19 The Dance of the Virgins on Atafu
At Papua we all put in to the marine hospital for treatment. One of the most dangerous things to do after starvation and scurvy is to eat, but it is almost impossible to keep from gorging oneself on food at the first opportunity. I traded a plug of tobacco with a native for a dozen bananas and I ate ten of them. The result was that my stomach swelled and I took on the proportions of a fat turtle in pain.
We were in port for a month, while the ship was being repaired and the sailors were recovering. If Father could have found any sailors at Papua he would have shipped them in a minute, but they are scarce in that part of the world, and beachcombers or halfbreed natives were the only crew he could assemble as he struck out once more from Papua to the Union Group of Islands, which are situated about twenty-eight degrees south of the Equator and one hundred sixty-seven longitude west.
All of the hardship of the trip thus far was paid for as far as I was concerned when we made Atafu. This is the largest island of the Union Group, and at that it is only three miles long by half a mile wide. It is atoll shaped, around a blue lagoon of clear water. Atafu is what is known as one of the coral islands, for its base is pale pink coral. The island rises about three feet above sea level, and is covered with thick tropical foliage. The palms are thirty to forty feet high, and the underbrush is a tangled jungle of tropic vines.
Breadfruit trees, coconuts, yarrow root, banana and plantain palms, blossoming hibiscus flowers, poisonous wild peas, giant morning-glory vines and little native berry plants grow there in such profusion that as you approach the southeast side of the island it looks like a solidly woven mat of green and white. The beauty of Atafu is distinct from other South Sea islands. The sand on its horse-shoe beach is an orange gold, the coral jutting out under the white spray of the surf a delicate pink against the transparent green sea. Then within almost a stone’s throw from the beach inland lies the opalescent, bottomless lagoon. The natives say that at the bottom of the lagoon, which is so deep it has never been fathomed, in the “Sunset Land”: their heaven. They will tell you in all earnestness that that lagoon reaches to the other side of the earth where the sunsets are painted, and as natives worship beauty that far away the place at the pit of the lagoon is to them the “hereafter.”
The village which nestles on the edge of the jungle is composed of queer little three-cornered houses of coconut fibre matting. These houses are movable, and if the wind veers around or rain comes, the native husband turns his hut around to keep out the storm. The huts are only about four by six feet, and can be lifted by one man—it is no uncommon sight to sail up to Atafu and find the whole village gone. Not a sign of a hut or a living thing anywhere. That happens in the hurricane months, which are June and July in the tropics. The island is so low to sea level, that the giant breakers whipped up by a hurricane wash far upshore, even to the edge of the lagoon. The natives spend six months a year preparing for their winter. On the lee of the island, they dig caves and barricade them with twigs and woven palm leaves to shut out the wind. The women dry fruit and fish and bury it in the bottom of the cave for provision during the two months of hiding. One of the rarest delicacies they preserve is sun-dried plantains. These plantains are a species of banana. They let the intense heat of the sun crystallize them to sugar, then wrap them in damp leaves of morning-glory plants. The plantain thus wrapped turns to a sugary wine. They are wrapped up in little bundles that look like a Spanish tamale. I knew of some travellers who were touring the South Seas and their charts gave an accurate position of the native villages on each island in that group. When they returned to Australia they reported that they had found no sign of life. That was because they arrived there during hurricane time. I once asked a native Chief if his people didn’t grow restless during the two months they were buried alive on the island, and he said “No, they all get very no-doing,” which means drunk. The native men take coconuts and punch holes in the nut to let air get to the milk. Then they stop it up and let it ferment, thus brewing a liquor that is more deadly than any pre-Volstead drink ever conceived. I saw one of our sailors take a couple of drinks of coconut wine, and topple over me as if he had been hit on the head with a belaying pin, so I never pitied those natives who were forced by the elements to lie in a cave and suck wine while the sailors at sea had to struggle to keep a ship afloat.
The trip to Atafu was uneventful, except for Father’s vocabulary of profanity which he developed in finding expletives to describe his landlubber crew’s seamanship.
