Читать книгу Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific - Felix Speiser - Страница 15

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Maei is a small island whose natives have nearly all disappeared, as is the case on most of its neighbours. There is one small plantation, with the agent of which the Resident had business. After we had passed the narrow inlet through the reef, we landed, to find the agent in a peculiar, half-mad condition. He pretended to suffer from fever, but it was evident that alcohol had a good deal to do with it, too. The man made strange faces, could hardly talk and was quite unable to write; he said the fever had deprived him of the power of using his fingers. He was asked to dinner on board, and as he could not speak French nor the Resident English, negotiations were carried on in biche la mar, a language in which it is impossible to talk about anything but the simplest matters of everyday life. Things got still worse when the agent became more and more intoxicated, in spite of the small quantities of liquor we allowed him. I had to act as interpreter, a most ungrateful task, as the planter soon began to insult the Resident, and I had to translate his remarks and the Resident’s answers. At last, funny as the whole affair was in a way, it became very tiresome; happily, matters came to a sudden close by the planter’s falling under the table. He was then taken ashore by his native wife and the police-boys, who enjoyed this duty immensely. We smoked a quiet pipe, looked after the fish-hooks—empty, of course—and slept on deck in the cool night air. Next morning the planter came aboard somewhat sobered and more tractable. He brought with him his wife, and their child whom he wished to adopt. As the native women do not as a rule stay with their masters very long, the children are registered under the formula: “Child of N. N., mother unknown,” an expression which sounds somewhat queer to those who do not know the reason for it.

After having finished this business, we weighed anchor and set sail for Tongoa. This is one of the few islands whose native population does not decrease. The Presbyterian missionary there gives the entire credit for this pleasant fact to his exertions, as the natives are all converted. But as in other completely Christianized districts the natives die out rapidly, it is doubtful whether Christianity alone has had this beneficial effect, and we must seek other causes, though they are hard to find.

After a clear night we sailed along the coast of Epi. The bright weather had changed to a dull, rainy day, and the aspect of the landscape was entirely altered. The smiling islands had become sober, lonely, even threatening. When the charm of a country consists so entirely in its colouring, any modification of the atmosphere and light cause such a change in its character that the same view may look either like Paradise or entirely dull and inhospitable. What had been thus far a pleasure trip, a holiday excursion, turned suddenly into a business journey, and this change in our mood was increased by a slight illness which had attacked the Resident, making the jovial gentleman morose and irritable.

The stay in Epi was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for Malekula, anchoring in Port Sandwich.

Port Sandwich is a long, narrow bay in the south of Malekula, and after Port Vila the most frequented harbour of the group, as it is very centrally located and absolutely safe. Many a vessel has found protection there from storm or cyclone. The entrance to the bay is narrow, and at the anchorage we were so completely landlocked that we might have imagined ourselves on an inland lake, so quiet is the water, surrounded on all sides by the dark green forest which falls in heavy waves down from the hills to the silent, gloomy sea.

Immediately after our arrival my companions went pigeon-shooting as usual; but I soon preferred to join the son of the French planter at Port Sandwich in a visit to the neighbouring native village. This was my first sight of the real, genuine aborigines.

No one with any taste for nature will fail to feel the solemnity of the moment when he stands face to face for the first time with primitive man. As the traveller enters the depths of the virgin forest for the first time with sacred awe, he feels that he stands before a still higher revelation of nature when the first dark, naked man suddenly appears. Silently he has crept through the thicket, has parted the branches, and confronts us unexpectedly on a narrow path, shy and silent, while we are struck with surprise. His figure is but slightly relieved against the green of the bushes; he seems part of the silent, luxuriant world around him, a being strange to us, a part of those realms which we are used to imagine as void of feeling and incapable of thought. But a word breaks the spell, intelligence gleams in his face, and what, so far, has seemed a strange being, belonging rather to the lower animals than to human-kind, shows himself a man, and becomes equal to ourselves. Thus the endless, inhospitable jungle, without open spaces or streets, without prairies and sun, that dense tangle of lianas and tree-trunks, shelters men like ourselves. It seems marvellous to think that in those depths, dull, dark and silent as the fathomless ocean, men can live, and we can hardly blame former generations for denying all kinship with these savages and counting them as animals; especially as the native never seems more primitive than when he is roaming the forest, naked but for a bark belt, with a big curly wig and waving plumes, bow and arrow his only weapons. When alarmed, he hides in the foliage, and once swallowed up in the green depths which are his home and his protection, neither eye nor ear can find any trace of him.

