CHAPTER XX

Previous

Holy Week—How the rum was saved during the storm—An Easter Sunday “Celebration”—The Governor, Commissaire Bauda and I have a discussion—Paul Vernier, the Protestant pastor, and his Church—How the girls of the valley imperilled the immortal souls of the first missionaries—Jimmy Kekela, his family—A watch from Abraham Lincoln.

HOLY Week passed in a riot of uncommon amusement. Its religious significance—the most sacred period of the year both for Catholics and Protestants—was emphasized by priest and preacher with every observance of the church, but the lay white harked back to the mood of the ancient feast of spring and drew the natives with them. Permits to buy rum and wine were much sought for by the Marquesans, to whom drink was forbidden. The governor was of an easy disposition, and few who had the price of a dame-jeanne of rum or wine failed to secure it. As Lutz, the German trader at Tahauku, the adjoining valley, was the only importer of intoxicants, the canoes were active between our beach of Atuona and the stone steps at Tahauku, while others rode a-horse or walked. On Holy Thursday an uninformed new-comer might have pronounced the Marquesans a bustling race with a liquid diet.

Cloudbursts had swollen the streams, and made the trails troughs of mud, so that when Exploding Eggs and Mouth of God and I arrived at Atuona beach with our empties we were glad to place the receptacles in the canoe of a fisherman for transport to Lutz’s. A gesture of my cupped hand to my mouth made him eager to oblige me. We walked up the hill and past the Scallamera leper-house. My friends’ bare feet and skill made it hard for me to keep up with them. Shoes are clumsy shifts for naked soles. After a glass of Munich beer and a pretzel with Lutz, Exploding Eggs finding his own little canoe at the stone steps, we loaded the demi-johns in it and the fisherman’s. I went with the latter, and Mouth of God with my valet. The canoes were narrow and they sank to the gunwales with the weight. The tide of the swollen river tore through the bay, and soon Mouth of God cried out that we must take Exploding Eggs in our craft. The boy transferred himself deftly, and Mouth of God’s canoe shot ahead. It became necessary for us to bail, for the water poured in over the unprotected sides, and the boy and I used our hats actively. Suddenly the fisherman in agonizing voice announced that we could not stay afloat. He gave no thought to our bodily plight, the racing current, and the rapacious sharks, but laid stress on our freight.

Aue! The rum will be lost!” he shouted, as the canoe weltered deeper, and then, without ado, both he and Exploding Eggs leaped into the brine. The canoe staggered and rose, and, after freeing it from water, I paddled it to shore, while the pair swam alongside, watching the precious burden.

All night the torrent roared near my home. The big boulders rolled down the rocky bed, groaning in travail. The solid shot of cocoanut and breadfruit, sped by the gale, fell on my iron roof while the furious rain was like cannister. The trees made noises as a sailing ship in a storm, singing wildly, whistling as does the cordage, and the crash of their fall sounding as the freed canvas banging on the yards. Sleep was not for me, but I smoked and wrote, and listened to the chorus of angered nature until daybreak.

In the first light I saw Father David, in soutane and surplice, attended by two barelegged acolytes, fording the breast-high river. He held aloft the golden box containing the sacred bread, and one of the acolytes carried a bell of warning. Paro had the black leprosy, and in his hut far up the valley, on his mat of suffering, waited for the comfort of communion. All day three priests moved up and down urging the people to confess and “make their Easter.”

Titihuti, the magnificently tattooed matron, went with me to the ceremony of Honi Peka, the Kissing of the Crucifix. Honi really meant to rub noses or smell each other’s faces, for the Marquesans had no labial kiss. The Catholic church was well filled, and each native in turn approached the railing of the channel, and rubbed his nose over the desolate figure of the Savior. It was a wonderful magic to them. The next day, Good Friday or Venini Tapu, I asked Great Fern what event that day commemorated.

“Ietu Kirito was killed by his enemies, the tribe of Iuda,” he replied, as he might relate a tribal feud in these islands.

