The Island of Moorea
Chapter XII The Land of the Lizard Men — Facts and Fancies, Including a Few Horrors
Many an hour of quiet content had we of the dream ship spent while moored off Papeete, in watching the ever-changing beauties of Moorea, a bare fifteen miles distant.
Whether viewed in fair or foul weather, at sunrise or sunset, this island with its fantastic volcanic peaks and deep, mysterious valleys of purple haze attracts the eye of the dreamer like a magnet. What secrets lay hidden in those valleys? What might not be seen from the summit of those peaks? We determined to find out.
But first it was necessary to attend to things practical in the shape of our alleged auxiliary engine. It was perfectly possible, here in Papeete, to hire an expert to diagnose the trouble, but I had had my fill of “experts” the world over. They have an engaging habit of setting the contraption in motion by some happy accident, and declaring that “it is all right now,” but never by any chance explaining to the harassed owner what was the matter with it. It is my belief that they do not know themselves. The only point on which they are all agreed is that the “expert” who preceded them “made an unholy mess of the job,” and that if it had not been for themselves, it is doubtful if the engine would have ever run again. Moreover, their bill is usually in keeping with their modesty.
After a three-hour heart-to-heart consultation with the patient, I discovered, quite by accident and with Peter’s hat pin, that the tiny air-vent in the screw-top of one of the carburetors was clogged. Consequently, when the top was screwed down, the air had no outlet and forced down the float. Hence a persistent flooding.
It sounds absurd. It was absurd, but that was the entire trouble, and the accidental insertion of the hat pin converted lifeless scrap-iron into the power that the dream ship had so often and so sorely needed during the past months.
I hear the “experts” laugh, but I solace myself with the remembrance of one of their number leaping on his hat in an effort to locate an equally trivial trouble in marine motor engines, and draw the moral that it is as well to carry sisters who use hat pins.
A few hours’ sail brought us to Moorea, and one of the finest natural harbours in the South Pacific, where we were met by a plantation owner of our acquaintance in an outrigger canoe, and piloted through a tortuous reef channel to an anchorage of firm coral sand.
The entrance to this harbour is fully half a mile wide, so how the captain of a French gunboat contrived to pile his vessel securely on the reef is something of a mystery. It is said that he had dined “not wisely but too well” in Papeete, and was filled with élan to demonstrate how close a shave he could accomplish without cutting himself. And again, that he had been sent to bring back cattle, a mission that, as a naval officer, he so abhorred that he had done the deed deliberately.
In any case, there lies his craft, a fine old hulk, with the rollers rumbling and seething through her vitals; fit warning to the mariner who would toy with coral.
Such grim monuments to mischance, negligence, or deviltry litter the reefs of the Pacific; and what tales they could tell! I know of one on Middleton Reef, now used as a store ship for other possible victims, that was piled there on a lee shore during a south-west gale, and the bottom ripped clean out of her. For a week she lay half-submerged, her crew wading the decks knee-deep in water, and gazing over her sides or down through her hatches at the provisions scattered on the coral. There was water down there—fresh water in breakers and tanks, and food in tins that only needed block and tackle to hoist them up to the poop. But who would dive down and make the tackle fast? It meant almost certain death of an even more hideous kind than faced them as it was, and, unlike the orthodox romance, there were no heroic volunteers. The skipper was ready and willing, but he had his wife aboard who restrained him by swearing that if he did any such thing she would throw herself and their three-year-old daughter after him.
In all, they waited a week without food or water before the threatening attitude of the crew forced the skipper to make the attempt in spite of his wife’s entreaties and threats. He dived; he made fast the tackle, but all of him that came to the surface was a severed leg, and the wife followed him with her child in her arms.
It is strange that a region of such beauty as the South Pacific Islands should be the favoured home of tragedy, but so it is. My very good friend the late Louis Becke, who probably knew these parts better than any man of his time, often bemoaned the fact that when choosing a theme for one of his incomparable tales of the South Seas, he could not paint true to life without finding tragedy peering at him from every corner. He claimed the cause of it to be that this sunny realm of bronze gods was never intended to be invaded by the white man, and there are few who, in all fairness, can differ with him.
