The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 18

It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the Polynesian varua ino or aitu o le vao is clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire. Here is a tale in which the kinship appears broadly marked. On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives. He died, he was buried; and his late neighbours had scarce tasted the delights of licence ere his ghost appeared about the village. Fear seized upon all; a council was held of the chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval of the Rarotongan missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in the presence of several whites – my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one – the grave was opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred face down. The still recent staking of suicides in England and the decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close parallels.

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long centred and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground; and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The rite was practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of the ignorant.

This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres dwelt with their children among the bones of generations. The mummy, even in the making, was as little feared. In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual unction and exposure to the sun; in the Carolines, upon the farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the family hearth. Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in Samoa. And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter, cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night, the head of her dead husband. In all these cases we may suppose the process, whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully exorcised the aitu.

But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure. Here the man is duly buried, and he has to be watched. He is duly watched, and the spirit goes abroad in spite of watches. Indeed, it is not the purpose of the vigils to prevent these wanderings; only to mollify by polite attention the inveterate malignity of the dead. Neglect (it is supposed) may irritate and thus invite his visits, and the aged and weakly sometimes balance risks and stay at home. Observe, it is the dead man’s kindred and next friends who thus deprecate his fury with nocturnal watchings. Even the placatory vigil is held perilous, except in company, and a boy was pointed out to me in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own father. Not the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect the issue. A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the less his spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the neighbourhood of Government House was still avoided after dark. We may sum up the cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires, and the vampire spares none. And here we come face to face with a tempting inconsistency. For the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that the medium was always of the race of the communicating spirit. Here, then, we have the bonds of the family, on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other, helpfully persisting.

The child’s soul in the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves. It is the spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty. When they are slain, the house is stained with blood. Rua’s dead fisherman was decomposed; so – and horribly – was his arboreal demon. The spirit, then, is a thing material; and it is by the material ensigns of corruption that he is distinguished from the living man. This opinion is widespread, adds a gross terror to the more ugly Polynesian tales, and sometimes defaces the more engaging with a painful and incongruous touch. I will give two examples sufficiently wide apart, one from Tahiti, one from Samoa.

And first from Tahiti. A man went to visit the husband of his sister, then some time dead. In her life the sister had been dainty in the island fashion, and went always adorned with a coronet of flowers. In the midst of the night the brother awoke and was aware of a heavenly fragrance going to and fro in the dark house. The lamp I must suppose to have burned out; no Tahitian would have lain down without one lighted. A while he lay wondering and delighted; then called upon the rest. “Do none of you smell flowers?” he asked. “O,” said his brother-in-law, “we are used to that here.” The next morning these two men went walking, and the widower confessed that his dead wife came about the house continually, and that he had even seen her. She was shaped and dressed and crowned with flowers as in her lifetime; only she moved a few inches above the earth with a very easy progress, and flitted dryshod above the surface of the river. And now comes my point: It was always in a back view that she appeared; and these brothers-in-law, debating the affair, agreed that this was to conceal the inroads of corruption.

Now for the Samoan story. I owe it to the kindness of Dr. F. Otto Sierich, whose collection of folk-tales I expect with a high degree of interest. A man in Manu’a was married to two wives and had no issue. He went to Savaii, married there a third, and was more fortunate. When his wife was near her time he remembered he was in a strange island, like a poor man; and when his child was born he must be shamed for lack of gifts. It was in vain his wife dissuaded him. He returned to his father in Manu’a seeking help; and with what he could get he set off in the night to re-embark. Now his wives heard of his coming; they were incensed he did not stay to visit them; and on the beach, by his canoe, intercepted and slew him. Now the third wife lay asleep in Savaii; her babe was born and slept by her side; and she was awakened by the spirit of her husband. “Get up,” he said, “my father is sick in Manu’a and we must go to visit him.” “It is well,” said she; “take you the child, while I carry its mats.” “I cannot carry the child,” said the spirit; “I am too cold from the sea.” When they were got on board the canoe the wife smelt carrion. “How is this?” she said. “What have you in the canoe that I should smell carrion?” “It is nothing in the canoe,” said the spirit. “It is the land-wind blowing down the mountains, where some beast lies dead.” It appears it was still night when they reached Manu’a – the swiftest passage on record – and as they entered the reef the bale-fires burned in the village. Again she asked him to carry the child; but now he need no more dissemble. “I cannot carry your child,” said he, “for I am dead, and the fires you see are burning for my funeral.”