About five o’clock of the night of October 19th, we hove to off Atafu. There is no anchorage there so we had to drop extra sail and keep the ship up in the wind. The natives had evidently sighted us long before we saw Atafu, for the beach was a swarming mass of black men, wildly gesticulating to us.
Father called to me, “You get your trading stuff on the poop deck, Joan, we want to get a chance to trade before you cheat them out of their breech clouts.” I have always been able to get more from the natives by trading than any six sailors, and Father said I must be cheating! My particular store of goods to trade consisted of pieces of tinfoil off chewing gum and tobacco which I had begged from the sailors, boxes of matches, ivory soap, and red calico. The natives were crazy to get the tinfoil. They rolled it into little knobs and put it on their bushy hair like jewels. The matches were my next best bet for a good trade. I would give them two matches for a Panama hat or a handful of bird of paradise feathers. Ivory soap was especially valuable in trading. The old natives would give me a rare mat, or a box of sandalwood inlaid with raw pearl for a cake of it. No, they didn’t want the soap to wash in; they ate it for dessert! The red calico was for the women. From them I would coax a ring of tortoise-shell inlaid with blue mother-of-pearl, or fans painted on palm leaves with berry juices.
“Drop over a Jacob’s ladder,” called Father as four heavily laden outrigger canoes shot out toward us. These outriggers are so built that they will not capsize in a surf, and they were overflowing with bunches of bananas, breadfruit, dried fish, and wild chickens, about the size of pigeons. Years before some whaling captain must have given them some chickens and they interbred them so much that they degenerated until their offspring became as small as pigeons. They live wild in the trees and the natives sneak up on them at night and catch them.
“Ora-ai,” shouted a large native in the bow of the first canoe. That meant “Friendly we come as friends.” The large man was none other than Rara-mongai, the native Chief of Atafu. Rara-mongai was the largest man on the island and by virtue of his stature he was king. When he died the next biggest man would succeed him. Rara-mongai was all dressed up for the gala occasion of the “white man’s ship with wings” arrival. The natives see about two ships a year and it is a big event when one will stop and trade with them. As that native Chief climbed up the Jacob’s ladder loaded down with strings of rare shells, he was the queerest looking live thing I had ever seen. His fuzzy hair was turning grey, which seemed to accentuate his black skin. He wore an old full-dress coat, a woman’s muslin petticoat, (it looked like the cast-off of some sea captain’s wife) which ended above his knees, and a string of jewelry around his waist. His jewelry was rusty hardware that had washed ashore from some passing ships. A tomato can jangled amidships, ring bolts of iron came next to that, and an old colander and a can opener. The chief wore them as ornaments, for to him they were strange, weird, unheard-of things, those bits of sea-washed, rusty hardware.
Rara-mongai stepped forward and placed a string of shells around my neck, and then one around Father’s. That was a sign of friendly welcome, too. Father made the sign of friendship back to him and we waved to the blacks in the canoes to come aboard. They scrambled up the side of the ship like screaming monkeys. Their bronze bodies were naked except for a protecting breech clout. In a flash they had unloaded their canoes and were chattering wildly for bargains. In the last canoe, unnoticed apparently, were two women. They were so fat they weighed the canoe down astern. The youngest of them was the Chief’s daughter, “Good,” and the other woman was her nurse.
“Come on aboard,” I called to them, in English, forgetting in my excitement to speak their dialect. They just held on to the edge of the canoe and grinned. My pantomime convinced them I wanted them, so they climbed aboard, but with great difficulty. Father and the sailors were engaged on deck trading, so I sneaked the women down to the cabin of the ship. I asked them if they wanted something to eat; they said they did, so I called the cabin-boy and told him I would eat my supper then. Those two native women never in their lives had been inside a room without fresh air, and that, combined with the rolling of the ship, made them seasick. They were game, though, to see it through. I was watching them to see what they would do just as they were curiously watching me. They sat at the table when the food was served. First came soup. I watched them to see if they knew what to do with it. They didn’t, but they watched me, then followed my every movement and ate the soup. They had never tasted any food in their lives except native fruits and fish, so the expression on their faces at onion soup was one of wonderment. All during the meal they laughed and gurgled, and stared at me. Suddenly Good and her nurse heard a commotion up on deck and I told them to wait a minute and I would be back. The noise I found there was the natives shoving off for the island. The Chief said to Father:
“You come, Chief of white-ship-with-wings and I make fun for you.” Father wasn’t very anxious to go ashore to have natives “make fun,” or dance for him.
