A Footnote to History | Page 4

it not so that when David
killed Goliath, he cut off his head and carried it before the king?"
With the civil life of the inhabitants we have far less to do; and yet
even here a word of preparation is inevitable. They are easy, merry, and
pleasure-loving; the gayest, though by far from either the most capable
or the most beautiful of Polynesians. Fine dress is a passion, and makes
a Samoan festival a thing of beauty. Song is almost ceaseless. The
boatman sings at the oar, the family at evening worship, the girls at
night in the guest-house, sometimes the workman at his toil. No
occasion is too small for the poets and musicians; a death, a visit, the
day's news, the day's pleasantry, will be set to rhyme and harmony.
Even half-grown girls, the occasion arising, fashion words and train
choruses of children for its celebration. Song, as with all Pacific
islanders, goes hand in hand with the dance, and both shade into the
drama. Some of the performances are indecent and ugly, some only dull;
others are pretty, funny, and attractive. Games are popular.
Cricket-matches, where a hundred played upon a side, endured at times
for weeks, and ate up the country like the presence of an army. Fishing,
the daily bath, flirtation; courtship, which is gone upon by proxy;
conversation, which is largely political; and the delights of public
oratory, fill in the long hours.
But the special delight of the Samoan is the malanga. When people
form a party and go from village to village, junketing and gossiping,

they are said to go on a malanga. Their songs have announced their
approach ere they arrive; the guest-house is prepared for their reception;
the virgins of the village attend to prepare the kava bowl and entertain
them with the dance; time flies in the enjoyment of every pleasure
which an islander conceives; and when the malanga sets forth, the same
welcome and the same joys expect them beyond the next cape, where
the nearest village nestles in its grove of palms. To the visitors it is all
golden; for the hosts, it has another side. In one or two words of the
language the fact peeps slyly out. The same word (afemoeina)
expresses "a long call" and "to come as a calamity"; the same word
(lesolosolou) signifies "to have no intermission of pain" and "to have
no cessation, as in the arrival of visitors"; and soua, used of epidemics,
bears the sense of being overcome as with "fire, flood, or visitors." But
the gem of the dictionary is the verb alovao, which illustrates its pages
like a humorous woodcut. It is used in the sense of "to avoid visitors,"
but it means literally "hide in the wood." So, by the sure hand of
popular speech, we have the picture of the house deserted, the malanga
disappointed, and the host that should have been quaking in the bush.
We are thus brought to the beginning of a series of traits of manners,
highly curious in themselves, and essential to an understanding of the
war. In Samoa authority sits on the one hand entranced; on the other,
property stands bound in the midst of chartered marauders. What
property exists is vested in the family, not in the individual; and of the
loose communism in which a family dwells, the dictionary may yet
again help us to some idea. I find a string of verbs with the following
senses: to deal leniently with, as in helping oneself from a family
plantation; to give away without consulting other members of the
family; to go to strangers for help instead of to relatives; to take from
relatives without permission; to steal from relatives; to have plantations
robbed by relatives. The ideal of conduct in the family, and some of its
depravations, appear here very plainly. The man who (in a native word
of praise) is mata-ainga, a race-regarder, has his hand always open to
his kindred; the man who is not (in a native term of contempt) noa,
knows always where to turn in any pinch of want or extremity of
laziness. Beggary within the family--and by the less self-respecting,
without it--has thus grown into a custom and a scourge, and the
dictionary teems with evidence of its abuse. Special words signify the

begging of food, of uncooked food, of fish, of pigs, of pigs for
travellers, of pigs for stock, of taro, of taro-tops, of taro-tops for
planting, of tools, of flyhooks, of implements for netting pigeons, and
of mats. It is true the beggar was supposed in time to make a return,
somewhat as by the Roman contract of mutuum. But the obligation was
only moral; it could not be, or was not, enforced; as a matter of fact, it