Photo from Underwood and Underwood
The Coral road and the traders’ stores

Holy Saturday was a joyous holiday, and on Easter Sunday the climax of the feasting and merriment came. The communion-rail was crowded, many complying with the church compulsion of taking the sacrament once a year under pain of mortal sin. There was compensation for celibacy and exile in Father David’s expression of delight as he put into each communicant’s mouth the host. He was the leading actor in a divine drama, the conversion by his few words of consecration of a flour wafer into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. The histrionic was mixed with and a moving part of his exaltation.

Photo by Brown Bros.
Scene on beach a few miles west of Papeete

He gave to all, including Peyral and me, the only white attendants, a little loaf of bread he had blessed; faraoa benetitio in Marquesan, or flour benedicto. Ah Suey took communion, and after mass hurried to me. The reputed murderer of Wagner, the American, was prideful because he was the baker of the faraoa benetitio.

“How you likee that bleadee?” he asked me. “My bake him bleadee, pliest make him holee. Bimeby me ketchee heaven,” he said in all seriousness.

Titihuti, my neighbor, joined me to walk to our homes, and, knowing her to miss no masses on Sundays, I asked her why she had not received the sacrament. She said she had never partaken of it, that she had yet to make her first communion of the Lord’s supper.

“But, Titihuti,” I remonstrated, “you know that you are in danger of hell-fire. You believe in the Catholic doctrine, you say, and despite that you disregard its strict order.”

Titihuti I realized was a heathen, still full of animist superstitions, and I was not unprepared to hear her answer:

“If I took the host into my mouth I would die. The manakao would seize me. I will wait until I am about to die, and then PÈre David will give me the viaticum, and I will go straight to aki.”

The manakao is a demon, and aki is paradise. Titihuti was intending to take the chance that kings and others took in the early days of Christianity, when, being taught that baptism wiped out all sins, they kept an alert clergyman always near them to sprinkle them and speed them to heaven, and meanwhile they sinned as they pleased.

By noon the entire village was chanting and dancing. The unusual removal of the restriction against beverages made Easter a pagan rout. The natives became uninhibited, if not natural, for a few hours. Several times the governor had had groups at his palace to give exhibitions of their aboriginal dances, but this feast-day he extended a general invitation to a levee. Fifty or sixty men or women enjoyed the utmost hospitality. The young ruler was bent on seeing their fullest expression of mirth, without any restraint of sobriety. The noise of their songs echoed to the mission, where the nuns prayed that some brand might be spared from the holocaust. Swaggering chiefs and beauteous damsels abandoned themselves to the spirit of the day. The dances were without order. Whenever a man or woman felt the urge they sprang to their feet and began the tapiriata. Under the palms, upon the verandas, in the salle À manger, in every corner of the palace and its grounds, the people, astonished at such unwonted freedom and such lavish bounty, showed their appreciation in movements of their bodies and legs. The fairest girls surrounded the host, and with sinuous circlings and a thousand blandishments entertained and thanked him. The chants by the elders were of his greatness. The young sang of passion.

From the hill near the cemetery where Guillitoue, the anarchist, dwelt, sounded the drums. I was the especial guest there in the afternoon, and those who were not too deep in the pool of pleasure at the palace climbed the mountain. The orator had built a shelter of bamboo and cocoanut leaves, graceful and clean, and upon its carpet of leaves we sat. Guillitoue in a loin-cloth and black frock-coat moved about among the three score with a dame-jeanne in each hand, and poured rum or wine at request. Occasionally he broke into a wild hula, grotesque as he whirled about with the wickered bottles at arms-length. From other valleys whites and natives had come to the koina. Thirty horses were tied to the cemetery railing. Amiable gaiety and ludicrous baboonery passed the afternoon.

Frederick Tissot, a storekeeper at Puamau, a Swiss in his fifties, ten years in the Foreign Legion of Algiers, a worker upon the Chicago Exposition buildings in the early nineties, and seventeen years here, spoke of the “good time” when he worked at Zinkand’s restaurant in San Francisco.

“I drank thirty quarts of beer a day. I was cook, and the bartenders stood in with me for bonnes bouches. I never tasted solid food. I had soup and booze. I nearly died in a year, and had to leave.”

He sighed at the memory of those golden days. Later I saw him falling off his horse, and laid upon a mat in a native house.