A DANCING-TABLE ON DANCING-GROUND NEAR PORT SANDWICH, MADE OF CORAL PLATES.

But our ideas change when we enter his village home, with its dancing-grounds with the big drums, the sacred stone tables, idols and carved tree-trunks, all in a frame of violently coloured bushes—red, purple, brown and orange. Above us, across a blue sky, a tree with scarlet flowers blows in the breeze, and long stamens fall slowly down and cover the ground with a brilliant carpet. Dogs bark, roosters crow and from a hut a man creeps out—others emerge from the bush and from half-hidden houses which at first we had not noticed. At some distance stand the women and children in timid amazement, and then begins a chattering, or maybe a whispered consultation about the arrival of the stranger. We are in the midst of human life, in a busy little town, where the sun pours through the gaps in the dark forest, and flowers give colour and brightness, and where, after all, life is not so very much less human than in civilization.

Then the forest has lifted its veil, we have entered the sanctuary, and the alarming sensation of nature’s hostility is softened. We white men like to talk about our mastery over nature, but is it not rather true that we flee from nature, as its most intense manifestations are oppressive to us? Is not the savage, living so very close to nature, more its master, or at least its friend, than we are? We need space and the sight of sun and sky to feel happy; the night of the forest, the loneliness of the ocean are terrible to us, whilst to the native they are his home and his element.

It is evident that under our first strong impression of the native’s life we overlook much—the filth, the sores, the brutality of social life; but these are really only ripples on an otherwise smooth existence, defects which are not less present in our civilization, but are better concealed.

The next day we followed the coast of Malekula southward. There are immense coral reefs attached to the coast, so that often the line of breakers is one or two miles away from the shore. These reefs are a solid mass of cleft coral stones constantly growing seaward. Their surface is more or less flat, about on a level with the water at low tide, so that it then lies nearly dry, and one can walk on the reefs, jumping over the wide crevices in which the sea roars and gurgles with the rise and fall of the breakers outside. These ever-growing reefs would surround the whole coast were it not for the fresh water that oozes out from the land and prevents the coral from growing at certain points, thus keeping open narrow passages through the reef, or wider stretches along the coast free from rocks. These basins form good anchorages for small craft, as the swell of the open sea cannot cross the reef; only the entrances are often crooked and hard to find.

Our captain brought us safely into a quiet lagoon, where the yacht lay in deep green water, smooth as glass, while beyond the reef the breakers dashed a silver line across the blue ocean.

Of course we immediately went shooting on the reef. I did not have much sport, as I could see nothing worth shooting, but I was much interested in wading in the warm water to observe the multiform animal life of the reef. There was the “bêche-de-mer,” the sea-cucumber, yellow or purplish-black, a shapeless mass lying in pools; this is a delicacy highly valued by the Chinese and therefore a frequent article of exportation. The animals are collected, cut open, dried and shipped. There was the ugly muræna, which goes splashing and winding like a snake between boulders, and threatens the intruder with poisonous looks and snapping jaws. Innumerable bright-coloured fish shot hither and thither in the flat pools, there were worms, sea-stars, octopus, crabs. The wealth of animal life on the reef, where each footstep stirs up a hundred creatures, is incredible, and ever so many more are hidden in the rocks and crevices.

The plants that had taken root in the coral were mostly mangrove bushes with great forked roots.