Papeete, Tahiti
Chapter XI Tahiti: Its Pleasures and Problems
Although the Paumotus fully deserve their subtitle of “Low Archipelago,” they have a marked effect on the southeast winds that are so prevalent in these latitudes, and so much relied upon by sailing craft.
The law of the “trades” is simplicity itself, and as a matter of general interest is perhaps worthy of mention here.
“Fickle as the winds” is a synonym that does not apply at certain seasons and in certain areas, and these areas, through mariners’ reports, have been definitely located and recorded in the British Admiralty and United States Hierographic Office wind charts. A schooner skipper may now lay a course from, say, San Francisco to Sydney, and know to within a couple of points from which direction the wind will come for the entire voyage. He will be careful to “hug the trades”—the northeast down to the Equator, and the southeast beyond—and the reason of these steadfast and accommodating winds is that the hot air of the Equator naturally rises, leaving a vacuum that the cooler airs of north and south rush in to fill.
The Paumotus, however, with the intense heat generated in their mighty lagoons, form a miniature Equator of their own, and completely disorganize the “trades” thereabouts, with the result that weather conditions between this group and the Societies are notoriously unreliable.
A greater contrast between two islands a bare forty-eight hours apart can hardly be imagined than between the last of the Paumotus with its coral reef invisible at ten miles, and the cloud-capped volcanic peaks of Tahiti. It is like approaching another world. It is another world.
At the pass in the barrier reef off Papeete, a genial French pilot took charge, and secured us the best berth in the harbour. Here the coral wall that forms the beach is so sheer that it is possible to make fast to the trunk of a flamboyant, as though to a bollard on a quay, and walk ashore on a gangplank—which we of the dream ship promptly did and dined in splendour at the best hotel.
With unaccustomed collars chafing our leathern necks, and perspiring freely under the burden of clothes after a régime of towel and sola topi, we consumed iced vin rouge, poulet rôti with salad, and omelette à la maître d’hotel. Papeete was a pleasant place in that hour. Indeed, Papeete is a pleasant place at any hour. It is the metropolis of the south-eastern Pacific islands, just as Honolulu is of the northeastern, attracting as varied an assortment of humanity as any in the world.
Here we have the planter of vanilla and cocoanuts, the trader in anything from copra to silk stockings, the pearl buyer, the schooner skipper, and the ubiquitous adventurer on their native heath—and under conditions to make it possible for each to live and prosper.
The French may be wrong from our iron-bound, Anglo-Saxon point of view, but they certainly have the knack of making life a more enjoyable affair under their administration than under any other at the present time.
It was at Papeete that we of the dream ship lost our cook. It may be remembered that in the Galapagos Islands, five thousand miles back on our tracks, we rescued an exquisite Ecuadorean Government official from a delicate position by christening him “Bill” and installing him in our culinary department, where he was expected to work his passage to Australia.
He proved to be an expert cigarette smoker and little more, so that when he approached us after the first night in Papeete and intimated that he found it “necessary” to leave, we were neither surprised nor pained.
And so you may see to this day Bill, of the biscuit-coloured socks and passionate tie, leaning gracefully over the soft-goods counter of a French store, extolling the virtues of a new line in underwear or gallantly escorting a bevy of Tahitian beauty to the movies of an evening.
Bill has found his niche in the scheme of things, and who can say more?
“If you manage to get past here without trouble aboard, you’ll be the first yachting party to do it.”
So spake that kindliest of men, the acting British Consul of Papeete, and although we of the dream ship were fortunate enough to succeed where others had failed, I recognize the truth of his words. Right down from Bligh of Bounty mutiny fame to the most recent of pleasure cruises there is a succession of enterprises that have found their quietus at Papeete. There is something peculiarly demoralizing about the place. It invites to a laxity of mind and muscle unequalled in the Pacific, which perhaps accounts for its fatal fascination.
