Epilogue
Sydney N. S. W.
August 1st, 1891.
It seems strange, after a year of summer and of free air, to have come almost suddenly into city and winter, however mild. I am writing to you by a coal fire, in a room high up, to which I go by an elevator, and I hear outside, in the damp cool air, the sound of the cable tramway, and the rolling of hansom cabs. Two weeks ago, I was resting on the ground in straw huts among mountains, and looking at darkish old gentlemen, who had killed and eaten not so long ago friends and acquaintances of members of our party. One could not get enough of the air, and the heat was still part of our living.
Our South Sea days are over; in a day or two we bid good-bye to the open spaces and make for the Straits and Java. As Polynesia has faded away, the sadness of all past things comes upon me—that summer is gone—those hours and those islands which spotted great blue spaces of time and place will be merely memories for autumn.
Here it is winter—a colder one than those last warm mild days of Fiji. There a great peace, a great quiet was around us. We were high above the little town of Suva, with an enormous landscape of mountains seen over the spread of the beautiful harbour. In the day the light was tropical, the sky all blue and radiant, the mountains clear and distinct. Morning and evening the light became more like a memory of home with slight visions of Scotland in between. The clouds filled up the distance with dimness, the light of morning or evening hung behind and over them as if asleep. In such a repose of nature we passed our days as if preparing for the final close.
We were treated with great kindness; we had no hard time on board the steamer that took us away reluctant in mind, and slowly in a week’s time we dropped down to this colder latitude and into civilization in full blast. We saw the sky grow clearer and more washed; the sea lost its blue; we could almost believe that we were home again as we ended our trip. We had passed some of the New Hebrides, had passed part of a day outside of Anaityum, had seen the Isle of Pines like a shadow on the horizon, had looked in vain for the smoke or light of Tanna, and at the end of the week entered the long, complicated harbour of Sydney.
Steamships, steamboats, street cars, hansom cabs, hotels, theatres, Sarah Bernhardt playing, all as before.
Good-bye to brown skins and skies and seas of impossible azure. Good-bye to life in presence of the remotest past.
“On the knees of the Ogre I pillowed my head;
My feet followed safely the Path of the Dead;
With my brother the Shark God I lived as a guest,
And reached through the breakers the Isle of the Blest.
“I bathed in the sea where the Siren still sleeps;
The kiss of the Queen is still red on my lips;
My hands touched the Tree with the Branches of Gold;
I have lived for a season in the Order of Old.”
Notes
1 “Alofa” means everything—hail, welcome, love, respect, etc.
2 This is properly the “guest house” of the village.
3 Of course we are not allowed to pay—this would not be “chiefy”—but we shall make a present some day.
4 Mariner, whose book all should read, was kept a prisoner in Tonga about 1806, being one of the first white men there. His companions were killed—he contrariwise, like my father in Saint Domingo, was adopted by the great chief, and learned the language and all habits. On his escape and return he was carefully examined and investigated by the intelligent physician who wrote his book for him. He repeated every gesture of the kava just as it is to-day, the scientific man taking it down in an accurate way.
5 Religion is a better word, as in Tongan before Christianity.
6 The traitor is Judas; the hesitating judge is Pilate. When Mataafa’s men defeated the Germans, they cut off the heads of some of the Germans killed. When reproached by him for the act as barbarous, they indignantly appealed to David’s having cut off the head of Goliath, after having slain him.
7 My adopted sister, the Queen of Tahiti, an island enormously changed by European influence and residence, complained to me of some young man—that his walk was insolent, out of keeping, like that of a person of importance by blood.
8 Père Gavet complained to me of what he called the unreasonableness of Sir John Thurston, the high commissioner and English governor of Fiji, when the Catholic bishop, upon his canoe’s touching the shore of some Christian village, was carried up, canoe and all, into the public place or village green, Sir John interfered, and forbade its ever happening again. And I myself could not say that it was not a small discourtesy.
But this was the point, as Sir John told me: in the old Fijian habits such things were done for a sovereign chief, and for a political ruler; and since the Church had preached the division of the two authorities, such special homage should have been reserved for the civil and not the religious power.
9 My South Sea companion, Mr. Henry Adams.
10 Savaii, Hawaiki, Hawaii; apparently all Polynesians come from a place of the name. It is also a name for the Unknown World. Many islanders of the Pacific believe that this Samoan island is the ancestral Savaii. The Samoans themselves assume it to be so. The island holds the home of the Malietoa, for centuries a supreme chief, one of whose representatives is now king by treaty.
11 Taupō, properly taupou, but I have written taupō because the sound of the final u is too difficult to render, and hardly discernible. It lengthens the sound like our u, but with a gentle breathing. You get it more or less in our taboo.
12 Siva, not Sifa, as I said it at first, and yet she certainly pronounces it with more of an f sound than our neighbours of this island. Still I give in to theory, as facts always must, for they have no one to back them, no principles, no money invested.
13 Secondary chiefs; pronounce “yatowai.”
14 Note on Limits: There is a good account in the small edition of the voyage of the Duff.
15 Tiaapuaa, “drove of pigs,” was the name of certain trees growing along the edge of the mountain Moarahi. The profile against the sky suggested, and the same trees—or others in the same position to-day—as I looked at them, did make a “procession” along the ridge.
16 The “cloak” of the family is the rain; the Tevas are the “children of the Mist.” Not so many years ago, one of the ladies of the family, perhaps the old Queen of Raiatea, objected to some protection from rain for her son, who was about to land in some ceremony. “Let him wear his cloak!” she said. And of course there are traditions of weather that belong to the family, that accompany it, and that presage or announce coming events.
17 I understand by this, two of the hills that edge the valley.
18 The inland mountain peak of the central island, which he could not see.
[19] “Le ciel tout l’univers est plein de mes aïeux.”
20 In the other family at home, into which I was born, the distance back seems shorter. Oberea first saw the European ships while my grandfather was alive, and he must have read the first accounts carried out to Europe by Bougainville and Cook.
21 The bird messenger repeats the places and names of things most sacred to the chief (as you will see further), his mount, his cape, his marae.
22 To which the chief answers that he will look at his mistress’s place or person on the shore.
23 Temanutunu means bird that lets loose the army.
24 Vaeri Matuahoe (mud in my ears), a Tino iia (fish body) the double man, half man, half fish, recalls the god of the Raratonga who himself recalled to the missionaries the god Dagon.
25 Stone foundation or base of house and space around it.
26 The founder of the Pomaré, who later became great chiefs and then kings, by European consecration.
27 Manea appears in Cook and in the accounts of the first missionaries. The detail escapes me, as I have no book just at hand, at this moment. I have a vague recollection of some slight scandal again in family matters, but missionaries were fond of tittle-tattle, like most people.
28 The ditches or slopes, natural or otherwise, can be filled with sharp stakes and other cruel devices scattered among the trees so as to make a serious defence to any sudden attack.