—only toil and church-going; so says a voice from his face; and the face is the face of the Polynesian Esau, but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a different world. And a Polynesian at the best makes a singular missionary in the Gilberts, coming from a country recklessly unchaste to one conspicuously strict; from a race hag-ridden with bogies to one comparatively bold against the terrors of the dark. The thought was stamped one morning in my mind, when I chanced to be abroad by moonlight, and saw all the town lightless, but the lamp faithfully burning by the missionary's bed. It requires no law, no fire, and no scouting police, to withhold Maka and his countrymen from wandering in the night unlighted.



CHAPTER IV

A TALE OF A TAPU

On the morrow of our arrival (Sunday, 14th July 1889) our photographers were early stirring. Once more we traversed a silent town; many were yet abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their open houses; there was no sound of intercourse or business. In that hour before the shadows, the quarter of the palace and canal seemed like a landing-place in the "Arabian Nights" or from the classic poets; here were the fit destination of some "faery frigot," here some adventurous prince might step ashore among new characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it floated on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the repository of the Grail. In such a scene, and at such an hour, the impression received was not so much of foreign travel—rather of past ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had crossed, as centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by the same steps, home and to-day. A few children followed us, mostly nude, all silent; in the clear, weedy waters of the canal some silent damsels waded, baring their brown thighs; and to one of the maniap's before the palace gate we were attracted by a low but stirring hum of speech.

The oval shed was full of men sitting cross-legged. The king was there in striped pyjamas, his rear protected by four guards with Winchesters, his air and bearing marked by unwonted spirit and decision; tumblers and black bottles went the round; and the talk, throughout loud, was general and animated. I was inclined at first to view this scene with suspicion. But the hour appeared unsuitable for a carouse; drink was besides forbidden equally by the law of the land and the canons of the church; and while I was yet hesitating, the king's rigorous attitude disposed of my last doubt. We had come, thinking to photograph him surrounded by his guards, and at the first word of the design his piety revolted. We were reminded of the day—the Sabbath, in which thou shalt take no photographs—and returned with a flea in our ear, bearing the rejected camera.

At church, a little later, I was struck to find the throne unoccupied. So nice a Sabbatarian might have found the means to be present; perhaps my doubts revived; and before I got home they were transformed to certainties. Tom, the bar-keeper of the "Sans Souci," was in conversation with two emissaries from the court. The "keen," they said, wanted "din," failing which "perandi."[7] No din, was Tom's reply, and no perandi; but "pira" if they pleased. It seems they had no use for beer, and departed sorrowing.

"Why, what is the meaning of all this?" I asked. "Is the island on the spree?"

Such was the fact. On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and the king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu against liquor. There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies to the superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one can start him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop. The tapu, raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten days the town had been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen it the afternoon before) in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by the Old Men and his own appetites, continued to maintain the liberty, to squander his savings on liquor, and to join in and lead the debauch. The whites were the authors of this crisis; it was upon their own proposal that the freedom had been granted at the first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they were doubtless pleased it should continue. That pleasure had now sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded) unduly; and it now began to be a question how it might conclude. Hence Tom's refusal. Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the moment, and it was avowedly unavailing; the king's foragers, denied by Tom at the "Sans Souci," would be supplied at "The Land we Live in" by the gobbling Mr. Williams.

The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I am inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate. Yet the conduct of drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole townful—and I might rather say, by the whole polity—king, magistrates, police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited, lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable number of whites have perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their own misconduct; and the natives have displayed in at least one instance a disposition to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing but dumb bones. This last was the chief consideration against a sudden closing of the bars; the bar-keepers stood in the immediate breach and dealt direct with madmen; too surly a refusal might at any moment precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for a massacre.

Monday, 15th.—At the same hour we returned to the same maniap'. Kuemmel (of all drinks) was served in tumblers; in the midst sat the crown prince, a fatted youth, surrounded by fresh bottles and busily plying the corkscrew; and king, chief, and commons showed the loose mouth, the uncertain joints, and the blurred and animated eye of the early drinker. It was plain we were impatiently expected; the king retired with alacrity to dress, the guards were despatched after their uniforms; and we were left to await the issue of these preparations with a shedful of tipsy natives. The orgie had proceeded further than on Sunday. The day promised to be of great heat; it was already sultry, the courtiers were already fuddled; and still the kuemmel continued to go round, and the crown prince to play butler. Flemish freedom followed upon Flemish excess; and a funny dog, a handsome fellow, gaily dressed, and with a full turban of frizzed hair, delighted the company with a humorous courtship of a lady in a manner not to be described. It was our diversion, in this time of waiting, to observe the gathering of the guards. They have European arms, European uniforms, and (to their sorrow) European shoes. We saw one warrior (like Mars) in the article of being armed; two men and a stalwart woman were scarce strong enough to boot him; and after a single appearance on parade the army is crippled for a week.

At last, the gates under the king's house opened; the army issued, one behind another, with guns and epaulettes; the colours stooped under the gateway; majesty followed in his uniform bedizened with gold lace; majesty's wife came next in a hat and feathers, and an ample trained silk gown; the royal imps succeeded; there stood the pageantry of Makin marshalled on its chosen theatre. Dickens might have told how serious they were; how tipsy; how the king melted and streamed under his cocked hat; how he took station by the larger of his two cannons—austere, majestic, but not truly vertical; how the troops huddled, and were straightened out, and clubbed again; how they and their firelocks raked at various inclinations like the masts of ships; and how an amateur photographer reviewed, arrayed, and adjusted them, to see his dispositions change before he reached the camera.