Even on Moorea, the incomparable, we of the dream ship had not been ashore an hour before encountering a thing too ghastly to ponder on. It was a man with legs so immense that only the toes of the feet protruded beyond them. His neck was thicker than his head, and part of his anatomy he wheeled before him, covered with a parieu.
It was a case of elephantiasis, a common disease of the islands, but against a background of such loveliness seeming the more terrible.
Here was a shady, grass-grown beach road overhung with flamboyants, and bordered with crotons and flaming hibiscus; there a cocoanut plantation with its serried ranks of graceful palm trunks fading away into cool green distances like the pillars of a dimly lit temple; a brook, bustling through thickets, its banks carpeted with wondrous ferns and velvety moss—and here a tumble-down, deserted native house—rearing its battered head above a tangle of tropical vegetation. It had once been a home, and the land about it a prosperous banana patch. The first family that had occupied it had developed elephantiasis. A second and a third had met with the same fate, and now no one can be induced to live anywhere near the accursed spot. It is taboo.
Scientists claim they have discovered the germ of this dread disease in the mosquito, but many believe it to be in the earth, like that of tetanus.
But to revert to more pleasant subjects: legends still live on Moorea. It is the land of the lizard men, an agile race of dwarfs who lived on the inaccessible ledges of the mountain range, and descended periodically on the coast-dwellers, bearing off their wives and other valuables. They carried a short staff in either hand, giving them the appearance of lizards as they scrambled back to their fastnesses where none could follow.
To prove his words, the Moorean native of to-day will point out uniform rows of banana plants growing in clefts of rock amongst the clouds—the crops of the lizard men! How, otherwise, came they to be there? And he would be a wise man who could find the answer.
It is in these deep valleys, too, that ancient rites were performed, rites that were rigorously suppressed by the Government, but have survived until quite recent years. Indeed, white settlers assert that they are not entirely eradicated to this day. Tradition, religion, superstition, call it what you will, dies hard.
In this connection it was my good fortune to meet a retired police officer who probably had more to do with the suppression of “witchery” in the Islands than any man living.
“It mostly began with long-pig,” he told me. “Long-pig? Well, you know the Kanaka fashion of rolling bush pig in banana leaves and cooking it in the ground. Long-pig doesn’t happen to be pig, that’s all.
“And long-pig was enough for us. We broke up the party by marching the diners off in irons. But there were other things that had us beat. I’ve lain on my belly of a night, looking through a rat-hole in a native grass house, and seen some queer things: a war club stand on end, and dance on its own over the mats the length of the house. I’m no fool, but I’m darned if I could see how it was done. There was no harm in it, any more than there is in these new-fangled séances where spooks blow trumpets and rattle tambourines; but with Kanakas it may lead to long-pig, and that’s what we were after.
“Then again, we watched one place for close on a month, and at the end of it found nothing we could lay hands on, but something I sha’n’t forget.
“There must have been close on a hundred Kanakas squatting round the walls of the house in stony silence, when a wind sprang up that nearly blew the roof off and yet never so much as stirred the leaves on the palms twenty yards away. It was still blowing when something dropped through the roof, and squatted on the mats in the middle of the house.
“There wasn’t much light—there never is at these chivarees, but there was enough for me to see that whatever it was it was a leper. It wasn’t all there. It wasn’t the right shape, or colour, but it boomed out answers to questions that the others put to it, and, knowing the lingo, I listened. It was the usual business: So-and-so’s father was all right, but hoped that his son would join him before long as he was a trifle lonely. And somebody else’s brother was having the time of his life with a brand-new sailing canoe that was the fastest thing yet. And somebody else was going to die soon....
“Now, you can arrest a leper on suspicion, and I did my best, but I never got that one. He just went, and so did the others, though they made more of a fuss about it; and all the time that wind was blowing the hair of my head this way and that.
“Fake? Of course it was a fake, but clever at that. I never got the leper, and that ‘somebody else’ died all right, because I saw him. But then Kanakas are like that: they die to order....”
