In the South Seas | Page 4

I had never
again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to- day, I
should be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised. The majority of
Polynesians are easy folk to get in touch with, frank, fond of notice,
greedy of the least affection, like amiable, fawning dogs; and even with
the Marquesans, so recently and so imperfectly redeemed from a
blood-boltered barbarism, all were to become our intimates, and one, at
least, was to mourn sincerely our departure.

CHAPTER II
--MAKING FRIENDS

The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over- estimated.
The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak
with elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has
a tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an attempt upon the
others.
And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters
abound. Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the
bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and hamlet;
and even where these are unserviceable, the natives themselves have
often scraped up a little English, and in the French zone (though far less
commonly) a little French-English, or an efficient pidgin, what is called

to the westward 'Beach-la-Mar,' comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now
taught, besides, in the schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of
British ships, and the nearness of the States on the one hand and the
colonies on the other, it may be called, and will almost certainly
become, the tongue of the Pacific. I will instance a few examples. I met
in Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he
had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one word of
German. I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in Rapa-iti
that while the children had the utmost difficulty or reluctance to learn
French, they picked up English on the wayside, and as if by accident.
On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in the Carolines, my friend
Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the lads playing cricket on the
beach and talking English; and it was in English that the crew of the
Janet Nicoll, a set of black boys from different Melanesian islands,
communicated with other natives throughout the cruise, transmitted
orders, and sometimes jested together on the fore-hatch. But what
struck me perhaps most of all was a word I heard on the verandah of
the Tribunal at Noumea. A case had just been heard--a trial for
infanticide against an ape- like native woman; and the audience were
smoking cigarettes as they awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable
French lady, not far from tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared
she would engage the prisoner to be her children's nurse. The
bystanders exclaimed at the proposal; the woman was a savage, said
they, and spoke no language. 'Mais, vous savez,' objected the fair
sentimentalist; 'ils apprennent si vite l'anglais!'
But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first stage of my
relations with natives I was helped by two things. To begin with, I was
the show-man of the Casco. She, her fine lines, tall spars, and snowy
decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon, and the white, the gilt, and the
repeating mirrors of the tiny cabin, brought us a hundred visitors. The
men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms, as their fathers
fathomed out the ships of Cook; the women declared the cabins more
lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in the
chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I
have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and
delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions. Biscuit,
jam, and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the

photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their everyday
costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in three weeks'
sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign; alien faces, barbaric
dresses, they were now beheld and fingered, in the swerving cabin,
with innocent excitement and surprise. Her Majesty was often
recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss her photograph;
Captain Speedy--in an Abyssinian war-dress, supposed to be the
uniform of the British army--met with much acceptance; and the
effigies of Mr. Andrew Lang were admired in the Marquesas. There is
the place for him to go when he shall be weary of Middlesex and
Homer.
It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth some
knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not
much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same