The 'blood royal' is an extremely thick, depraved fluid; formedprincipally of raw fish, bad brandy, and European sweetmeats, and ischarged with a variety of eruptive humours, which are developed insundry blotches and pimples upon the august face of 'majesty itself',and the angelic countenances of the 'princes and princesses of the bloodroyal'!
Now, if the farcical puppet of a chief magistrate in the SandwichIslands be allowed the title of King, why should it be withheld fromthe noble savage Mehevi, who is a thousand times more worthy of theappellation? All hail, therefore, Mehevi, King of the Cannibal Valley,and long life and prosperity to his Typeean majesty! May Heaven for manya year preserve him, the uncompromising foe of Nukuheva and the French,if a hostile attitude will secure his lovely domain from the remorselessinflictions of South Sea civilization.
Previously to seeing the Dancing Widows I had little idea that therewere any matrimonial relations subsisting in Typee, and I should as soonhave thought of a Platonic affection being cultivated between the sexes,as of the solemn connection of man and wife. To be sure, there were oldMarheyo and Tinor, who seemed to have a sort of nuptial understandingwith one another; but for all that, I had sometimes observed acomical-looking old gentleman dressed in a suit of shabby tattooing, whohad the audacity to take various liberties with the lady, and that tooin the very presence of the old warrior her husband, who looked onas good-naturedly as if nothing was happening. This behaviour, untilsubsequent discoveries enlightened me, puzzled me more than anythingelse I witnessed in Typee.
As for Mehevi, I had supposed him a confirmed bachelor, as well as mostof the principal chiefs. At any rate, if they had wives and families,they ought to have been ashamed of themselves; for sure I am, they nevertroubled themselves about any domestic affairs. In truth, Mehevi seemedto be the president of a club of hearty fellows, who kept 'Bachelor'sHall' in fine style at the Ti. I had no doubt but that they regardedchildren as odious incumbrances; and their ideas of domestic felicitywere sufficiently shown in the fact, that they allowed no meddlesomehousekeepers to turn topsy-turvy those snug little arrangements they hadmade in their comfortable dwelling. I strongly suspected however, thatsome of these jolly bachelors were carrying on love intrigues withthe maidens of the tribe; although they did not appear publicly toacknowledge them. I happened to pop upon Mehevi three or four times whenhe was romping--in a most undignified manner for a warrior king--withone of the prettiest little witches in the valley. She lived with anold woman and a young man, in a house near Marheyo's; and although inappearance a mere child herself, had a noble boy about a year old, whobore a marvellous resemblance to Mehevi, whom I should certainly havebelieved to have been the father, were it not that the little fellowhad no triangle on his face--but on second thoughts, tattooing is nothereditary. Mehevi, however, was not the only person upon whom thedamsel Moonoony smiled--the young fellow of fifteen, who permanentlyresided in the home with her, was decidedly in her good graces. Isometimes beheld both him and the chief making love at the same time. Isit possible, thought I, that the valiant warrior can consent to giveup a corner in the thing he loves? This too was a mystery which, withothers of the same kind, was afterwards satisfactorily explained.
During the second day of the Feast of Calabashes, Kory-Kory--beingdetermined that I should have some understanding on these matters--had,in the course of his explanations, directed my attention toa peculiarity I had frequently remarked among many of thefemales;--principally those of a mature age and rather matronlyappearance. This consisted in having the right hand and the left footmost elaborately tattooed; whilst the rest of the body was wholly freefrom the operation of the art, with the exception of the minutely dottedlips and slight marks on the shoulders, to which I have previouslyreferred as comprising the sole tattooing exhibited by Fayaway, incommon with other young girls of her age. The hand and foot thusembellished were, according to Kory-Kory, the distinguishing badge ofwedlock, so far as that social and highly commendable institution isknown among those people. It answers, indeed, the same purpose as theplain gold ring worn by our fairer spouses.
After Kory-Kory's explanation of the subject, I was for some timestudiously respectful in the presence of all females thus distinguished,and never ventured to indulge in the slightest approach to flirtationwith any of their number. Married women, to be sure!--I knew better thanto offend them.
A further insight, however, into the peculiar domestic customs of theinmates of the valley did away in a measure with the severity of myscruples, and convinced me that I was deceived in some at least of myconclusions. A regular system of polygamy exists among the islanders;but of a most extraordinary nature,--a plurality of husbands, instead ofwives! and this solitary fact speaks volumes for the gentle dispositionof the male population.
Where else, indeed, could such a practice exist, even for a singleday?--Imagine a revolution brought about in a Turkish seraglio, andthe harem rendered the abode of bearded men; or conceive some beautifulwoman in our own country running distracted at the sight of her numerouslovers murdering one another before her eyes, out of jealousy for theunequal distribution of her favours!--Heaven defend us from such a stateof things!--We are scarcely amiable and forbearing enough to submit toit.