The business was funny to see; I do not know that it is graceful to laugh at; and our report of these transactions was received on our return with the shaking of grave heads.

The day had begun ill; eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at any moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin. The Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded on three sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to contain over a thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to the ships, in the case of an alert, was a recourse not to be thought of. Our talk that morning must have closely reproduced the talk in English garrisons before the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt that any mischief was in prospect, the sure belief that (should any come) there was nothing left but to go down fighting, the half-amused, half-anxious attitude of mind in which we were awaiting fresh developments.

The kuemmel soon ran out; we were scarce returned before the king had followed us in quest of more. Mr. Corpse was now divested of his more awful attitude, the lawless bulk of him again encased in striped pyjamas; a guardsman brought up the rear with his rifle at the trail; and his majesty was further accompanied by a Rarotongan whalerman and the playful courtier with the turban of frizzed hair. There was never a more lively deputation. The whalerman was gapingly, tearfully tipsy; the courtier walked on air; the king himself was even sportive. Seated in a chair in the Ricks' sitting-room, he bore the brunt of our prayers and menaces unmoved. He was even rated, plied with historic instances, threatened with the men-of-war, ordered to restore the tapu on the spot—and nothing in the least affected him. It should be done to-morrow, he said; to-day it was beyond his power, to-day he durst not. "Is that royal?" cried indignant Mr. Rick. No, it was not royal; had the king been of a royal character we should ourselves have held a different language; and royal or not, he had the best of the dispute. The terms indeed were hardly equal; for the king was the only man who could restore the tapu, but the Ricks were not the only people who sold drink. He had but to hold his ground on the first question, and they were sure to weaken on the second. A little struggle they still made for the fashion's sake; and then one exceedingly tipsy deputation departed, greatly rejoicing, a case of brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow. The Rarotongan (whom I had never seen before) wrung me by the hand like a man bound on a far voyage. "My dear frien'!" he cried, "good-bye, my dear frien'!"—tears of kuemmel standing in his eyes; the king lurched as he went, the courtier ambled—a strange party of intoxicated children to be entrusted with that barrowful of madness.

You could never say the town was quiet; all morning there was a ferment in the air, an aimless movement and congregation of natives in the street. But it was not before half-past one that a sudden hubbub of voices called us from the house, to find the whole white colony already gathered on the spot as by concerted signal. The "Sans Souci" was overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah thronged. From all these throats an inarticulate babbling cry went up incessantly; it sounded like the bleating of young lambs, but angrier. In the road his royal highness (whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom; on the top step, tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting to the prince. Yet a while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous. Then came a brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned and was rejected; the stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view, through the disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their midst a fourth. By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his knees, his face concealed, he was wrenched from the verandah and whisked along the road into the village, howling as he disappeared. Had his face been raised, we should have seen it bloodied, and the blood was not his own. The courtier with the turban of frizzed hair had paid the costs of this disturbance with the lower part of one ear.

So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the inhumane. Yet we looked round on serious faces, and—a fact that spoke volumes—Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar. Custom might go elsewhither, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased, but Tom had had enough of bar-keeping for that day. Indeed, the event had hung on a hair. A man had sought to draw a revolver—on what quarrel I could never learn, and perhaps he himself could not have told; one shot, when the room was so crowded, could scarce have failed to take effect; where many were armed and all tipsy, it could scarce have failed to draw others; and the woman who spied the weapon and the man who seized it may very well have saved the white community.

The mob insensibly melted from the scene; and for the rest of the day our neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in solitude. But the tranquillity was only local; din and perandi still flowed in other quarters: and we had one more sight of Gilbert Island violence. In the church, where we had wandered photographing, we were startled by a sudden piercing outcry. The scene, looking forth from the doors of that great hall of shadow, was unforgettable. The palms, the quaint and scattered houses, the flag of the island streaming from its tall staff, glowed with intolerable sunshine. In the midst two women rolled fighting on the grass. The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished, because the one was stripped to the ridi and the other wore a holoku (sacque) of some lively colour. The first was uppermost, her teeth locked in her adversary's face, shaking her like a dog; the other impotently fought and scratched. So for a moment we saw them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then the mob closed and shut them in.

It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore. But we were travellers, folk that had come far in quest of the adventurous; on the first sign of an adventure it would have been a singular inconsistency to have withdrawn; and we sent on board instead for our revolvers. Mindful of Taahauku, Mr. Rick, Mr. Osbourne, and Mrs. Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public highway, and fired at bottles to the admiration of the natives. Captain Reid, of the Equator, stayed on shore with us to be at hand in case of trouble, and we retired to bed at the accustomed hour, agreeably excited by the day's events. The night was exquisite, the silence enchanting; yet as I lay in my hammock looking on the strong moonshine and the quiescent palms, one ugly picture haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day's work; the imagination readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects, on the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling pell-mell and huggermugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens of our cities: I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through Soho, and seen that which cured me of my dinner.