True, the foregoing is hearsay, but it is first-hand hearsay, and on the best possible authority.
The only other Island witchcraft that I have encountered and can vouch for personally is fire-walking, a well known Kanaka pastime. That natives can make a pit of stones white hot with burning brush-wood, and then walk bare-footed upon them for upward of two minutes, is not so wonderful to the skeptic who knows that they paint the soles of their feet with a secret preparation that is a non-conductor of heat. But the fact that they can lead a white man, whose feet are not so treated, over the same stones, is a “trick” that needs some explaining.
Then, there is the herb for the unfailing and harmless production of abortion; a preparation of such preservative powers that it will keep the human body for centuries; and an innumerable array of magic potions undreamed of in our philosophy. Undoubtedly the Islands have their secrets, as quaint and wonderful as any in darkest Africa, and some day—which I trust is not far off—I hope to “inquire more closely.”
Our planter friends of Moorea appeared to lead a pleasant life. Theirs was a bachelor bungalow run by efficient house-boys, and set on the fringe of a palm grove overlooking a vista of sea and reef and mountain as beautiful as any in the Island—which means in the world.
They were growing vanilla, and, although Britishers, had chosen Moorea as the scene of their labours because they preferred French rule.
“The French don’t mess you about like our own people,” one of them informed us. “They’re not anti-this and anti-that. They leave you alone, and I can tell you we appreciate it after visiting a few of our colony-governed colonies.” He referred, of course, to the mandates given to Australia and New Zealand over certain groups of the South Pacific. “It’s like giving a kid something to play with. He’s bound to break it.”
The other of our two hosts was engaged in a passage-at-arms with Peter, and I pitied him. Trust a woman for either kindling or dousing a flame of enthusiasm in the male breast. But as she still holds to her viewpoint, and the question at issue involves every white woman who contemplates living in the South Sea Islands, it is of interest, and I take the liberty—and the risk—of quoting from her diary:
“One of them (our hosts) was engaged to an English girl of eighteen, and was going to send for her in a month or two, but expected opposition from her parents, who thought the Society Islands too uncivilized and out of the world for a young girl to be happy in. I must say I agreed with them.
“Perhaps for the first few months the novelty would keep her amused; but after that! I cannot imagine an intelligent, energetic girl being content to live her life on an island, however beautiful, where she would be the only white woman.
“I said something of the sort to her fiancé, since he asked my opinion. He said he had promised her a horse, as she was intensely keen on riding. Even then it meant that she would have to keep to the track which ran round the island, and one soon wearies of the same ride day after day, when there is no object in view but exercise.
“I suggested that she might help on the plantation, and that perhaps making things for her new home would keep her occupied, but was told it would be impossible for her to do a hand’s tap of manual work as she would lose prestige with the natives (awful thought!) and that she was not the sort to like needlework or housekeeping as she was too much of a sport; besides, the ‘boys’ would do the latter.
“Then what would be left for the poor girl to do? I asked.
“‘Oh, she could potter about; and then I should always be on hand,’ was the reply.
“What could be said to a man who thought along those lines?”
The answer is an echo—“What?”
But I must confess to a sneaking sympathy for him, all the same. The position of the white man living alone amongst natives is difficult enough in all conscience, and any one who has done it will testify to the absolute necessity of retaining prestige. To lose it is an “awful thought!” for without it the white man sinks lower than his neighbours, and is soon regarded by them with unveiled contempt.
No; call it “bluff,” what you will, but the white man cannot afford to part with his prestige. And how much more is it necessary when he has his womenfolk to protect?
In any case, the Islands are not a suitable home for white women, say what they will. There are isolated instances of them thriving there, but in the vast majority of cases they fall victims to a pernicious type of anæmia which, even if it does not kill, remains with them for the rest of their lives. And as for children, they thrive for about five years from birth, and then fade to mere weeds unless sent to more temperate climes.
Perhaps—who knows?—these things are but another proof that we harbingers of progress were not intended to invade the sanctuary of the South Seas.