How everyone lives, including a goodly sprinkling of whites, is a mystery that intrigues. I know a man hereabouts living in a twelve-by-fourteen corrugated iron shed furnished with empty crates and kerosene tins. At any odd hour that he chances to awaken from a more or less permanent state of torpor, he lounges into town and pays the smaller stores a visit. He pays nothing else. Starting at one end of a counter, with its sample edibles outspread, he systematically talks and eats his way to the other, and by the time the process is complete he leaves with a parting bon mot, and a full stomach.
He is a type of the present-day beach-comber, hardly such a romantic figure as his prototype of the “good old days,” but in his way interesting. His is the art of getting something for nothing, and who amongst us shall say he has never essayed the feat?
I cannot let this gentleman pass without enlarging upon him, if only to illustrate the mental processes by which a cultured man may descend to the status of a beach-comber.
He had never worked, and declared that he never would, both of which statements I could readily believe. Why should he work? To make a living? He has one without it. To make money for the mere sake of making money? Such a pastime did not attract him. To save himself from boredom? He was never bored. Were not sunsets and cloud effects, and all the strange living things of the beach (including store-keepers) provided for his entertainment? To retain his self-respect? Not at all. If others found it necessary to plan and strive in order to retain their self-respect, let them proceed! Personally, he did not find it necessary, that was all; and he fell to gouging his foul nails with a jackknife.
“Of course,” I ventured to murmur, “there is self-respect and self-respect.”
“Quite,” he agreed, cheerfully.
But the man’s real secret, the canker at the back of his diseased mind, was revealed to me—as I have no doubt it has been to many others—in the most startling fashion. Suddenly, and apropos of nothing either of us had said, he sprang to his feet and struck an attitude in front of the rusty hurricane lantern standing on an empty fruit crate.
“Do you notice anything?” he asked me.
All I noticed was an elderly gentleman, inclining to corpulence and baldness, with rather a fine profile terminating in a Vandyke beard, standing rigidly with folded arms and an air of imperiousness that struck me as out of place.
“You see no resemblance?” he suggested, incredulously.
I saw none in particular, and said so. He took his seat with an air of disappointment.
“Then perhaps I may help you,” he said. “My mother was lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria when King Edward was Prince of Wales. Does that convey anything to you?”
Naturally, it did, and I was forced to admit a resemblance that had escaped me.
Touched? Perhaps.
Taking this unworthy as the lowest rung of the white Tahitian social ladder, one comes next to the clerks of the larger stores, who, after a year or two with their firm, are marooned in charge of a trading station on some distant island at a wage that makes honesty and prosperity incompatible.
Then comes the store manager in crackling white drills and a luxuriant office, who welcomes you with a winning smile, and speeds you with a staggering bill; the schooner skipper, a genial soul possessed of an enviable independence that empowers him to tell his “owners” to go to the devil for three months of a hurricane season each year, the while his ship lies in port, and he disports himself and his latest yarn over variegated drinks on the balcony of the Bougainville Club; the French Government official, as awe-inspiring in business hours as he is charming out of them.
As for the natives, they are to-day a relic—rather a sad relic when one comes to think of it—of a once-superb race. White man’s blight has descended upon them and they have withered like so many of their brothers throughout the milky-way of the Pacific.
When shall we learn that what may be one man’s meat is another’s poison, and refrain from attempting to instil our ideas of progress into a people on whom they have precisely the opposite effect? The answer is, “Never—so long as there is money in it.”
But an additional rung must be added to our social ladder of Tahiti, and a sturdy rung at that. The half-caste—especially the French-Tahitian half-caste—is deservedly becoming a power in the land.
The accepted idea of him is that he retains in his composition all the failings of the white man and none of his virtues, but like so many accepted ideas it is entirely erroneous. He is a human being with the failings and virtues of any other, and there is not a doubt that he possesses a physical and mental virility that carries him further than most toward success in the tropics. He is usually extremely handsome, quietly mannered, and industrious, and the women of his species are among the most beautiful in the world.
Lastly there is the Chinaman; and the more one sees of this bland, uninterfering race, the more one is driven to the conclusion that he has come nearer to solving the riddle of existence than any other.
