CHAPTER VI

The Simple Life in the South Seas—Servant Problems again—Foods and Fruits of the Country—The Tree that digests—Home-made Vanilla—The Invaluable Lime—How to cook a Turtle—In an Island Bungalow—The Little House on the Coral Shore—Humours of Island Life—Burying a Cycle—A Network of Names—Mr. Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin-Roof—The Night-dress that went to Church—The Extraordinary Wedding—South Sea Musicians—A Conductor’s Paradise—Society Journalism in Song.

HOUSEKEEPING in the South Sea Islands demands a section to itself. All who are uninterested in such matters may, and doubtless will, begin to skip at this point.

Nothing helps the white house-mistress more than the simple standard of living set in most of the islands. It is true that if you are the wife of an important official in the Government House entourage of Fiji, or if you live in civilised, Americanised Honolulu, you will have to “do things” much as they are done at home. But, with these two exceptions, life in that enormous section of the globe known as the South Seas (much of it, by the way,—is north of the Line) is simple and unpretentious. In describing the home life of the white settlers in Raratonga, I describe what is, with small local variations, the life of settlers in almost every group of the Pacific, certainly, the life of all in the eight different groups I visited myself, during the years I spent in the South Seas. All over the island world, people dine in the middle of the day, except when entertaining friends, keep few servants or none, and dress and feed simply, because nothing else is possible. The trade cottons in the stores form the material of every lady’s dresses, and as for the making, common consent, not to speak of climatic conditions, votes the simplest style the best. Where every stitch of sewing in dress or blouse must be done by the person who is to wear the garment, it is astonishing how soon one grows to regard elaborate tuckings, flouncings, inlayings, with hostility, and how satisfied the eye becomes with the simpler and less “fatigued” lines of the garments fashioned by women who cannot hire a dressmaker for love or money. Evening dress is almost always of the “blouse” description, and in a climate which works universal mischief with delicate white skins, no matter how they are protected, this is no matter for regret. Men buy their drill suits ready-made from the trading stores at a few shillings apiece, and, with a white dinner-jacket and black cummerbund, any one is ready for the gayest of evening entertainments.

The great dress question—being thus resolved into the simple elements of a few cotton frocks for every day, and a muslin or two for best, behold! half the worry of modern life is lifted at a blow. “One must look like other people”—the goad of the toiling townswoman—becomes in the islands, “One looks like other people because one must,” and the words are a lullaby of rest.

After dress, comes servants, in the list of small worries that turn a woman’s fair locks grey, and swell the takings of the fashionable hairdressers. Well, it cannot be said that there is no servant trouble in the islands. White servants simply do not exist; they are far too much in demand in America and Australasia to desert either of these domestic paradises for the hotter and lonelier islands. Native girls cannot be had either, since they marry at thirteen or thereabouts. Native boys and men are the only resource. They come to work by the day, and are fed in the house; their wages are generally about five shillings weekly, in the case of a boy, and ten shillings for a man. So far as they go, they are satisfactory enough; they work hard, and are extremely honest, and they are amiability and good-nature itself. But their scope is decidedly limited. They can garden, under direction; they can sweep, fetch wood and water, clean the cooking-stove, husk and open the cocoanuts, wash, peel and boil the vegetables, scrub the verandah floor, clean the knives, wash up dishes, and whiten the shoes. That is about all. The mistress of the house and her daughters, if she is lucky enough to have any, must do all the serious cooking, make the beds, dust, tidy, and lay the table for meals.

One cannot say, however, that health suffers from the necessity of doing a certain amount of housework every day. On the contrary, the white women of the islands are strong and handsome, and do not seem to suffer from the heat nearly so much as the semi-invalid ladies who have come to be regarded as the type of white womanhood in India, that paradise of excellent service and servants.

Otherwise, the islands help out the housekeeper considerably. She can grow as much excellent coffee as the family are likely to want, on a few bushes in the back yard, and peppers only have to be pulled off the nearest wild chili tree. Taro, yam, sweet potato, can be bought from the natives for a trifle, or grown with very little trouble. There will probably be enough breadfruit, mango, orange, lime, and mammee-apple in the grounds of the house, to supply all the family needs, and if any one likes chestnuts, they can be picked up under the huge maupei trees along any road. The mammee-apple or paw-paw, mentioned above, is one of the most characteristic fruits of the islands. In Raratonga, it grows with extraordinary fertility, springing up of itself wherever scrub is cleared away, and coming to maturity in a few months. It is a slender palm-like tree, from ten to thirty feet high, with a quaintly scaled trunk, very like the skin of some great serpent, and a crown of pointed, pinnated leaves, raying out fanwise from the cluster of heavy green and yellow fruit that hangs in the centre. The fruit itself is rather like a small melon, though wider at one end than the other. It looks likes a melon, too, when cut open, and is both refreshing and satisfying, with a sweetish, musky flavour, The small, soft black seeds in the centre are a sovereign cure for dyspepsia, as is also the fruit itself in a lesser degree. The whole of this wonderful tree, indeed, seems to be possessed of digestive powers, for the toughest fowl or piece of salt beef will become tender in a few hours, if wrapped in its leaves. When boiled in the green stage the fruit is undistinguishable from vegetable marrow, and if cooked ripe, with a little lime juice, it can be made into a mock apple pie, much appreciated by settlers in a land where the typical British fruit cannot be grown.