James Nichols, son of a Chicagoan, dignified, tall and thin, almost white, with side-whiskers, a black cutaway, overalls, and bare feet, a shoeless butler for all the world, had a tale for me of his father’s marrying in Tahiti a member of the royal family of PomarÉ, and of himself being born on Christmas Island.

“A wild island that,” said the quasi-butler in English. “Captain Cook discovered it when he was steering north from Borabora on Christmas day. He stayed there a few weeks and saw an eclipse of the sun. He took away three hundred turtles. When I lived there they melted cocoanuts into oil, and my father was the cooper. Cook had planted cocoanuts there. It is an atoll, a lonely place, and I was glad to leave. I learned English from my father, and married a Paumotu lady. I was in Tahiti until eight years ago, when the cyclone wiped me out. Here I work for the mission, making copra, and I am the tinker and tinsmith. Here’s looking at you!”

Jensen, the young and engaging Dane, who will never return to civilization, trod a measure with a charming girl from Hanamenu.

“The clan of the Puna has left its bare paepaes all over her valley,” he said. “She is the last.”

At dark the cavalcade reeled down the hill, leaving Pierre Guillitoue sleeping beside the drum. Despite his late fifties and his, to say the least, irregular way of living, Pierre is strong and healthy.

Captain Cook marveled in his diary that “since the arrival of the ship in Batavia [Java] every person belonging to her has been ill, except the sailmaker, who was more than seventy years old; yet this man got drunk every day while we remained there.”

A white man lured away the consort of Ahi, an agreeable young man much in love. I found the lorn husband screaming in grief.

“Tahiatauani, my wife, my wife!” he cried out. The Marquesan weeps with facility. Hour after hour this stalwart fellow let fall tears, lying on the ground in agony. Then he rose and said no more about it.

Easter Sunday went out in a blaze of riotous glory. I saw Ah Suey after nightfall inquiring anxiously and angrily for his daughter. The nuns had reported to him that she had failed to appear for vespers. That night in the breadfruit-grove by the High Place they enacted the old orgies of pre-Christian days. Thirty men and women, mostly young, sang the ancient songs and danced by the lights of lanterns, of candlenuts and fagots, and to the sound of the booming drums.

I sat at wine the next day with Father David in the mission-house. It was bare and ugly as all convents, having the scant, ascetic, uncomfortable atmosphere that monks and nuns dwell in all over the world—no ornaments, no good pictures, no ease. Stark walls, stiff chairs, and the staring, rude crucifix over the door. The apostolic vicar censured the Government severely. He plucked his long, black beard nervously, and spoke his feelings in the imperious manner of a mortal who holds the keys of the kingdom of heaven, castigating fools who wouldn’t even learn there was a door. There was no trace of personal pride.

“The government here and in France is unjust to the church. We suffer from the impiety and wickedness of French officials. The people of France are right at heart, but the politicians are Antichrists. The Protestants are bad enough, but the French are Catholics, or should be. This young governor here is a veritable heathen, and has shown the people the road to hell again, when they had hardly trod the via trita, via tuta. He and Bauda are godless men. Monsieur, rum is forbidden to be given to a Marquesan, yet the valley floats in rum. I know that to get copra made one must stretch the strict rod of the law a trifle, but not to drunkenness, nor to dances of the devil, dances, that, frowned upon, might be forgotten.”

The governor, Commissaire Bauda, and I dined that night on the palace veranda, and afterward we had an animated discussion. I wrote it down verbatim:

Governor. What was it PÈre David said to you, mon ami?

I. He said that the Catholic church was badly treated by the officials here.

Governor. Yes, he wants another great slice of land. Oh, that church is insatiable! One of my predecessors, Grosfillez, fought them. Here is his report in the archives: He says that, contrary to their claims that they have caused the republic to be loved here, that they have taught the Franch language, and have raised the natives from savagery, from immorality and evil manners, the facts are that they have not changed a particle the morals of the Marquesans, that they taught in their schools a trifling smattering of French, and that they did not make France loved and respected, but sought the domination of their order, the Picpus Congregation, at the expense of the Government. This domination they forced in the early days at the point of the bayonet, to the sacrifice of the lives of French officers and soldiers.