“Can I go?” I asked, fearing he would forbid me to be out of his sight for an hour.
“All right, you can go ashore and help those two blankety-blank landlubbers fill the kegs with fresh water.”
I turned and disappeared down the companionway before he could take back his promise. There I found Good and her nurse just finishing the contents of the swill barrel. While I was gone they had prowled into the pantry, thought the garbage was part of the strange new food and ate every mouthful of it. I had to get three natives and Father to carry them up to the deck and fresh air.
Some of the natives at the signal from the Chief to return to the island, jumped overboard, their breech clouts bulging with their trades, the others pulled back in the outriggers. I started to get in the outrigger with Good but Father caught me by the seat of my pants, just as I was going over the side.
“Hey you, you go ashore in the dinghy with the crew. Bring back two barrels of fresh drinking water, and when you get them filled come smack back here to the ship.”
“Yes sir,” I answered, only too eager to obey. Bulgar and the Swede, the waiter and the truck driver and myself put off with the two barrels. It is one thing to land an outrigger canoe through a surf, and quite another to get a clumsy ship’s boat with two water kegs and four people in it ashore. Swede sculled, and I stood in the bow directing him through the channel, for I could see over the reef. A long sinuous green comber sneaked up on us and lifted us high in the air, then let us down with a smack in the surf. We got by that, but another came before we got righted out of the swell, and it took boat, landlubbers, sailors, water kegs and me, and sent us flying toward the beach smothered in foam. I dodged a water barrel and landed without a scratch on the beach, but the boat was lost. It broke up into splinters. The water barrels washed ashore. I don’t think I was as sorry as I should have been about losing the boat, for without it Father couldn’t get ashore, and we couldn’t get back to the ship. I didn’t care particularly, because I wanted to explore the island. Before I had shaken the water off myself I was surrounded by a dozen or more boys, about twenty years old. They formed a circle around me, and were laughing. Finally, with a great show of bravado, one of them dashed up to me and touched the white skin on my legs, whereupon all the others shouted and cheered. I was the first white girl they had ever seen and they wanted to know how white skin felt under their dusky fingers.
With a guard of them we were taken to the center of the village to the Chief. That kindly old man was very much concerned over our accident. However, Good was not concerned, sulked on the floor of the hut, and would have nothing to do with me. I think she credited me with being responsible for the pains in her stomach from her meal of garbage. However, I was undaunted—I was ashore once more. I had my bare feet on real land again so didn’t care about anything else.
“Chief, where is the water for our barrels?” I asked. Instead of summoning a servant to take me to the native reservoir, he himself took me by the hand and led me down a path through the jungle. Hand in hand we walked, and the sailors followed behind carrying the two barrels and cursing at the stickers in the jungle that were cutting their bare feet.
In native dialect Rara-mongai said to me:
“Over there, in the hollowed-out heart of the palm trees we save water. When it rains, water goes inside the palm trunk. Save it for dry months.”
He pulled some green leaves away from a row of chopped off banana palm trunks, and there, inside of each, were trunkfuls of cool fresh water. I tasted it, and it had the tang of palm pitch in it, which made it the more refreshing. Carefully, using coconuts and tortoise-shells for dippers, he helped us fill the two barrels.
“Tonight when moon comes up full, dance of Virgins in the village. You stay and see all by my side. Your friends (meaning the sailors) they stay too and see Virgin dance.”
“Virgins? Sure I’ll stay,” piped up Bulgar.
“What is the Dance of the Virgins?” I asked.
“Every year young girl ready to marry. Must choose mate at Virgin Dance. Then become good wife because she pick husband alone.”
I was so anxious to stay and see the dance that I forgot all about returning to the ship. I asked Swede, as he was the oldest sailor and therefore had the most authority over the others, if he wanted to stay.
