Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (813 page)

He marked Taahauku for a suitable site, acquired it, and offered the superintendence to Mr. Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already some time in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on Tauata.  Mr. Stewart was somewhat averse to the adventure, having some acquaintance with Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu.  He had once landed there, he told me, about dusk, and found the remains of a man and woman partly eaten.  On his starting and sickening at the sight, one of Moipu’s young men picked up a human foot, and provocatively staring at the stranger, grinned and nibbled at the heel.  None need be surprised if Mr. Stewart fled incontinently to the bush, lay there all night in a great horror of mind, and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow.  ‘It was always a bad place, Atuona,’ commented Mr. Stewart, in his homely Fifeshire voice.  In spite of this dire introduction, he accepted the captain’s offer, was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen, and proceeded to clear the jungle.

War was pursued at that time, almost without interval, between the men of Atuona and the men of Haamau; and one day, from the opposite sides of the valley, battle - or I should rather say the noise of battle - raged all the afternoon: the shots and insults of the opposing clans passing from hill to hill over the heads of Mr. Stewart and his Chinamen.  There was no genuine fighting; it was like a bicker of schoolboys, only some fool had given the children guns.  One man died of his exertions in running, the only casualty.  With night the shots and insults ceased; the men of Haamau withdrew; and victory, on some occult principle, was scored to Moipu.  Perhaps, in consequence, there came a day when Moipu made a feast, and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of it.  These passed early by Taahauku, and some of Moipu’s young men were there to be a guard of honour.  They were not long gone before there came down from Haamau, a man, his wife, and a girl of twelve, their daughter, bringing fungus.  Several Atuona lads were hanging round the store; but the day being one of truce none apprehended danger.  The fungus was weighed and paid for; the man of Haamau proposed he should have his axe ground in the bargain; and Mr. Stewart demurring at the trouble, some of the Atuona lads offered to grind it for him, and set it on the wheel.  While the axe was grinding, a friendly native whispered Mr. Stewart to have a care of himself, for there was trouble in hand; and, all at once, the man of Haamau was seized, and his head and arm stricken from his body, the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe.  In the first alert, the girl escaped among the cotton; and Mr. Stewart, having thrust the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside, supposed the affair was over.  But the business had not passed without noise, and it reached the ears of an older girl who had loitered by the way, and who now came hastily down the valley, crying as she came for her father.  Her, too, they seized and beheaded; I know not what they had done with the axe, it was a blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the girl; and the blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to foot.  Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying the heads to Moipu.  It may be fancied how the feast broke up; but it is notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire.  These passed back through Taahauku in extreme disorder; a little after the valley began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing braves; and a letter of warning coming at the same time to Mr. Stewart, he and his Chinamen took refuge with the Protestant missionary in Atuona.  That night the store was gutted, and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves.  Three days later the schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr. Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view the grave, which was already indicated by the stench.  While they were so employed, a party of Moipu’s young men, decked with red flannel to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from Atuona, dug up the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried them away on sticks.  That night the feast began.

Those who knew Mr. Stewart before this experience declare the man to be quite altered.  He stuck, however, to his post; and somewhat later, when the plantation was already well established, and gave employment to sixty Chinamen and seventy natives, he found himself once more in dangerous times.  The men of Haamau, it was reported, had sworn to plunder and erase the settlement; letters came continually from the Hawaiian missionary, who acted as intelligence department; and for six weeks Mr. Stewart and three other whites slept in the cotton-house at night in a rampart of bales, and (what was their best defence) ostentatiously practised rifle-shooting by day upon the beach.  Natives were often there to watch them; the practice was excellent; and the assault was never delivered - if it ever was intended, which I doubt, for the natives are more famous for false rumours than for deeds of energy.  I was told the late French war was a case in point; the tribes on the beach accusing those in the mountains of designs which they had never the hardihood to entertain.  And the same testimony to their backwardness in open battle reached me from all sides.  Captain Hart once landed after an engagement in a certain bay; one man had his hand hurt, an old woman and two children had been slain; and the captain improved the occasion by poulticing the hand, and taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair.  It is true these wars were often merely formal - comparable with duels to the first blood.  Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought wanting in civility to the guests of the other.  About one-half of the population served day about on alternate sides, so as to be well with each when the inevitable peace should follow.  The forts of the belligerents were over against each other, and close by.  Pigs were cooking.  Well-oiled braves, with well-oiled muskets, strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast.  No business, however needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed to be centred in this mockery of war.  A few days later, by a regrettable accident, a man was killed; it was felt at once the thing had gone too far, and the quarrel was instantly patched up.  But the more serious wars were prosecuted in a similar spirit; a gift of pigs and a feast made their inevitable end; the killing of a single man was a great victory, and the murder of defenceless solitaries counted a heroic deed.