Bauda. That is true here and everywhere we French have gone. We have died to spread the power of the church. Nom d’un chien! Six campaigns in Africa, me! Et pire alors! Did not General La Grande pin this decoration on me?

Governor. Here is the very letter of Grosfillez to the authorities. He says that he visited the school at Taiohae, and that when he spoke to the pupils, many of them three or four years in the school, the good sister asked permission to translate his simple words into canaque so they could understand. Sapristi! Is that teaching French? Is not the calendar of the church here filled with foolishness, and almost all in canaque? Hein? Read this:

The governor thrust into my hands the almanac written by Father Simeon Delmas, of Taiohae, and published by the mission. It was in hektograph, neatly and beautifully written, and contained the religious calendar of the year, and sermons, admonitions, and anecdotes, in Marquesan, with a small minority in French; a photograph of Monseigneur Etienne Rouchouze, former vicar apostolic to Oceanica, with praise for his career; an anecdote of Bernadette of Lourdes, the famous peasant girl to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, together with a list of the apparitions of the Virgin in France, beginning in 1830, the other dates being ’46, ’58, ’71, and ’76; a prayer to Joan of Arc, with an attack on Protestantism (Porotetane) for burning her, and something about the Duke of Guise; a stirring article on Nero’s persecution of the Christians; an account of the Fall of the Bastille; a comparison between Clovis, king of France, and Napoleon; a tale of Charles V; and a table showing that the Catholic church had established missions in all the inhabited islands of this group since 1858, and giving the number of children in the schools when they were closed by the government as clerical.

“The mountain groaned and brought forth a mouse, a soldier,” said the almanac.

“That is treason,” said the governor, looking over my shoulder, “and what has all that foolishness to do with a dying race that does not know what it means? The church has done nothing for these people. They are not changed except for the worse. What has the church done for their health? Nothing. My predecessor wanted to stop the eating of popoi. He knew that it is dirty, not healthful, and the promiscuous way of eating it spreads disease. The church fought him and said popoi was all right. France! Have we not suffered enough by that church since the Edict of Nantes? Since time immemorial? The church is a corporation, selfish, scheming, always against any government it does not control. It has been the evil genius of France. Only Napoleon harnessed the beast and made it do his work, but it saw his humbling. The priests tell the canaques the Government is against the church, and that the church is in the right; that it is the duty of every Catholic to love the church first, because the church is Christ. They do not preach disaffection. Peut-Être, non. But they do not preach affection.

I. But you must admit that these priests lead lives of self-sacrifice; that personally they gain nothing. A meager fare and hard work. They visit the sick——

Governor. Visit the sick? They do that, and they bury the dead. But they do nothing to better conditions. We teach sanitation. The priests are themselves either ignorant or neglectful of sanitation. Their calendars, their tracts, their preaching, say not a word about health, cleanliness; nothing about the body, but all about the soul, about duties to the church. I am here primarily to study and aid the lepers, the consumptives and the other sick. To try and halt the disease which has killed thousands of unborn children, and the tuberculosis which takes most of the Marquesans in youth. I am a soldier, experienced in Africa, used to leprosy, and the care of natives. In Africa the church gives nothing to the people but its ritual. What has the church done here after seventy years?

I. Ah, governor, that is the very question PÈre David asked me as to the Government. He says they looked after the lepers when they had a free hand here.

Governor. Looked after them. They were not physicians. Those men are peasants crammed with a pitiful theology. They shall have nothing from me but the law.

He attacked the intermezzo of “Cavalleria Rusticana” on his flute, as Many Daughters arrived. Over her ear was a sprig of fern, and about her neck a string of fragrant nuts. Her very large eyes were singularly brilliant.

C’est toi qui pousse le pu me metai.” she complimented and tutoyed. “C’est toi qui n’a pas la pake? It is thou who playest the flute wonderfully. It is thou who has not any tobacco?”

“Ah, ma fille, you are well? You will have a drop of absinthe?” said the governor.

“With pleasure; I am as dry as the inside of an old skull.”

“But, my friend,” I remonstrated with the executive, aside. “She is a leper. Her sister is, too. Are you not afraid? She drinks from our glasses.”