“Hell yes, Skipper, any time any virgins dance that’s where you’ll find me.” As long as he had expressed a willingness to stay also I saw no occasion to hurry back aboard ship, so we followed the Chief to the village. The sun had set, and the moon was just beginning to dip out of the horizon. I sat at the Chief’s feet, and the men stood behind him and watched the festival begin.
Once a year it is the custom in Atafu to have a marrying festival, which is celebrated by the Dance of the Virgins. An Atafu girl is ready to marry when she is ten or eleven years old, and she alone has the choice of her husband. No man can woo her until she has given him the sign that she has chosen him. The marriage festival is the biggest event of the year. The little girls shine their gold brown bodies with coconut oils. Instead of preparing lavish wardrobes they make their skins shine like burnished gold. Over their left ear, snugly tucked in their thick hair to assure its not falling out during the dance, is a white lotus or hibiscus flower. The white hibiscus is a flower sacred to virgins, and when they place one on the left ear it is the sign that they are ready to take a mate.
The moon rising on the set day of the festival is the signal for the dance to begin. All the young men who are going to take a wife, or rather who desire a wife, line up on the left side of the Chief, and stand with folded arms and watch the dance. The folded arms are a sign of “must not touch, but only look” until the dance is over. Slowly and almost inaudibly at first, then gradually becoming louder and more wild and barbaric, it burst into a thrilling savage rhythm. The tom-tom is the tribe’s only musical instrument. They have never heard of the ukulele or guitar. I have found out since that the ukulele was introduced into the Hawaiian Islands by a boy from Harvard!
As the beating of the tom-toms swelled, the virgins, nine in all, started their dance—there in our presence they unfolded the sacred rite of virginity crying for a mate. Every movement of their muscles has a meaning, and it is foreign to the meaning that the civilized world has put upon it. The Chief, on seeing the sailors’ spellbound gaze, said:
“On your far-away island United States men pay women many gifts to make bad our dance.” I hotly denied that accusation. The hula-hula, which is always associated with the South Seas, is a cheap imitation of the real thing, but at that time I had never heard of it.
The writhing of their abdomens was symbolic of calling upon the fires of the earth to burn their wombs clean for the coming of a manchild to make their tribe strong. Their waving arms called on the sea to bring them ships loaded with treasure, and on the winds to bring long life to their body, so that their loved one would enjoy them long. As the music swelled their dance became more uncontrolled; they seemed to be spirits inside of native bodies trying to express a hunger for mating.
Suddenly the music stopped, the girls threw themselves on the ground singing a triumphant song, but the left hand of each was cupped over the lotus flower to keep it from the ground.
Rara-mongai rose from his throne and walked to the middle of the clearing where the girls lay. A hush fell, as he solemnly spoke:
“To you who are looking for a wife, I speak. The strongest men alone can have maidens. Here in moonlight on festival night, each man step forward and show what strength of body he has that the maidens may choose the greatest of you.”
A native man’s way of wooing is to show off in front of his bride to be, physically. He tries to outdo his rivals by excelling in physical strength, such as husking a coconut with his teeth, stabbing a wild boar, diving and killing a shark single-handed. Instead of protesting their love in so many words they believe in action, and by displaying physical supremacy, they think to impress the women that they are the masters. At the Chief’s words about twenty young natives stepped forward eagerly. The truck driver and Swede made a dive for the center of the clearing too.
“Say, Chief,” spoke up Swede, “I’m stronger than any of these young pups, and I’ll take that little girl with the nice fat figger.” Swede was so pleased with himself that he didn’t notice the anger in Rara-mongai’s face. He spoke harshly in his dialect:
“Maidens choose husband. No white man touch my people.”
To Swede, the dance had just been a good show, and sailor-fashion he was entering into the spirit of it, not realizing he was violating the most sacred rite of Atafu.
By intervening I gained the favor of the Chief once more. The girl that Swede had pointed out never took her eyes off him during the rest of the ceremony. A white man wanted her, and she wouldn’t make any effort to attract her own native kind. Any white man in the South Seas who is healthy looking and strong, can win a native woman away from any native or chief.