I was not able to learn what particular ceremony was observed in formingthe marriage contract, but am inclined to think that it must have beenof a very simple nature. Perhaps the mere 'popping the question', asit is termed with us, might have been followed by an immediate nuptialalliance. At any rate, I have more than one reason to believe thattedious courtships are unknown in the valley of Typee.
The males considerably outnumber the females. This holds true of manyof the islands of Polynesia, although the reverse of what is the case inmost civilized countries. The girls are first wooed and won, at a verytender age, by some stripling in the household in which they reside.This, however, is a mere frolic of the affections, and no formalengagement is contracted. By the time this first love has a littlesubsided, a second suitor presents himself, of graver years, and carriesboth boy and girl away to his own habitation. This disinterested andgenerous-hearted fellow now weds the young couple--marrying damseland lover at the same time--and all three thenceforth live togetheras harmoniously as so many turtles. I have heard of some men who incivilized countries rashly marry large families with their wives, buthad no idea that there was any place where people married supplementaryhusbands with them. Infidelity on either side is very rare. No manhas more than one wife, and no wife of mature years has less than twohusbands,--sometimes she has three, but such instances are notfrequent. The marriage tie, whatever it may be, does not appear to beindissoluble; for separations occasionally happen. These, however,when they do take place, produce no unhappiness, and are preceded by nobickerings; for the simple reason, that an ill-used wife or a henpeckedhusband is not obliged to file a bill in Chancery to obtain a divorce.As nothing stands in the way of a separation, the matrimonial yoke sitseasily and lightly, and a Typee wife lives on very pleasant and sociableterms with her husband. On the whole, wedlock, as known among theseTypees, seems to be of a more distinct and enduring nature thanis usually the case with barbarous people. A baneful promiscuousintercourse of the sexes is hereby avoided, and virtue, without beingclamorously invoked, is, as it were, unconsciously practised.
The contrast exhibited between the Marquesas and other islands of thePacific in this respect, is worthy of being noticed. At Tahiti themarriage tie was altogether unknown; and the relation of husbandand wife, father and son, could hardly be said to exist. The ArreorySociety--one of the most singular institutions that ever existed in anypart of the world--spread universal licentiousness over the island. Itwas the voluptuous character of these people which rendered the diseaseintroduced among them by De Bougainville's ships, in 1768, doublydestructive. It visited them like a plague, sweeping them off byhundreds.
Notwithstanding the existence of wedlock among the Typees, theScriptural injunction to increase and multiply seems to be butindifferently
attended to. I never saw any of those large families inarithmetical or step-ladder progression which one often meets with athome. I never knew of more than two youngsters living together in thesame home, and but seldom even that number. As for the women, it wasvery plain that the anxieties of the nursery but seldom disturbed theserenity of their souls; and they were never seen going about the valleywith half a score of little ones tagging at their apron-strings, orrather at the bread-fruit-leaf they usually wore in the rear.
The ratio of increase among all the Polynesian nations is very small;and in some places as yet uncorrupted by intercourse with Europeans,the births would appear not very little to outnumber the deaths; thepopulation in such instances remaining nearly the same for severalsuccessive generations, even upon those islands seldom or neverdesolated by wars, and among people with whom the crime of infanticideis altogether unknown. This would seem expressively ordained byProvidence to prevent the overstocking of the islands with a race tooindolent to cultivate the ground, and who, for that reason alone, would,by any considerable increase in their numbers, be exposed to the mostdeplorable misery. During the entire period of my stay in the valley ofTypee, I never saw more than ten or twelve children under the age of sixmonths, and only became aware of two births.
It is to the absence of the marriage tie that the late rapid decreaseof the population of the Sandwich Islands and of Tahiti is in part to beascribed. The vices and diseases introduced among these unhappy peopleannually swell the ordinary mortality of the islands, while, from thesame cause, the originally small number of births is proportionallydecreased. Thus the progress of the Hawaiians and Tahitians to utterextinction is accelerated in a sort of compound ratio.
I have before had occasion to remark, that I never saw any of theordinary signs of a pace of sepulture in the valley, a circumstancewhich I attributed, at the time, to my living in a particular partof it, and being forbidden to extend my rambles to any considerabledistance towards the sea. I have since thought it probable, however,that the Typees, either desirous of removing from their sight theevidences of mortality, or prompted by a taste for rural beauty, mayhave some charming cemetery situation in the shadowy recesses alongthe base of the mountains. At Nukuheva, two or three large quadrangular'pi-pis', heavily flagged, enclosed with regular stone walls, and shadedover and almost hidden from view by the interlacing branches ofenormous trees, were pointed out to me as burial-places. The bodies, Iunderstood, were deposited in rude vaults beneath the flagging, and weresuffered to remain there without being disinterred. Although nothingcould be more strange and gloomy than the aspect of these places, wherethe lofty trees threw their dark shadows over rude blocks of stone,a stranger looking at them would have discerned none of the ordinaryevidences of a place of sepulture.