“Me? I am a soldier, and a student of leprosy. It is my hobby. It is mysterious, that disease. I watch her closely.”

If the apostolic vicar felt keenly his inability to manage the affairs of the village and the islands to suit his ideas of morality and religion, so did the Protestant pastor. My house was very near the mission, and it was some days after I had arrived before I went to the dissenting church, half a mile across the valley. Monsieur Paul Vernier, the Protestant pastor, had been many years in the Marquesas. He was respected by the ungodly. Guillitoue hailed him as a brother, anarchist and infidel though he was himself. Vernier alternated between hunting souls to save and bulls to shoot, for he was a very son of Cush, and his quest of the wild cattle of the mountains had put him upon their horns more than once. Salvation he held first, and he was canny in copra, but many nights he lay upon the tops of the great hills when pursuit of game had led him far.

Vernier had a background, for, though born in Tahiti, his father had been a man of culture and his mother a charming Frenchwoman, whose home in Tahiti was memorable to visitors. Vernier had devoted his life to the Marquesans, and lived in this simple atmosphere without regret for Tahiti. The apostolic vicar said that Vernier was Antichrist made manifest in the flesh, but that was on account of the odium theologicum, which here was as bitter as in Worms or Geneva of old. The spirit of PÈre David was pierced by the occasional defections from his flock caused by the proselytizing of Vernier. Before I met him I had gone to his church with Great Fern and Apporo. It was a box-like, redwood building, its interior lacking the imagery and coloring of the Roman congregation. The fat angels of Brother Michel, the cherubim and seraphim in plaster on the faÇade of Father David’s structure were typical of the genius of that faith, round, smiling, and breathing good will to the faithful. Protestantism was not in accord with the palms, the flowers, and the brilliancy of the sunlight. Thirty made up the congregation, of whom fourteen were men, twelve women, and four children, though the benches would seat a hundred. The women, as in the Catholic church, wore hats, but I was the only person shod.

Men and women sat apart. During the service, except when they sang, no man paid any attention to the preacher, nor did but three or four of the men. They seemed to have no piety. The women with children walked in and out, and four dogs coursed up and down the aisle. No one stirred a hand or tongue at them.

Fariura, a Tahitian preacher, who replaced Vernier, was a devout figure in blackest alpaca suit and silk tie, but barefooted. As he stood on a platform by a deal table and read the Bible, I saw his toes were well spread, which in this country was like the horny hand of the laborer, proof of industry. Climbing the cocoanut-trees made one’s toes ape one’s fingers in radiation.

Tevao Kekela led the singing in a high-pitched coppery voice, and those who sang with her had much the same intonation and manner. Often the sound was like that of a Tyrolean yodel, and the lingering on the last note was fantastic. They sang without animation, rapidly, and as if repeating a lesson. In the Catholic church the natives were assisted by the nuns. These words were, of course, Marquesan, and I copied down a stanza or two:

Haere noara ta matorae
Va nia i te ea tiare,
Eare te pure tei rave,
Hiamai, na roto i te,
Taehae ote merie?
O te momona rahi
O te paraue otou, ta mata noaraoe?
Momona rahi roa
O te reira eiti to te merie?
Parau mai nei Ietue
Etimona Peteroe tia mai nioe,
Haa noara vau i tei nei po
Areva tuai aue.

Fariura prayed melodiously and pleadingly for ten minutes, during which Tevao Kekela’s father never raised his head but remained bowed in meditation. A tattooed man in front of me bent double and groaned constantly during the invocation. The others were occupied with their thoughts.

Then said Fariura, “Ma teinoa o Ietu Kirito, Metia kaoha nui ia, in the name of Jesus Christ, a good day to all the world.”

He began his hour’s sermon. The discourse was about Rukifero and his fall from Aki, and I discovered that Rukifero was Lucifer and Aki was paradise. He described the fight preceding the drop as much like one of the old Marquesan battles, with bitter recriminations, spears, clubs, and slings as weapons, and Jehovah narrowly escaping Goliath’s fate. In fact, the preacher said He had to dodge a particularly well-aimed stone. Fariura, Kekela, Terii, the catechist, and his wife, Toua, received communion, with fervent faces, while the others departed, lighting cigarettes on the steps, some mounting horses, and the women fording the river with their gowns rolled about their foreheads.