Cooking bananas are much used, and grow wild on the lands of the natives, who sell them for a trifle. Every house has its own patch of eating bananas of many kinds, and orange-trees are almost sure to be there as well. There is always a huge bunch of bananas, and two or three great palm-leaf baskets of oranges, on the verandah of every house, and the inmates consume them both in uncounted numbers all day. Pineapples are easily raised in the little bit of garden, or they can be bought for a penny a piece. A vanilla vine will probably spread its beautiful thick leaves over the fence, and hang out, in due season, a store of pods for flavouring use in the kitchens. Arrowroot may be grown or bought—a big basket sells for sixpence, and it has no more to do with the arrowroot of the grocer’s shop at home, than a real seal mantle worth three figures has to do with a two guinea “electric”. Limes grow wild everywhere, and the island housewife makes full use of them. They clean her floors, her tables, her enamelled ware, stained table linen, or marked clothing; they wash her hair delightfully, and take the sunburn off her face and hands; they make the best of “long drinks,” and the daintiest of cake flavouring, they are squeezed into every fruit salad, and over every stew; they take the place of vinegar, if the island stores run low; in truth, they are used for almost every purpose of domestic cooking, cleaning, or chemistry.

Cabbage of an excellent kind grows wild in a few islands. Tomatoes, small but excellent in flavour, are found on the borders of the seashore, in many. Nearly all English vegetables are grown by the white settlers with extremely little trouble. The egg-plant, known in England as a greenhouse ornament, here thrives splendidly in gardens, and instead of the little plum-like fruit of the British plant, produces a great purple globe as big as a fine marrow, which resembles fried eggs very closely, if sliced and cooked in a pan. But in truth there is no limit to the richness and generosity of the island soil. Were it not for the troublesome item of butcher’s meat, housekeeping in the Pacific would be marvellously cheap and easy. That, however, is the housekeeper’s bugbear. Outside of Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and Honolulu, fresh beef is not be had at all, and fresh mutton not often. In very many islands tinned meat and fowls are the only resource; and the lady of the house must tax her ingenuity to the utmost to find ways of disguising the inevitable “tin.” Curry, stew, pie, mince; mince, pie, stew, curry—so runs the monotonous programme in most houses; and disguise it as one may, the trail of the tin is over it all.

It is a great day in the islands when turtle are caught. They are not common in the groups frequented by white people, since they prefer the lonely, barren atolls where the soil is dry and infertile; but now and then a “school” is found, and a big catch made. Then there is rejoicing in the land, and cooking in every house of an uncommonly-liberal and elaborate kind. The South Sea turtle are enormous, often weighing as much as seven or eight hundred pounds, and occasionally touching the thousand. Such a monster as this would easily feed a large household for a week—but alas, in tropical climates fresh meat, even when scalded, will not keep more than three days; so a good deal is usually wasted. The famous turtle soup, is made from the flippers, which are full of gelatine; and it may safely be assumed that no London aldermen fed on dying creatures carried half across the world has ever tasted soup so good as that made from a fine healthy turtle just out of the sea. The grass-green fat of the upper shell is used to put in the soup, and to fry the thick steaks of turtle beef, also to baste the big roast of turtle meat that is generally a feature of a turtle dinner. The eggs (of which there will probably be a large bucketful at least) are fried in green fat, and eaten as they are, shell-less, crisp and golden, tasting rather like roast chestnut. The tripe is cooked like ordinary tripe; the liver is fried. An excellent dinner, but surely an indigestible one? By no means. It is a curious property of this turtle meat that a much larger quantity of it can be eaten than of any ordinary butcher’s meat, without any sense of repletion or after ill effects. This is the great dainty of the South Sea islands, and if to a turtle dinner be added bisque soup made from mountain river crayfish, a real island fruit salad, with lime juice and cocoanut cream, a freshly plucked pineapple, a dish of mangoes, granadillas, and a cup of island-grown coffee, not the Carlton or the Savoy could do better for a travelling prince.

All South Sea Island “white” houses are more or less alike, being built of coral concrete (occasionally of wood) and fitted with imported windows and doors. The verandah is the great feature of the building; for there the family will probably spend most of their time, reading, smoking, receiving callers, or simply lounging in long chairs and listening to the monotonous singing of the natives in the thatched reed houses near at hand. Splendid climbing plants wreathe the pillars and sloping roofs of these verandahs—stephanotis, Bougainvillea, and countless gay tropical flowers whose ugly Latin names only an accomplished botanist could remember. Gardenias, gorgeous white trumpet lilies, tall bushes of begonia; pink, yellow and scarlet hibiscus, crimson poinsettia, delicate eucharis lilies, run riot about the grounds, and orange and lemon flowers fill the air with an exquisite perfume.