The foot of the cliffs, about all these islands, is the place of fishing.  Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly women, some nearly naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses, perched in little surf-beat promontories - the brown precipice overhanging them, and the convolvulus overhanging that, as if to cut them off the more completely from assistance.  There they would angle much of the morning; and as fast as they caught any fish, eat them, raw and living, where they stood.  It was such helpless ones that the warriors from the opposite island of Tauata slew, and carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted mighty men of valour.  Of one such exploit I can give the account of an eye-witness.  ‘Portuguese Joe,’ Mr. Keane’s cook, was once pulling an oar in an Atuona boat, when they spied a stranger in a canoe with some fish and a piece of tapu.  The Atuona men cried upon him to draw near and have a smoke.  He complied, because, I suppose, he had no choice; but he knew, poor devil, what he was coming to, and (as Joe said) ‘he didn’t seem to care about the smoke.’  A few questions followed, as to where he came from, and what was his business.  These he must needs answer, as he must needs draw at the unwelcome pipe, his heart the while drying in his bosom.  And then, of a sudden, a big fellow in Joe’s boat leaned over, plucked the stranger from his canoe, struck him with a knife in the neck - inward and downward, as Joe showed in pantomime more expressive than his words - and held him under water, like a fowl, until his struggles ceased.  Whereupon the long-pig was hauled on board, the boat’s head turned about for Atuona, and these Marquesan braves pulled home rejoicing.  Moipu was on the beach and rejoiced with them on their arrival.  Poor Joe toiled at his oar that day with a white face, yet he had no fear for himself.  ‘They were very good to me - gave me plenty grub: never wished to eat white man,’ said he.

If the most horrible experience was Mr. Stewart’s, it was Captain Hart himself who ran the nearest danger.  He had bought a piece of land from Timau, chief of a neighbouring bay, and put some Chinese there to work.  Visiting the station with one of the Godeffroys, he found his Chinamen trooping to the beach in terror: Timau had driven them out, seized their effects, and was in war attire with his young men.  A boat was despatched to Taahauku for reinforcement; as they awaited her return, they could see, from the deck of the schooner, Timau and his young men dancing the war-dance on the hill-top till past twelve at night; and so soon as the boat came (bringing three gendarmes, armed with chassepots, two white men from Taahauku station, and some native warriors) the party set out to seize the chief before he should awake.  Day was not come, and it was a very bright moonlight morning, when they reached the hill-top where (in a house of palm-leaves) Timau was sleeping off his debauch.  The assailants were fully exposed, the interior of the hut quite dark; the position far from sound.  The gendarmes knelt with their pieces ready, and Captain Hart advanced alone.  As he drew near the door he heard the snap of a gun cocking from within, and in sheer self-defence - there being no other escape - sprang into the house and grappled Timau.  ‘Timau, come with me!’ he cried.  But Timau - a great fellow, his eyes blood-red with the abuse of kava, six foot three in stature - cast him on one side; and the captain, instantly expecting to be either shot or brained, discharged his pistol in the dark.  When they carried Timau out at the door into the moonlight, he was already dead, and, upon this unlooked-for termination of their sally, the whites appeared to have lost all conduct, and retreated to the boats, fired upon by the natives as they went.  Captain Hart, who almost rivals Bishop Dordillon in popularity, shared with him the policy of extreme indulgence to the natives, regarding them as children, making light of their defects, and constantly in favour of mild measures.  The death of Timau has thus somewhat weighed upon his mind; the more so, as the chieftain’s musket was found in the house unloaded.  To a less delicate conscience the matter will seem light.  If a drunken savage elects to cock a fire-arm, a gentleman advancing towards him in the open cannot wait to make sure if it be charged.

