In the South Seas | Page 5

convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both
cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs
deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding
money as the means and object of existence. The commercial age, in
each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war abroad and patriarchal
communism at home. In one the cherished practice of tattooing, in the
other a cherished costume, proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off:
beef, driven under cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the
meat-loving Highlander; long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the
man- eating Kanaka. The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and
resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs,
reminded me continually of the days of Lovat and Struan. Hospitality,
tact, natural fine manners, and a touchy punctilio, are common to both
races: common to both tongues the trick of dropping medial consonants.
Here is a table of two widespread Polynesian words:-
House. Love.
Tahitian FARE AROHA
New Zealand WHARE
Samoan FALE TALOFA
Manihiki FALE ALOHA
Hawaiian HALE ALOHA
Marquesan HA'E KAOHA
The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan

instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots.
Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch,
written with an apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a
perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to this day. When a Scot
pronounces water, better, or bottle--wa'er, be'er, or bo'le--the sound is
precisely that of the catch; and I think we may go beyond, and say, that
if such a population could be isolated, and this mispronunciation should
become the rule, it might prove the first stage of transition from t to k,
which is the disease of Polynesian languages. The tendency of the
Marquesans, however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the
very common letter l, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is
agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon
grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will you
find such names as Haaii and Paaaeua, when each individual vowel
must be separately uttered.
These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my
own folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not only
inclined me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but
continually modified my judgment. A polite Englishman comes to-day
to the Marquesans and is amazed to find the men tattooed; polite
Italians came not long ago to England and found our fathers stained
with woad; and when I paid the return visit as a little boy, I was highly
diverted with the backwardness of Italy: so insecure, so much a matter
of the day and hour, is the pre-eminence of race. It was so that I hit
upon a means of communication which I recommend to travellers.
When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of superstitious belief, I
cast back in the story of my fathers, and fished for what I wanted with
some trait of equal barbarism: Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's
head, the second-sight, the Water Kelpie,--each of these I have found to
be a killing bait; the black bull's head of Stirling procured me the
legend of Rahero; and what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the
Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand,
about the Tevas of Tahiti. The native was no longer ashamed, his sense
of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of
kinship that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content
himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown. And the presence
of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk in clouds of

darkness.
The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the west
of the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A grove of
palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as for a triumph)
with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour. A road runs from end
to end of the covert among beds of flowers, the milliner's shop of the
community; and here and there, in the grateful twilight, in an air filled
with a diversity of scents, and still within hearing of the surf upon the
reef, the native houses stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same
word, as we have seen, represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with
scarce a shade of difference, the abode of man. But although the word
be the same, the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan,
among the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most
commodiously lodged. The