The curious may learn in Dr. Sierich’s book the unexpected sequel of the tale. Here is enough for my purpose. Though the man was but new dead, the ghost was already putrefied, as though putrefaction were the mark and of the essence of a spirit. The vigil on the Paumotuan grave does not extend beyond two weeks, and they told me this period was thought to coincide with that of the resolution of the body. The ghost always marked with decay – the danger seemingly ending with the process of dissolution – here is tempting matter for the theorist. But it will not do. The lady of the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still supposed to bear the brand of perishability. The Resident had been more than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still supposed to go the rounds.

Of the lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be wearisome to tell. One story I give, for it is singular in itself, is well known in Tahiti, and has this of interest, that it is post-Christian, dating indeed from but a few years back. A princess of the reigning house died; was transported to the neighbouring isle of Raiatea; fell there under the empire of a spirit who condemned her to climb coco-palms all day and bring him the nuts; was found after some time in this miserable servitude by a second spirit, one of her own house; and by him, upon her lamentations, reconveyed to Tahiti, where she found her body still waked, but already swollen with the approaches of corruption. It is a lively point in the tale that, on the sight of this dishonoured tabernacle, the princess prayed she might continue to be numbered with the dead. But it seems it was too late, her spirit was replaced by the least dignified of entrances, and her startled family beheld the body move. The seemingly purgatorial labours, the helpful kindred spirit, and the horror of the princess at the sight of her tainted body, are all points to be remarked.

The truth is, the tales are not necessarily consistent in themselves; and they are further darkened for the stranger by an ambiguity of language. Ghosts, vampires, spirits, and gods are all confounded. And yet I seem to perceive that (with exceptions) those whom we would count gods were less maleficent. Permanent spirits haunt and do murder in corners of Samoa; but those legitimate gods of Upolu and Savaii, whose wars and cricketings of late convulsed society, I did not gather to be dreaded, or not with a like fear. The spirit of Anaa that ate souls is certainly a fearsome inmate; but the high gods, even of the archipelago, seem helpful. Mahinui – from whom our convict-catechist had been named – the spirit of the sea, like a Proteus endowed with endless avatars, came to the assistance of the shipwrecked and carried them ashore in the guise of a ray-fish. The same divinity bore priests from isle to isle about the archipelago, and by his aid, within the century, persons have been seen to fly. The tutelar deity of each isle is likewise helpful, and by a particular form of wedge-shaped cloud on the horizon announces the coming of a ship.

To one who conceives of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are known to be healthy and harmless living people, dwellers of an underworld; and the same fancy is current in Tahiti, where also they have the hair red. Tetea is the Tahitian name; the Paumotuan, Mokurea.

PART III
THE EIGHT ISLANDS

CHAPTER I
THE KONA COAST

Of the island of Hawaii, though I have passed days becalmed under its lee, and spent a week upon its shores, I have never yet beheld the profile. Dense clouds continued to enshroud it far below its midst; not only the zone of snow and fire, but a great part of the forest region, covered or at least veiled by a perpetual rain. And yet even on my first sight, beholding so little and that through a glass from the deck of the Casco, the rude plutonic structure of the isle was conspicuous. Here was none of the accustomed glitter of the beach, none of the close shoreside forests of the typical high island. All seemed black and barren, and to slope sheer into the sea. Unexpected movements of the land caught the attention, folds that glittered with a certain vitreosity; black mouths of caves; ranges of low cliffs, vigorously designed awhile in sun and shadow, and that sank again into the general declivity of the island glacis. Under its gigantic cowl of cloud, the coast frowned upon us with a face of desolation.

On my return I passed from a humming city, with shops and palaces and busy wharves, plying cabs and tramcars, telephones in operation and a railway in the building; mounted a strong and comfortable local steamer; sailed under desolate shores indeed, but guided in the night by sea and harbour lights; and was set down at last in a village uninhabited by any white, the creature of pure native taste – of which, what am I to say but that I know no such village in Europe? A well-to-do western hamlet in the States would be the closest parallel; and it is a moderate prophecy to call it so already.