The preacher shook hands with me, the only white. He was in a lather from the heat and his unusual clothes, and the rills of sweat coursed down his body. His pantomime of the heavenly faction fight had been energetic. I took him to my house for a swig of rum, and we had a long chat on the activities of the demon, and ways of circumventing his wiles.

Men like Vernier were not deceived by dry ecclesiasticism. They knew how little the natives were changed from paganism, and how cold the once hot blast of evangelism had grown. Religion was for long the strongest tide in the affairs of the South Seas both under the heathen and the Christian revelation. Government was not important under Marquesan communism, for government is mostly concerned with enforcing opportunity for acquisitive and ambitious men to gain and hold wealth and power. In the days of the tapus gods and devils made sacred laws and religious rites. The first missionaries in the Marquesas, who sailed from Tahiti, were young Englishmen, earnest and confident, but they met a severe rebuff. They relate that a swarm of women and girls swam out to their vessel and boarded it.

“They had nothing on,” says the chronicle, “but girdles of green ferns, which they generously fed to the goats we had on board, who seemed to them very strange beings. The goats, deprived for long of fresh food, completely devastated the garments of the savage females, and when we had provided all the cloth we had to cover them, we had to drive the others off the ship for the sake of decency.”

Harris, one of the English missionaries, ventured ashore, and the next morning returned in terror, declaring that nothing would induce him to remain in the Marquesas. He feared for his soul. He said that despite his protestations and prayers the girls of the valley had insisted on examining him throughout the night hours to see if he was like other humans, and that he had to submit to excruciating intimacies of a “diabolical inspiration.” Crooks, Harris’s partner, dared these and other dangers and remained a year. Crooks said that in Vaitahu, the valley in which Vanquished Often and Seventh Man Who Wallows in the Mire lived, there were deified men, called atuas, who, still in life, wielded supernatural power over death, disease, the elements, and the harvests, and who demanded human sacrifices to appease their wrath. Crooks believed in the supremacy of Jehovah, but, like all his cloth then, did not doubt diabolism and the power of its professors.

For half a century American and English centers of evangelism despatched missionaries to the Marquesas, but all failed. The tapus were too much feared by the natives, and the sorcerers and chiefs held this power until the sailors and traders gradually broke it. They sold guns to the chiefs, and bought or stole the stone and wooden gods to sell to museums and collectors. They ridiculed the temples and the tapus, consorted with the women, and induced them for love or trinkets to sin against their code, and they corrupted the sorcerers with rum and gauds. They prepared the ground for the Christian plow, but it was not until Hawaiian missionaries took the field that the harvest was reaped. Then it was because of a man of great and loving soul, a man I had known, and whose descendants I met here.

I was picking my way along the bank of a stream when a deep and ample pool lured me to bathe in it. I threw off my pareu and was splashing in the deliciously cool water when I heard a song I had last heard in a vaudeville theater in America. It was about a newly-wedded pair, and the refrain declared that “all night long he called her Snookyookums.” The voice was masculine, soft, and with the familiar intonation of the Hawaiian educated in American English. I swam further and saw a big brown youth, in face and figure the counterpart of Kamehameha I, the first king of Hawaii, whose gold and bronze statue stands in Honolulu. He was washing a shirt, and singing in fair tune.

“Where’s your Snookyookums?” I asked by way of introduction.

He was not surprised. Probably he heard and saw me before I did him.

“Back on Alakea Street in Honolulu,” he replied, smilingly, “where I wish I was. You’re the perofeta [prophet] they talk about. I been makin’ copra or I’d been see you before. My name is Jimmy Kekela, and I was born here in that house up on the bank, but I was sent to school in Honolulu, and I played on the Kamehameha High scrub team. The only foot-ball I play now is with a cocoanut. I had a job as chauffeur for Bob Shingle, who married a sister of the Princess Kawananakoa, but my father wrote me to come back here. I’ll wring out this shirt, and we’ll go up and see my folks.”