When Tahiti suffered one of its periodical awakenings to the fact that it must have plantation and road labour, it imported some thousands of Chinese. But what it failed to do was to specify on its indent the kind of Chinaman required, with the result that the majority turned out to be of the store-keeping class, and about as much use for road-making or copra-getting as a sick jelly-fish. Some stayed by the work for which they were intended, but many more, in their own insidious fashion, set up shop, and to-day wield a financial influence in Papeete second to none. “I’d sooner work for the Chinks,” a white super-cargo told me. “You know where you are with them. They give you a square deal, expect a square deal from you, and if they don’t get it, give you the boot without back-chat. They’re not in an ever-lasting, all-fired hurry, either.”
So here are one or two secrets of the Chinaman’s success. Is it another that he will buy a pearl for no other purpose than to drink it pulverized in tea? Who can say? It is certain that he won’t.
It was here in Papeete that I became a garçon d’honneur; at least, that is what I was told I was, though at the time I felt, and I am sure looked, like nothing on earth.
If it had not been for Liza I should never have suffered the indignity of transition from the semblance of a man to that of a stuffed and hustled dummy. But who can listen to the pleadings of a particularly attractive half-caste Tahitian by moonlight on the deck of a dream ship without surrender? I cannot.
It was explained to Peter, as intermediary, that she (Liza) needed an escort to her sister’s wedding, and thought that I should lend an air of distinction to the proceedings. She had fallen in love with my particular brand of sola topi, and she thought me très gentil. I expect this settled the matter. In any case, at nine o’clock that night, arrayed as ordered, and securely wedged between Liza and one of her innumerable and attractive female relatives, I was conveyed, swift as Ford could fly, to the offices of the Maire, where I was dragged forth and pushed into position to form one of a long procession of youths and maidens, the former in white gloves and evening dress ties, the latter in frills.
From, then onward I have no clear recollection of how I came to be in the various places that I found myself. Liza managed it. Liza was the most efficient tug I had ever made fast to. Up a lane of giggling onlookers we trickled and, after the civil ceremony, down it again, to be whirled away to the church, where the same performance, with certain variations, was enacted. Then to the home of the bride, and incidentally of Liza, a palace of light and heat, music and movement, where I found solace in a life-saver before the tug again made fast and towed me in to “breakfast.”
I had fancied the marriage complete, the knot irrevocably tied. Not so. We stood about a long table, our hands itching to descend on a glass of inviting champagne, while the native department of the ceremony, and to my mind the most impressive, was conducted by a venerable Tahitian, a relation of the bride’s mother.
He spoke, and continued to speak, untroubled by the growing restlessness of his audience. Liza pouted, and whispered in my ear, from which I gathered that the speaker had not been invited, that his mere presence constituted an insult. I failed to see why a representative of one side of Liza’s family should receive such scurvy treatment, but lacked the courage to say so, which is perhaps as well. Instead, I asked what he was saying, and elicited the following:
“It is old Tahitian custom—he should not be here! It is old Tahitian custom when you marry you have new name. He is telling new name which must be ‘WIND’; and when they have children, they are to be more ‘WIND’. He should not be here! There, it is finish; drink your champagne.”
Which, ever obedient, I proceeded to do.
Followed dancing, a strange mixture of hula and fox-trot, until four o’clock of the morning, a farewell to Liza under the stars, and a somewhat clumsy boarding of the dream ship.
Such is present-day Papeete, a place of pleasure, interest, or profit, according to taste.
The main trouble in the Societies, as elsewhere in the Pacific islands, is scarcity of labour. Each group in this mighty ocean is struggling with the problem at the present time, and has not yet succeeded in reaching a solution. The native will not work. He does not believe in toiling for others when he is a self-supporting landlord himself, and, when you come to think of it, why should he? The Pacific Islands, ambitious for development, are consequently forced to turn for help to the more congested quarters of the globe, such as India and China, and herein lies the danger. The influx has already begun, and there is not a doubt that in time it will swell from a beneficial stream into an overwhelming flood unless ultimately returned to its source by a conduit of stringent legislation.
We of the dream ship left the pleasures and problems of Papeete with regret, but succeeded in leaving with our ship’s company intact, to the lasting wonder of our very good friend the British Consul—to whom salaams from a less salubrious clime.