Hookena is its name. It stands on the same coast which I had wondered at before from the tossing Casco; the same coast on which the far voyager Cook ended a noble career not very nobly. That district of Kona where he fell is one illustrious in the history of Hawaii. It was at first the centre of the dominion of the great Kamehameha. There, in an unknown sepulchre, his bones are still hidden; there, too, his reputed treasures, spoils of a buccaneer, lie, and are still vainly sought for, in one of the thousand caverns of the lava. There the tabus were first broken, there the missionaries first received; and but for the new use of ships and the new need of harbours, here might be still the chief city and the organs of the kingdom. Yet a nearer approach confirmed the impression of the distance. It presents to the seaward one immense decline. Streams of lava have followed and submerged each other down this slope, and overflowed into the sea. These cooled and shrank, and were buried under fresh inundations, or dislocated by fresh tremors of the mountain. A multiplicity of caves is the result. The mouths of caves are everywhere; the lava is tunnelled with corridors and halls; under houses high on the mountain, the sea can be heard throbbing in the bowels of the land; and there is one gallery of miles, which has been used by armies as a pass. Streams are thus unknown. The rain falls continually in the highlands: an isle that rises nearly fourteen thousand feet sheer from the sea could never fail of rain; but the treasure is squandered on a sieve; and by sunless conduits returns unseen into the ocean. Corrugated slopes of lava, bristling lava cliffs, spouts of metallic clinkers, miles of coast without a well or rivulet; scarce anywhere a beach, nowhere a harbour: here seems a singular land to be contended for in battle as a seat for courts and princes. Yet it possessed in the eyes of the natives one more than countervailing advantage. The windward shores of the isle are beaten by a monstrous surf; there are places where goods and passengers must be hauled up and lowered by a rope, there are coves which even the daring boatmen of Hamakua dread to enter; and men live isolated in their hamlets or communicate by giddy footpaths in the cliff. Upon the side of Kona, the table-like margin of the lava affords almost everywhere a passage by land; and the waves, reduced by the vast breakwater of the island, allow an almost continual communication by way of sea.

Yet even here the surf of the Pacific appears formidable to the stranger as he lands, and daily delights him with its beauty as he walks the shore.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that the steamer Hall conveyed me to Hookena. She was charged with tourists on their way to the volcano; and I found it hard to justify my choice of a week in an unheard-of hamlet, rather than a visit to one of the admitted marvels of the world. I do not know that I can justify it now and to a larger audience. I should prefer, indeed, to have seen both; but I was at the time embarrassed with arrears of work; it was imperative that I should choose; and I chose one week in a Kona village and another in the lazaretto, and renounced the craters of Maunaloa and Haleakala. For there are some so constituted as to find a man or a society more curious than the highest mountain; some, in whom the lava foreshores of Kona and Kaú will move as deep a wonder as the fiery vents that made them what they are.

The land and sea breezes alternate on the Kona coast with regularity; and the veil of rain draws up and down the talus of the mountain, now retiring to the zone of forests, now descending to the margin of the sea. It was in one of the latter and rarer moments that I was set on board a whale boat full of intermingled barrels, passengers, and oarsmen. The rain fell and blotted the crude and sombre colours of the scene. The coast rose but a little way; it was then intercepted by the cloud: and for all that appeared, we might have been landing on an isle of some two hundred feet of elevation. On the immediate foreshore, under a low cliff, there stood some score of houses, trellised and verandahed, set in narrow gardens, and painted gaudily in green and white; the whole surrounded and shaded by a grove of cocoa-palms and fruit trees, springing (as by miracle) from the bare lava. In front, the population of the neighbourhood were gathered for the weekly incident, the passage of the steamer; sixty to eighty strong, and attended by a disproportionate allowance of horses, mules, and donkeys; for this land of rock is, singular to say, a land of breeding. The green trees, the painted houses, the gay dresses of the women, were everywhere relieved on the uncompromising blackness of the lava; and the rain, which fell unheeded by the sightseers, blended and beautified the contrast.

The boat was run in upon a breaker, and we passengers ejected on a flat rock where the next wave submerged us to the knees. There we continued to stand, the rain drenching us from above, the sea from below, like people mesmerised; and as we were all (being travellers) tricked out with the green garlands of departure, we must have offered somewhat the same appearance as a shipwrecked picnic.