For two hours while the rest of the villagers feasted, the native men wooed the virgins by showing off athletically. Not one word is spoken, the whole story of their desire is in pantomime. When the moon reached the center of the sky, the Chief called for silence. According to the custom of the tribe he told the girls that now they must choose a man, by taking the lotus from their left ear and placing it on the right ear of the chosen one. I looked at the faces of the twenty young men who stood in a row hoping to be selected. As the girls walked up slowly with the lotus blossoms in their outstretched hands toward them, fear and triumph flashed down the line. Three girls went to one young buck and gave him their lotus, another man received two flowers, and the others one. Those that were passed up by the girls once more folded their arms in to their bodies.
“Huh,” grunted Swede contemptuously, in my ear, “if those birds just fold their arms and lay down on the job no wonder the janes didn’t pick ’em.”
The Chief walked to the three girls who had picked one man, and did a Solomon. He handed the man to the girl who had reached him first. Primitive law, administered swiftly and without question. A couple stood before the Chief. With his tortoise-shell emblem of state he touched the girl and the man on the head, the native sign of wedlock. To the woman he said:
“By choosing this man you now become nothing. He is the stronger. If any man touch you after this wedlock the man shall be punished, for you have no right or privilege to say what shall be done with your body. If your husband gives privilege of your body to man he must be paid for it. If man take you without your husband’s willingness, that man shall be sent to the coral reef to scrape the salt that dries there from the surf. There he shall stay until he is again like a child (until madness seizes him) and then he shall fall in the sea.”
The native man turned to the girl, she lifted her bare shoulder to his lips, and he bit her until her blood came. The Chief went on:
“Woman’s blood in husband’s body make you one always.”
Then to the man, the Chief admonished: “Every girl come now and touch her body to your body. If you do not desire them when they touch you, your choice of wife is good. You have woman good for you.”
He beckoned to a group of the youngest and prettiest girls in the village. One by one they sidled up to the groom and in the most alluring and sensuous manner, they let their bodies caress his. The groom stood with his eyes averted, unmoved. It was a triumph over temptation, and that was the signal for the tom-toms to burst into an exotic rhythm, as the married pair walked hand in hand down to the lagoon. There is a tribal custom on Atafu that every newly married couple walk hand in hand up to their necks in the waters of the lagoon, they cleanse themselves together, and when they have done that, their marriage is consummated before the eyes of all.
When the last couple was married, the festival was over, and dancing, singing and feasting lasted long into the night. I had forgotten all about time, the water barrels and Father’s order to come right back to the ship. By the position of the moon I guessed it was about four a.m. A frightened cry from a native running up from the beach broke in on the revelry. Wildly he pointed to the ship off shore. The truck driver who never had much to say at any time laconically observed:
“The Old Man’s sending up flares from the vessel. Guess he thinks a cannibal swallowed you whole.”
I was in for it and I knew it. I could feel my hind part tingling in anticipation of what was going to happen when Father got his hands on me.
“Let’s beat it back to the ship, Swede. There won’t be a barnacle left on my bottom when Father catches me.”
“Yeh? Well, what’s your hurry, how you going to get the water barrels back?”
I knew I’d catch hell for staying ashore, but to come back minus a life boat and no fresh water was suicide.
“Say, Chief, will you lend me an outrigger and a couple of men to bring it back, so I can get back to the ship?”
The Chief smiled, and said:
“White girl always ora-aii on Atafu. I help you go, but sorry. Some day come back again?”
I would have promised that Chief anything just to get off the island. He gave us an outrigger and we shoved out for the schooner. I saw the red distress flares from the ship light up the sky—Father was in earnest, and the moon was so bright I could plainly see the hull of the ship from the beach. Without much difficulty we got beyond the surf and were soon alongside. I let the sailors go aboard first. They threw over a bowline and hauled the water kegs on deck. Father was at the Jacob’s ladder leaning over the side, smoking his pipe. The smoke was coming out of it in fast jerks, and I needed no barometer to tell me a storm was coming.
