tahitian morals and duplicity—i play the violin at government concert—death of m’neil—the black slave traffic

arriving at tahiti our passengers went off to the plantations and i went off also as i wanted to see what kind of a place it was. the capital, papeite, was a much larger and livelier place than apia. the population consisted of all kinds of half-castes, chinese, french, and tahitian brigands. i went inland and tramped around the sugar plantations whereon worked the natives and chinese. a good deal of the country was under cultivation. i shall never forget the awful-looking people that i came in contact with or forget the debauchery that i witnessed. the sole occupation of a good many of the natives was to drink as much as they could get down them and the women sold their bodies to the first-comer for the price of a drink. the missionaries were there by hundreds, it seemed; they were a mixture of french and english and had exciting times reforming those native women and men. i went into several of the native homes and found them very hospitable people. some of the women had chinese husbands and their half-caste children had tiny almond eyes, jet-black and sparkling. the chinese of society islands impressed me as being much more wholesome in their way of living than 153the australian chinamen, and they did not smell half so disagreeable. a chinaman got jealous of his native wife whilst i was there and struck her with a knife. the tahitians went for him and when i saw him you could hardly tell which was his head and which his feet; anyway his brother chinamen came into the village, rolled him up and gave him a decent burial, and his wife screamed and wailed away till i was glad to clear out, for it was a most painful sight to see her grief. she was a pretty woman, in fact all the young women were handsome, and the men too, but as soon as the women get over twenty they start to fade. a south sea island girl of ten years of age is as matured as a european girl of sixteen.

i found human nature was just the same there as everywhere else—everyone wanted as much as they could get out of you, and those who were better clothed than their sisters and brothers were vain-glorious and looked down on the others. girls and boys made love to each other and eloped into the forest with the missionaries after them at full speed, and the brave old chiefs strolled about and spoke of the old times and smacked their lips and spoke on the sly of the missionaries, saying “they were the children of the devil” but addressing them to their faces with some such jargon as, “me christian man now. one god. good god, who no eat other god,” whereupon they would gravely walk away to sell their soul for a drink. they loved their old customs deep down in their heart and rubbed noses 154with each other and cherished hopes that some day the gods would help them to drive the white men into the sea. but the older ones were even then fast disappearing, and drink and prostitution were raising the death rate of the native children, and so there, as elsewhere all over the south seas, the race was fast dying out.

there were many traders there, and they all seemed to make plenty of money. you could always recognise a trader by his big hat smashed on his head and his slouching walk and his very often warty nose, that had started to blossom after drinking some oceans of beer. they were generally married men and often got into awful trouble when they were quite unsober by mistaking their tahitian wife for their marquesan wife, and mentioning the wrong name to their bride during the night brought down her wrath on to their wicked heads. i have often seen them with a black eye or a terribly scratched, clawed face, for women in tahiti are as jealous as the european ladies, and will brook no rival; but of course when their husband is away with his other bride on some far-off isle they do not let the grass grow under their feet, and often a white trader leaves his home in disgust when his native wife presents him with a half-caste baby with slit-almond eyes and a face showing strong mongolian origin, or a little fair-skinned mite with pretty violet dark eyes that looks suspiciously like the village missionary.

rarotongan scenery

in papeite i made the acquaintance of rené, a 157frenchman, who was a clever violin-player. he was at that time working as a clerk in the tahitian commissioner’s offices and played at the papeite opera house which was something on the lines of a bush town music hall in australia. he was very kind to me and gave me several good lessons on playing the violin, for he had studied under some of the best french masters. he had some splendid duets for two violins and one night, when they had a ball on at the papeite government house, he recommended me and i got the engagement to go with him, and we played the duets together. he was a much better performer than i was, but he gave me the solo part and did all he could to get me the credit of the concert. all went off very well indeed till, when rené and i were having supper with all the high folk of papeite and i was feeling in very high spirits at the turn my luck had taken, for i was nearly on my beam ends when rené got me that job, i bent over from my chair and looked out of the door and saw that my violin which i had left by the hat-rack had disappeared! i got up and rushed off like a shot, and as i did so i saw one of the tahitian servants bolting through the door with the violin. shouting at the top of my voice i ran after him, cleared the steps with one jump, and there up the moonlit street ran the thief holding my violin in one hand. i had no revolver with me, otherwise i would have fired, for i was desperate. my violin was my all, and the fear of losing it put renewed vigour in my feet and i was gaining on the cursed 158thief. “stop or i fire!” i shouted, and as he was leaving the straight track he turned, and i held my hand up, as he thought, to shoot. in the moonlight he saw my white hand upheld, and thinking it held a gun he threw the fiddle down and rushed off into the scrub. my fiddle was none the worse for the adventure, but i was, for the night was close and sweltering hot, and i arrived back to the supper-table bathed in sweat and half dead.