The purser spied and introduced me to my host, ex-judge Nahinu, who was then deep in business, despatching and receiving goods. He was dressed in pearl-grey tweed like any self-respecting Englishman; only the band of his wide-awake was made of peacock’s feather. – “House by and by,” said he, his English being limited, and carried me to the shelter of a rather lofty shed. On three sides it was open, on the fourth closed by a house; it was reached from without by five or six wooden steps; on the fourth side, a farther flight of ten conducted to the balcony of the house; a table spread with goods divided it across, so that I knew it for the village store and (according to the laws that rule in country life) the village lounging-place. People sat with dangling feet along the house verandah, they sat on benches on the level of the shed or among the goods upon the counter; they came and went, they talked and waited; they opened, skimmed, and pocketed half-read, their letters; they opened the journal, and found a moment, not for the news, but for the current number of the story: methought, I might have been in France, and the paper the Petit Journal instead of the Nupepa Eleele. On other islands I had been the centre of attention; here none observed my presence. One hundred and ten years before, the ancestors of these indifferents had looked in the faces of Cook and his seamen with admiration and alarm, called them gods, called them volcanoes; took their clothes for a loose skin, confounded their hats and their heads, and described their pockets as a “treasure door, through which they plunge their hands into their bodies and bring forth cutlery and necklaces and cloth and nails,” and to-day the coming of the most attractive stranger failed (it would appear) to divert them from Miss Porter’s Scottish Chiefs: for that was the novel of the day.

My host returned, and led me round the shore among the mules and donkeys to his house. Like all the houses of the hamlet, it was on the European or, to be more descriptive, on the American plan. The parlour was fitted with the usual furniture and ornamented with the portraits of Kamehameha the third, Lunalilo, Kalakaua, the queen consort of the isles, and Queen Victoria. There was a Bible on the table, other books stood on a shelf. A comfortable bedroom was placed at my service, the welcome afforded me was cordial and unembarrassed, the food good and plentiful. My host, my hostess; his grown daughters, strapping lassies; his young hopefuls, misbehaving at a meal or perfunctorily employed upon their school-books: all that I found in that house, beyond the speech and a few exotic dishes on the table, would have been familiar and exemplary in Europe.

I walked that night beside the sea. The steamer with its lights and crowd of tourists was gone by; it had left me alone among these aliens, and I felt no touch of strangeness. The trim, lamp-lit houses shining quietly, like villas, each in its narrow garden; the gentle sound of speech from within; the room that awaited my return, with the lamp, and the books, and the spectacled householder studying his Bible: – there was nothing changed; it was in such conditions I had myself grown up, and played, a child, beside the borders of another sea. And some ten miles from where I walked, Cook was adored as a deity; his bones, when he was dead, were cleansed for worship; his entrails devoured in a mistake by rambling children.

A day of session in the Hookena Court-house equally surprised me. The judge, a very intelligent, serious Hawaiian, sat behind a table, taking careful notes; two policemen, with their bright metal badges, standing attention at his back or bustling forth on errands. The plaintiff was a Portuguese. For years, he had kept store and raised cattle in the district, without trouble or dispute. His store stood always open, it was standing so seven miles away at the moment of the case; and when his cattle strayed, they were duly impounded and restored to him on payment of one shilling. But recently a gentleman of great acuteness and a thousand imperfect talents had married into the family of a neighbouring proprietor; consecutively on which event the store-keeper’s cattle began to be detained and starved, the fine rose to half a dollar, and lastly a cow had disappeared. The Portuguese may have been right or wrong: he was convinced the new-comer was the main-spring of the change; called a suit in consequence against the father-in-law; – and it was the son-in-law who appeared for the defence. I saw him there, seated at his ease, with spectacles on brow; still young, much of a gentleman in looks, and dressed in faultless European clothes; and presently, for my good fortune, he rose to address the court. It appears he has already stood for the Hawaiian parliament; but the people (I was told) “did not think him honest,” and he was defeated. Honesty, to our ways of thought, appears a trifle in a candidate; and I think we have few constituencies to refuse so great a charmer. I understood but a few dozen words, yet I heard the man with delight, followed the junctures of his argument, knew when he was enumerating points in his own favour, when he was admitting those against him, when he was putting a question per absurdum, when (after the due pause) he smilingly replied to it. There was no haste, no heat, no prejudice; with a hinted gesture, with a semitone of intonation, the speaker lightly set forth and underlined the processes of reason; he could not shift a foot nor touch his spectacles, but what persuasion radiated in the court – it is impossible to conceive a style of oratory more rational or civilised. The point to which he spoke was pretty in itself. The people, as I had been told, did not think the orator honest; some judge, on a particular occasion, had inclined to the same view, and the man of talent was disbarred. By a clause in a statute, a layman or a disbarred lawyer might conduct a case for himself or for one of “his own family.” Is a father-in-law one of a man’s own family? “Yes,” argued the orator: “No,” with less grace and perspicuity, Nahinu, retained by the Portuguese. The laws of the tight little kingdom are conceived in duplicate for the Hawaiian hare and his many white friends. The native text appearing inconclusive, an appeal was made to the English, and I (as amicus curiæ) was led out, installed upon the court-house steps, and painfully examined as to its precise significance. The judge heard the orator; he heard Nahinu; he received by the mouth of the schoolmaster my report, for which he thanked me with a bow; and ruled the claimant out. This skirmish decided the fate of the engagement; fortune was faithful to the Portuguese; and late in the afternoon, the capable judge rode off homeward with his portfolio under his arm. No court could have been more equally and decently conducted; judge, parties, lawyers, and police were all decorous and competent; and but for the plaintiff, the business was entirely native.