Leisurely I climbed the rope ladder, for I was in no hurry to get aboard. Halfway up Father called:
“Where in hell is the dinghy?”
“I was going to explain to you about that, Father. We were trying to ride the surf and we capsized and....”
I got no further. Father had me by the neck and seat of the pants, hurrying me up to the poop.
“I can understand these so and so landlubbers upsettin’ a boat, but you’re my daughter and I won’t believe any yarn like you losin’ control of a dinghy.”
Along about dawn I was comfortable enough to sit down without too great pain! We were sailing along under full canvas, and Father, evidently content that I could get into no further deviltry, had turned in for a nap.
Swede and the sailors were sitting on the hatch near the mizzen mast. From my place at the wheel I heard Swede saying:
“Yeh, I coulda had any one of those dames, they was crazy about me; that fat little nigger wench is just busted-hearted to see me leave.”
And it was me that got a licking!
I was never to forget that experience on Atafu. I thought that everybody in the world was married according to native custom. I thought that some day I, too, would be taken to a dance where I could pick out my mate.
The days that followed our departure from Atafu became dull and monotonous. The sound of the tom-toms and the vision of the native girls abandoning themselves in a dance, was constantly before me. I hadn’t even had a licking for almost a week and the calm atmosphere was too much for me. I would have to start something if nothing was going to happen of its own accord. I started a cockroach war. I caught two big cockroaches and tied their bodies together with pieces of thread. Then I went around to the sailors and took bets on them. I drew a line on the deck and put a roach on either side of it. The one that pulled the other over the line won. I bet two plugs of tobacco and one of Father’s undershirts on the fattest cockroach, but the ship took a list to leeward just as he started to pull hard, and the other cockroach won and I lost. In novels of the sea the Captain’s daughter is frequently pictured as occupying herself with lovely feminine pastimes, but cockroaches, rats, or bedbug hunts were more fascinating to me. But even in the trade winds those games tired me. I wanted action.
One afternoon, finding nothing more exciting to do, and when I was sure Father was asleep, I started on my own Dance of the Virgins. I didn’t have anything I could use for a lotus flower except a pair of dried flying fish wings. I put them behind my left ear as I had seen the native girls do. I wasn’t sure just which one of the sailors on watch I would give that flower to, but that was to come later anyway.
Swede was at the wheel. I whispered to him:
“Will you go forward and get me a can full of grease from the cook? I’ll take the wheel for you.” He was glad of any excuse to get away, so he consented. He brought back a can of salt pork dripping from the galley.
“What are you goin’ to do with that stuff?” he asked.
“Don’t talk so loud, Swede. I’m goin’ to do that Virgin Dance the way we saw them do it on Atafu.”
“Jeeze,” he said.
I went down on the main deck near the mizzenmast and began greasing my body. I took off my overalls, and gave my body a glorious shine that would rival any I saw on the island, and started the dance. I pounded on a rain barrel for a tom-tom. Every sailor on deck beat it just as I got going. They had seen Father’s head appearing out of the companionway, but I hadn’t. The next thing I knew Father grabbed me but my body was so slippery he couldn’t keep a hold on me.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.
“Just dancing the way the girls danced for us on Atafu,” I answered, and I ran aft and locked myself in the flag locker.
Father followed me, but couldn’t unlock the door. “I’ll knock hell out of you when I lay hands on you,” he promised. I had no intention of ever coming out of that flag locker. Hours later I heard the dinner-bell ring. I was greasy and hot and hungry, but I thought better than to venture out. At dusk I heard a low whistle outside the porthole. I looked out and saw a piece of bread dangling there on a piece of string. The Jap cook had taken my side, and smuggled me some supper. The next morning I unlocked the door and looked around for Father. He was busy on his chart. I stood by him wrapped up in a flag. I thought I might as well get the licking over with so he could go on with his work. However, he didn’t even speak. He reached up to his book shelf and took down an illustrated copy of Dante’s Inferno, and opened it to the illustrations of women burning in fire in hell. I was cured. I would never be a dancer!
girl wrapped in a flag
coral atoll