The Kekela home was a large, bare house of pine planks from California raised a dozen feet on a stone paepae. Unsightly and unsuitable, it was characteristic of the architecture the white had given the Marquesan for his own graceful and beautiful houses of hard wood, bamboo, and thatch, of which few were left. I wrung out my pareu, replaced it, and scrambled up the bank with him. The house was in a cocoanut forest, the trees huge and lofty, some growing at an amazing angle owing to the wind shaping them when young. They twisted like snakes, and some so approached parallelism that a barefooted native could walk up them without using his hands, by the mere prehensility of his toes and his accustomed skill. In front of the steps to the veranda of the home were mats for the drying of the copra, and a middle-aged man, very brown and stout, was turning over the halves of the cocoanut meat to sun them all over.

Tahiatini, Many Daughters, the little leper lass

FranÇois Grelet, the Swiss, of Oomoa

“My father,” said Jimmy to me, and “Perofeta” to him. He shook hands gingerly in the way all people do who are unaccustomed to that greeting, and said, “Kaoha!” My answer, “Aloha nui oe!” surprised him, for it was the Hawaiian salute. On the veranda I was presented to the entire Kekela family, four generations. By ones and twos they drifted from the room or the grounds. Hannah, the widow of Habuku, was very old, but was eager to talk.

“I am a Hawaiian,” she said in that language, “and I have been in Atuona, on this piece of land, sixty years. My husband brought me here, and he was pastor in that church till he died. Auwe! What things went on here then! I have seen many men being carried by toward the Pekia, the High Place of Atuona, for roasting and eating. That was in war time, when they fought with the people of Taaoa, or other valley. Kekela and my husband with the help of God stopped that evil thing. Matanui, a chief, came to Hawaii in a whale-ship, and asked for people to teach his people the word of the true God. Four Hawaiians listened to Matanui, and returned with him to Hanavave, where the French priest Father Olivier, is now. A week later a French ship arrived with a Catholic priest. Auwe! He was angry to find the Protestants and tried to drive them out. They stayed with the help of the Lord, though they had a hard time. Then Kekela and we came, and we have seen many changes. He was a warrior, and not afraid of anything, even the devil. There are his sons, Iami and Tamueli, and his grandsons and granddaughters and their children. We are Hawaiian. We have no drop of Marquesan blood in us. Did you know Aberahama Linoconi?”

Hannah lifted herself from the mat on the floor, and brought from the house a large gold watch, very heavy and ornate, of the sort successful men bought fifty years ago. It was inscribed to James Kekela from Abraham Lincoln in token of his bravery and kindness in saving the life of an American seaman, and the date was 1864.

“That watch,” she said, “was given to Kekela by the big chief of America. When he died he gave it to his son, Tamueli. Tell the prophet why Aberahama Linoconi gave it to your grandfather, Iami!”

Jimmy, the former chauffeur, tried to persuade his uncle, Samuel, a missionary on another island, to tell the story, but finally himself narrated it in English.

“Grandfather Kekela was at Puamau, across this island, when he got this watch. He had been at Puamau some years and teachin’ people stop fightin’ an’ go church, when a whale-ship come in from Peru, an’ shot up the town. The Peru men killed a lot of Marquesans, and stole plenty of them to work in the mines like slave. They had guns an’ the poor Puamau native only spear and club, so that got away with it good an’ strong. Well, nex’ year come American whale-ship, an’ the mate come up the valley to ketch girl. He saw girl he love an’ chase her up the valley. The Puamau people let him go, an’ ask him go further. Then they tie him up and beat him like the Peru people beat them, and then they got the oven ready to cook him. The chief of Puamau come tell my grandfather what they goin’ do, an’ he was some sore. He put on his Sunday clothes he bring from Hawaii, an’ high collar an’ white necktie, an’ he go start something. He was young and not afraid of all hell. The mate was tied in a straw house, an’ everybody ‘roun’ was getting paralyzed with namu enata—you know that cocoanut booze that is rougher than sandpaper gin in Hawaii.