The Portuguese had come seven miles to Hookena, sure of substantial justice, and he left his store open, fearless of being robbed. Another white man, of strong sense and much frugality and choler, thus reckoned up what he had lost by theft in thirty-nine years among the different islands of Hawaii: a pair of shoes, an umbrella, some feet of hose-pipe, and one batch of chickens. It is his continual practice to send Hawaiians by a perilous, solitary path with sums in specie; at any moment the messenger might slip, the money-bag roll down a thousand feet of precipice, and lodge in fissures inaccessible to man: and consider how easy it were to invent such misadventures! – “I should have to know a white man well before I trusted him,” he said; “I trust Hawaiians without fear. It would be villainous of me to say less.” It should be remembered the Hawaiians of yore were not particular; they were eager to steal from Cook, whom they believed to be a god, and it was a theft that led to the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay; and it must not be forgotten that the Hawaiians of to-day are many of them poor. One residual trait of savage incompetence I have already referred to; they cannot administer a trust – I was told there had never yet been a case known. Even a judge, skilled in the knowledge of the law and upright in its administration, was found insusceptible of those duties and distinctions which appear so natural and come so easy to the European. But the disability stands alone, a single survival in the midst of change; and the faults of the modern Hawaiian incline to the other side. My orator of Hookena court-room may be a gentleman much maligned; I may have received his character from the lips of his political opponents; but the type described is common. The islands begin to fill with lawyers; many of whom, justly or unjustly, are disbarred; and to the age of Kamehameha, the age of Glossin has succeeded. Thus none would rob the store of the Portuguese, but the law was wrested to oppress him.

It was of old a warlike and industrious race. They were diggers and builders; the isles are still full of their deserted monuments; the modern word for law, Kanawai, “water rights,” still serves to remind us of their ancient irrigation. And the island story is compact of battles. Their courage and goodwill to labour seems now confined to the sea, where they are active sailors and fearless boatmen, pursue the shark in his own element, and make a pastime of their incomparable surf. On shore they flee equally from toil and peril, and are all turned to carpet occupations and to parlous frauds. Nahinu, an ex-judge, was paid but two dollars for a hard day in court, and he is paying a dollar a day to the labourers among his coffee. All Hawaiians envy and are ready to compete with him for this odd chance of an occasional fee for some hours’ talking; he cannot find one to earn a certain hire under the sun in his plantation, and the work is all transacted by immigrant Chinese. One cannot but be reminded of the love of the French middle class for office work; but in Hawaii, it is the race in bulk that shrinks from manly occupation. During a late revolution, a lady found a powerful young Hawaiian crouching among the grass in her garden. “What are you doing here?” she cried, for she was a strong partisan. “Do you not know they are murdering your king?” “I know,” said the skulker. “Why do you not go to help him?” she asked. “Aflaid,” said the poor craven, and crouched again among the grass. Here was a strange grandchild for the warriors that followed or faced Kamehameha. I give the singular instance as the more explicit; but the whole race must have been stricken at the moment with a similar weakness. No man dare say of this revolution that it was unprovoked; but its means were treachery and violence; the numbers and position of those engaged made the design one of the most insolent in history; and a mere modicum of native boldness and cohesion must have brought it to the dust. “My race had one virtue, they were brave,” said a typical Hawaiian: “and now they have taken that away.”