I have touched on the captain’s popularity.  It is one of the things that most strikes a stranger in the Marquesas.  He comes instantly on two names, both new to him, both locally famous, both mentioned by all with affection and respect - the bishop’s and the captain’s.  It gave me a strong desire to meet with the survivor, which was subsequently gratified - to the enrichment of these pages.  Long after that again, in the Place Dolorous - Molokai - I came once more on the traces of that affectionate popularity.  There was a blind white leper there, an old sailor - ‘an old tough,’ he called himself - who had long sailed among the eastern islands.  Him I used to visit, and, being fresh from the scenes of his activity, gave him the news.  This (in the true island style) was largely a chronicle of wrecks; and it chanced I mentioned the case of one not very successful captain, and how he had lost a vessel for Mr. Hart; thereupon the blind leper broke forth in lamentation.  ‘Did he lose a ship of John Hart’s?’ he cried; ‘poor John Hart!  Well, I’m sorry it was Hart’s,’ with needless force of epithet, which I neglect to reproduce.

Perhaps, if Captain Hart’s affairs had continued to prosper, his popularity might have been different.  Success wins glory, but it kills affection, which misfortune fosters.  And the misfortune which overtook the captain’s enterprise was truly singular.  He was at the top of his career.  Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the French as an indemnity for the robberies at Taahauku.  But the Ile Masse was only suitable for cattle; and his two chief stations were Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva-oa, some hundred miles to the southward, and facing the south-west.  Both these were on the same day swept by a tidal wave, which was not felt in any other bay or island of the group.  The south coast of Hiva-oa was bestrewn with building timber and camphor-wood chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into their houses.  But the recovery of such jetsam could not affect the result.  It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended.  Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new plantation arisen in their stead.

CHAPTER XIII - CHARACTERS

There was a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister island, Nuka-hiva.  Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would be a whale-boat manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra for sale; now perhaps a single canoe come after commodities to buy.  The anchorage was besides frequented by fishers; not only the lone females perched in niches of the cliff, but whole parties, who would sometimes camp and build a fire upon the beach, and sometimes lie in their canoes in the midst of the haven and jump by turns in the water; which they would cast eight or nine feet high, to drive, as we supposed, the fish into their nets.  The goods the purchasers came to buy were sometimes quaint.  I remarked one outrigger returning with a single ham swung from a pole in the stern.  And one day there came into Mr. Keane’s store a charming lad, excellently mannered, speaking French correctly though with a babyish accent; very handsome too, and much of a dandy, as was shown not only in his shining raiment, but by the nature of his purchases.  These were five ship-biscuits, a bottle of scent, and two balls of washing blue.  He was from Tauata, whither he returned the same night in an outrigger, daring the deep with these young-ladyish treasures.  The gross of the native passengers were more ill-favoured: tall, powerful fellows, well tattooed, and with disquieting manners.  Something coarse and jeering distinguished them, and I was often reminded of the slums of some great city.  One night, as dusk was falling, a whale-boat put in on that part of the beach where I chanced to be alone.  Six or seven ruffianly fellows scrambled out; all had enough English to give me ‘good-bye,’ which was the ordinary salutation; or ‘good-morning,’ which they seemed to regard as an intensitive; jests followed, they surrounded me with harsh laughter and rude looks, and I was glad to move away.  I had not yet encountered Mr. Stewart, or I should have been reminded of his first landing at Atuona and the humorist who nibbled at the heel.  But their neighbourhood depressed me; and I felt, if I had been there a castaway and out of reach of help, my heart would have been sick.