“They were scarin’ the mate almost to death when grandfather come along. The mate could see the umu heatin’ up, and the stones bein’ turned over on which he was goin’ to be cooked. Grandfather went in the hut. The mate was lyin’ on his back with his hands an’ feet tied with a purau rope, an’ his face was as white as a shirt. I remember grandfather used to say how white his face was. Kekela knelt down an’ prayed for the mate, an’ he prayed that the chief would give him his life. He prayed an’ prayed, and the chief listen an’ say nothin’. ‘Long toward mornin’ the chief couldn’t hold out no longer, an’ said if grandfather would give him the whale-boat he brought from Hawaii, his gun, an’ his black coat, he would let him go. Grandfather handed them all over, an’ took the mate to our house, and cured his wounds, and finally got him on a boat an’ away. It was no cinch, for the American ship had sailed away, and he had to keep the mate till another ship came. Many time the young men of Puamau tried to get the mate, to eat him, an’ when another ship arrived, an’ Kekela put the mate on board, they followed in their canoes to grab him. They pretty near were killin’ grandfather for what he did.

“The mate must have told the Pres’ent of United States about his trouble here, for grandfather got a bag of money, this watch, a new whaleboat, an’ a fine black coat brought him by an American ship with a letter from Mr. Lincoln. Father wrote back to Pres’ent Lincoln in Hawaiian, an’ thank him proper.”

“He must have lived to be a very old man,” I said, “because I was in Kawaiahao Church in Honolulu when he preached. He was asking for money for this church, and he took out the watch Lincoln gave him, and banged it on the pulpit so that we thought he would break it. He was greatly excited. I wrote a piece about his sermon in the Honolulu paper and it was printed in the Nupepa Kukoa, the Hawaiian edition of the Honolulu Advertiser.”

Samuel Kekela leaped to his feet and rushed into the house, from which he came with a yellowed copy of the Nupepa Kukoa, containing the article, with Kekela’s picture. To my own astonishment I read that the fourteen Hawaiians of the Kekela families who had accompanied the aged pioneer to Honolulu had journeyed in a schooner captained by my own shipmate, Lying Bill. I had seen the schooner in Honolulu Harbor.

Here was a remarkable group, a separate and alien sept, which, though living since before Lincoln’s Presidency in this wild archipelago, had preserved their Hawaiian inheritances and customs almost intact. This had been due to the initial impetus given them by their ancestor, and it had now ceased to animate them, so that they were declining into commonplace and dull copra makers, with but a tiny spark of the flame of piety that had lighted the soul of their progenitor.

“I am not the man my father was,” said John, the father of Jimmy. “I am an American because I am a Hawaiian citizen. My father had us all sent to Hawaii to be educated and to marry.”

The old Kekela had been a patriarch in Israel. Not alone had he lessened cannibalism and the rigidity of the tapu in the “great, cannibal isle of Hiva-Oa,” but he had instructed them in foreign ways. He had acquired lands, and now this family was the richest in the Marquesas. Only the Catholic mission owned more acres. They were proud, and convinced that they were anointed of the Lord, though Jimmy, being young, had no interest at all in religion. If Kekela the first had not been a missionary he would have been a chief or a capitalist. Hannah showed me the photographs of the kings and queen of Hawaii since Kamehameha IV with their signatures and affectionate words for Kekela. Now they were disintegrating, and another generation would find them as undone as the Marquesans. The contempt of government, trader, and casual white for all religion had affected them, who for two generations had been Christian aristocrats and leaders among a mass of commoners and admiring followers. The ten commandments were as dead as the tapus, and the church had become here what it is in America, a social and entertainment focus for people bored by life. The German philosopher has said that the apparent problem of all religions was to combat a certain weariness produced by various causes which are epidemic. Christianity for civilized people may be “a great storehouse of ingenuous sedatives, with which deep depression, leaden languor, and sullen sadness of the physiologically depressed might be relieved,” but for the Marquesans it had been a narcotic, perhaps easing them into the grave dug by the new dispensation brought by civilized outsiders. The gentle Jesus had been betrayed by the culture that had developed in his name, but which had no relation to his teaching or example. These good-willed Kekelas were as feeble to arrest the decay of soul and body of their charges as was the excellent Pastor Vernier or the self-sacrificing Father David. In the dance at the governor’s the flocks, at least, had an expression, corrupted as it was, of their desire for pleasure and forgetfulness of the stupid present.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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