During my stay in the valley, as none of its inmates were soaccommodating as to die and be buried in order to gratify my curiositywith regard to their funeral rites, I was reluctantly obliged toremain in ignorance of them. As I have reason to believe, however, theobservances of the Typees in these matters are the same with those ofall the other tribes in the island, I will here relate a scene I chancedto witness at Nukuheva.
A young man had died, about daybreak, in a house near the beach. I hadbeen sent ashore that morning, and saw a good deal of the preparationsthey were making for his obsequies. The body, neatly wrapped in a newwhite tappa, was laid out in an open shed of cocoanut boughs, upon abier constructed of elastic bamboos ingeniously twisted together. Thiswas supported about two feet from the ground, by large canes planteduprightly in the earth. Two females, of a dejected appearance, watchedby its side, plaintively chanting and beating the air with large grassfans whitened with pipe-clay. In the dwelling-house adjoining a numerouscompany we assembled, and various articles of food were being preparedfor consumption. Two or three individuals, distinguished by head-dressesof beautiful tappa, and wearing a great number of ornaments, appearedto officiate as masters of the ceremonies. By noon the entertainment hadfairly begun and we were told that it would last during the whole ofthe two following days. With the exception of those who mourned bythe corpse, every one seemed disposed to drown the sense of the latebereavement in convivial indulgence. The girls, decked out in theirsavage finery, danced; the old men chanted; the warriors smoked andchatted; and the young and lusty, of both sexes, feasted plentifully,and seemed to enjoy themselves as pleasantly as they could have done hadit been a wedding.
The islanders understand the art of embalming, and practise it with suchsuccess that the bodies of their great chiefs are frequently preservedfor many years in the very houses where they died. I saw three of thesein my visit to the Bay of Tior. One was enveloped in immense folds oftappa, with only the face exposed, and hung erect against the side ofthe dwelling. The others were stretched out upon biers of bamboo, inopen, elevated temples, which seemed consecrated to their memory. Theheads of enemies killed in battle are invariably preserved and hung upas trophies in the house of the conqueror. I am not acquainted with theprocess which is in use, but believe that fumigation is the principalagency employed. All the remains which I saw presented the appearance ofa ham after being suspended for some time in a smoky chimney.
But to return from the dead to the living. The late festival had drawntogether, as I had every reason to believe, the whole population of thevale, and consequently I was enabled to make some estimate with regardto its numbers. I should imagine that there were about two thousandinhabitants in Typee; and no number could have been better adapted tothe extent of the valley. The valley is some nine miles in length,and may average one in breadth; the houses being distributed at wideintervals throughout its whole extent, principally, however, towards thehead of the vale. There are no villages; the houses stand here and therein the shadow of the groves, or are scattered along the banks of thewinding stream; their golden-hued bamboo sides and gleaming white thatchforming a beautiful contrast to the perpetual verdure in which they areembowered. There are no roads of any kind in the valley. Nothing but alabyrinth of footpaths twisting and turning among the thickets withoutend.
The penalty of the Fall presses very lightly upon the valley of Typee;for, with the one solitary exception of striking a light, I scarcely sawany piece of work performed there which caused the sweat to stand upona single brow. As for digging and delving for a livelihood, the thing isaltogether unknown. Nature has planted the bread-fruit and the banana,and in her own good time she brings them to maturity, when the idlesavage stretches forth his hand, and satisfies his appetite.
Ill-fated people! I shudder when I think of the change a few yearswill produce in their paradisaical abode; and probably when the mostdestructive vices, and the worst attendances on civilization, shall havedriven all peace and happiness from the valley, the magnanimousFrench will proclaim to the world that the Marquesas Islands have beenconverted to Christianity! and this the Catholic world will doubtlessconsider as a glorious event. Heaven help the 'Isles of the Sea'!--Thesympathy which Christendom feels for them, has, alas! in too manyinstances proved their bane.
How little do some of these poor islanders comprehend when they lookaround them, that no inconsiderable part of their disasters originatein certain tea-party excitements, under the influence of whichbenevolent-looking gentlemen in white cravats solicit alms, and oldladies in spectacles, and young ladies in sober russet gowns, contributesixpences towards the creation of a fund, the object of which is toameliorate the spiritual condition of the Polynesians, but whose end hasalmost invariably been to accomplish their temporal destruction!
Let the savages be civilized, but civilize them with benefits, and notwith evils; and let heathenism be destroyed, but not by destroying theheathen. The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greaterpart of the North American continent; but with it they have likewiseextirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization isgradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism,and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers.
Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, thetemples demolished, and the idolators converted into NOMINAL Christians,that disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. Thedepopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious, hordes ofenlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders,and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat villas, trimgardens, shaven lawns, spires, and cupolas arise, while the poor savagesoon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers, andthat too on the very site of the hut where he was born. The spontaneousfruits of the earth, which God in his wisdom had ordained for thesupport of the indolent natives, remorselessly seized upon andappropriated by the stranger, are devoured before the eyes of thestarving inhabitants, or sent on board the numerous vessels which nowtouch at their shores.
When the famished wretches are cut off in this manner from their naturalsupplies, they are told by their benefactors to work and earn theirsupport by the sweat of their brows! But to no fine gentleman born tohereditary opulence, does this manual labour come more unkindly thanto the luxurious Indian when thus robbed of the bounty of heaven.Habituated to a life of indolence, he cannot and will not exert himself;and want, disease, and vice, all evils of foreign growth, soon terminatehis miserable existence.
But what matters all this? Behold the glorious result!--The abominationsof Paganism have given way to the pure rites of the Christianworship,--the ignorant savage has been supplanted by the refinedEuropean! Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!--Acommunity of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds ofthe Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled bythe presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meetingorator! Nor has such an opportunity for a display of missionary rhetoricbeen allowed to pass by unimproved!--But when these philanthropists sendus such glowing accounts of one half of their labours, why does theirmodesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good theyhave wrought?--Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact thatthe small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses;and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have beenliterally broken into the traces, and are harnessed to the vehicles oftheir spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!
. . . . . . .
Lest the slightest misconception should arise from anything thrown outin this chapter, or indeed in any other part of the volume, let me hereobserve that against the cause of missions in, the abstract no Christiancan possibly be opposed: it is in truth a just and holy cause. Butif the great end proposed by it be spiritual, the agency employed toaccomplish that end is purely earthly; and, although the object inview be the achievement of much good, that agency may nevertheless beproductive of evil. In short, missionary undertaking, however it mayblessed of heaven, is in itself but human; and subject, like everythingelse, to errors and abuses. And have not errors and abuses crept intothe most sacred places, and may there not be unworthy or incapablemissionaries abroad, as well as ecclesiastics of similar characterat home? May not the unworthiness or incapacity of those who assumeapostolic functions upon the remote islands of the sea more easilyescape detection by the world at large than if it were displayed inthe heart of a city? An unwarranted confidence in the sanctity of itsapostles--a proneness to regard them as incapable of guile--andan impatience of the least suspicion to their rectitude as men orChristians, have ever been prevailing faults in the Church. Nor is thisto be wondered at: for subject as Christianity is to the assaults ofunprincipled foes, we are naturally disposed to regard everything likean exposure of ecclesiastical misconduct as the offspring of malevolenceor irreligious feeling. Not even this last consideration, however shalldeter me from the honest expression of my sentiments.
There is something apparently wrong in the practical operations ofthe Sandwich Islands Mission. Those who from pure religious motivescontribute to the support of this enterprise should take care toascertain that their donations, flowing through many devious channels,at last effect their legitimate object, the conversion of the Hawaiians.I urge this not because I doubt the moral probity of those who disbursethe funds, but because I know that they are not rightly applied. To readpathetic accounts of missionary hardships, and glowing descriptions ofconversion, and baptisms, taking place beneath palm-trees, is one thing;and to go to the Sandwich Islands and see the missionaries dwellingin picturesque and prettily furnished coral-rock villas, whilst themiserable natives are committing all sorts of immorality around them, isquite another.
In justice to the missionaries, however, I will willingly admit, thatwhere-ever evils may have resulted from their collective mismanagementof the business of the mission, and from the want of vital piety evincedby some of their number, still the present deplorable condition of theSandwich Islands is by no means wholly chargeable against them. Thedemoralizing influence of a dissolute foreign population, and thefrequent visits of all descriptions of vessels, have tended not a littleto increase the evils alluded to. In a word, here, as in every casewhere civilization has in any way been introduced among those whom wecall savages, she has scattered her vices, and withheld her blessings.
As wise a man as Shakespeare has said, that the bearer of evil tidingshath but a losing office; and so I suppose will it prove with me, incommunicating to the trusting friends of the Hawiian Mission what hasbeen disclosed in various portions of this narrative. I am persuaded,however, that as these disclosures will by their very nature attractattention, so they will lead to something which will not be withoutultimate benefit to the cause of Christianity in the Sandwich Islands.
I have but one more thing to add in connection with this subject--thosethings which I have stated as facts will remain facts, in spite ofwhatever the bigoted or incredulous may say or write against them. Myreflections, however, on those facts may not be free from error. If suchbe the case, I claim no further indulgence than should be conceded toevery man whose object is to do good.
Typee: A Romance of the South Seas Page 33