i was at that time lodging in the north of the town with a storekeeper. in the same room where i was also slept a trader; his name was m’neil, and he had been very ill and was at that time convalescent. he admitted to me that he had been drinking too heavily and had made up his mind to be a teetotaller, and, as he told me what a curse drink was, he kept lifting a bottle of whisky from under his bed and taking a pull at it, saying, “man, jist a wee snack for the gude time’s sake.” he was really trying to break himself of the habit, and instead of drinking half-a-bottle at a time was just taking it in sips. by midnight he was quite drunk, and started weeping over his past sins, and kept me awake nearly all night saying over and over again—“ma lad, keep off th’ drink, ’twill be your ruin.” he was not a bad man at all, and when he was sober during the day, and i played him old scotch songs, for he would not for one moment let me play anything but scotch melodies, the tears would rise in his eyes. he died two days after and i felt very much cut up, for i saw him die and he gave me an 159old purse, saying, “take it, guid lad, and think of me.” his old comrade, a scotchman, came in from up the street, held his hand and completely broke down, crying like a little child as m’neil closed his eyes for ever. i still remember how that scotch friend rose up, looked under poor m’neil’s bed, and gently pulled the half-full whisky bottle out, put it under his coat and left the room, still sobbing, for m’neil and he had had many good times together and many a long talk and deep drink in that room as they lived over their old days in bonny scotland.

i was naturally very depressed after the death of m’neil; i had only known him a few days, but in those few days i seemed to know more of his true character than you could see through in another man in ten years. i remember after a day or so i got in with a dutch fellow named “van blank.” he was also a lodger in my dwelling-place and he had held the scotchman’s arm as he stood by m’neil’s grave; otherwise i think poor old mac (i cannot remember his name) would have fallen in. he had imbibed considerably, and it took van blank and i the whole afternoon to get him back to his room and put him to bed.

rené, my violin friend, went off to matahiva on some business, and i was at my wit’s end to know how to get some cash and get away from papeite. i was offered a job by some missionaries to go off to rarotonga to help in mission work for awhile. i considered seriously becoming a missionary myself, as it 160seemed a paying game, and i never saw a mission man of any sect on the beach hard up. van blank had long since joined the mission and he introduced me to several young tahitian mission girls who were devout christians. they were mostly very good-looking, wore more clothing than the inland natives, were splendid dancers, and down in the thatched homesteads of the village of tetua i went and stayed with van blank, and those mission girls, good gracious me! stood on their heads, screamed with laughter, waved their legs as i played the fiddle and all went back to the barbarian stage in five seconds, and after the dance i had to fly with van blank as twenty of them strove to embrace us, all at once! next day blank and i saw them in the mission-room teaching the native children to sing “onward, christian soldiers,” or a tune of that type, and as we looked in the school door they looked up at us gravely with their earnest dark eyes as though we were absolute strangers to the wild carousal of the night before. you could tramp the world over and never find people so clever in their cunning as the tahitian islanders, and yet they are, as i found, staunch friends in adversity and would never give a white man away to his superiors. and so all the creed denominations go swimmingly along, safe and happy in the giant hypocrisy of reformation that has brought such changes to the pacific isle, such happiness to the reformers, and such deceit into the hearts of the reformed.

a large trading schooner, the austral, at this time 161arrived in tahiti and i once more secured a job as second mate and left the island. i heard that her final destination was samoa and tonga; she was then bound for the marquesas islands. before leaving the “society group” she called at “fakarava,” “raiatea” and “takaroa,” beautiful isles they were too, standing lonely out there in the wide pacific, covered with luxurious tropical trees that sheltered the velvety skinned natives, many of whom were as wild as the savages of captain cook’s days. indeed, all the races that i came in contact with were as wild at heart as ever their ancestors were; but they were clever, and they soon discovered the best policy, which was hammered into them by the arrival of a warship and a gun battery to smash them up and let them see the white man’s power and the wisdom of following all his desires and ceasing all their own desires. then the missionaries came and the traders brought the rum, and the money to buy the rum, and gave the women the opportunity to obtain the money, for it was the women of the south seas that started to get the money and shared it with their native husbands. i think that must be the origin of the name “white slave traffic” of modern england. i know from my own eyes and from the lips of the sufferers of those far-off isles that the black slave traffic was a monstrous traffic beside which the english “white slave traffic” is a kind of sacred concert, comparatively speaking.

as far as i could judge and criticise the civilising 162influence of christianity in the south seas was this—the english, french and germans discovered a beautiful land in the south seas; a few months after arriving they blew the heads of some of the natives off, cowed them completely, took a battalion of sailors inland to the wild native village and those sailors all fell madly in love with the beautiful dark-eyed women who stood trembling before them, and by the time they were due to become mothers the fathers were in england, being paid their leave money at chatham, while the missionaries, hot with haste, were outbound for the same islands to reform the grieving mothers and make them more upright in their morals. when those missionaries arrived they put a “penny in the slot machine” on the shore, nailed a large tract on each wall of the heathen village homesteads, and then called the people christianised as they knelt in their nudeness and penitence at their feet in chanting rows, repeating the lord’s prayer with bowed heads, as the missionaries lifted their eyes heavenward and did not miss their boot-laces till long after the reformed heathen had departed.