Within, the high-pitched, deep, church-like roof rises above a range of partition walls separating the different rooms, but giving a common air supply to all, since the dividing walls are not more than ten or twelve feet high. There are no secrets in an island house; what any one says at one end can be heard at the other, and a light burning late in anybody’s bedroom keeps all the rest awake. In the older houses the roof is of “rau” or plaited pandanus thatch, of a soft brown tone, delightfully cool and exceedingly picturesque. The rafters, in such a house, will be almost black with age, and beautifully latticed and patterned with finely plaited “sinnet” (cocoanut fibre). More modern houses have corrugated iron roofs, generally painted red. The water supply from these roofs is of some importance, and they are less expense and trouble than the thatch; but the latter is incomparably the more picturesque, and a good deal the cooler as well.

The floor is always covered with native matting (pandanus leaf, split and plaited). This is of a pleasant tan colour in tone, and very cool and clean. The furniture is generally basket and bamboo, with a native “tappa” cloth (of which I shall have more to say later on) on the table. There are sure to be groups of old native weapons on the walls—lances and spears and clubs and arrows—and a few island fans, arranged in trophies, and garlanded with chains of shells. On the steps of the verandah one usually finds a fern or two, planted in big white clam-shells off the reef, and there may be others in the drawing-room.’ A piano is a great luxury; the island climate is not kind to pianos. Harmoniums are more common.

The bedrooms may have ordinary beds imported from Auckland, or they may have (what is quite as good) native bedsteads made of ironwood, laced across with sinnet, and covered with soft pandanus leaf mats, over which the under sheet is laid. Unless it is the cool season there will not be a blanket. Mosquito curtains, of course, protect each bed. All windows and doors are wide open, day or night, hot season or cool.

The South Sea housekeeper has a few insect plagues to fight against, but not nearly so many as her sister in India or Jamaica. The ants eat everything that is not hung or covered up. Enormous hornets, in the cool season, lurk about ceilings, bookcases and cupboards, sleepy, cross, and ready to dart a fearful sting, if accidentally touched. Cockroaches are destructive at all times. Fleas do not trouble much, and flies are only annoying in a few islands. Mosquitoes are troublesome in the hot season, but give little annoyance at other times. Centipedes and scorpions exist, but are not common. They do come into houses occasionally, and (being very poisonous, though not deadly) frighten the inmates quite as much as the inmates undoubtedly frighten them. It is the rarest possible thing, however, to hear of a European being bitten.

Education is not an unsolvable problem in the islands, since quite a large number of groups possess convent schools, where even such extras as music, languages, and fancy needlework can be taught.

On the whole, the difficulties of housekeeping are somewhat less than at home, and the cost certainly much smaller. It is true that a good many tinned stuffs are used, and tinned food is always dear; but the cheapness of everything that the soil produces makes up that difference, and the simple standard of living swings the balance still further to the right side. I am of opinion myself that white families would benefit both in comfort and in pocket by adopting the native style of house, which is, as already mentioned, a structure of small neat sticks or poles set very closely and strongly, but not filled in. The roof is always thatched. In such a house, the air circulates freely without any draught, and there is a pleasant, diffused light during the daytime. At night, when native houses are more or less transparent, the privacy-loving white can draw thin cotton curtains across his walls until the lights are put out.

One such house, built for and used by white people, was conspicuous for the simple beauty of the design. The interior was very plainly furnished with a few bamboo tables and chairs, and a light stretcher bed or two. Its curtains were of printed muslin from the store, and its floor was nothing but white coral sand brought from the beach. The house stood sheltered, by tall palms, and the sea was so near that all day one could watch the soft sparkle of the creaming surf through the half-transparent walls, and all night long one slept to the matchless lullaby of the humming reef.

(Windows blurred with beating mud, grey London roaring by in the rain; haggard faces, and murky summer, and the snake of custom clipping stranglingly about the free man’s throat—O Island wanderer, back in the weary North, does your sea-bird’s heart fly swift from these to those, and-sicken for the lands where you must go no more?)

Raratonga is full of funny things, if one knows where to look for them. One would not suppose that the tombs of the natives were a likely spot. Yet I would defy the most serious of graveyard moralisers to count over the list of things that the Raratongan buries in the tombs of his departed relatives, without feeling his seriousness badly shaken. Little household ornaments belonging to the deceased are pathetic, certainly; so, in a lesser degree, are the Sunday clothes that often accompany their wearer on the long journey. But what is one to say of bicycles, Japanned bedsteads, and even pianos? All these things have been buried by Raratongans in the big concreted tombs that crop up sociably along the edges of the public road every here and there. The piano, I must add, was dug up again, by order of an indignant missionary, who gave the disconsolate mourners a good lecture on heathenistic practices, and the necessity of drawing the line somewhere.

Native names are sometimes exceedingly funny to the perverted white mind, although to the owners they may be dignified, poetic, and even beautiful. One young coffee-coloured lady of my acquaintance had been named (in Raratongan) “Cup-of-Tea.” Another was “Box-with-a-Hole-in-It”—another “Tin-of-Meat.” I should suppose, from my knowledge of their religious training, that each of these ladies possessed a godly scripture name of her own, properly bestowed on her at her proper baptism. But in the Cook Islands, the name a native is christened by, and the name he or she goes by, are almost always distinct, which is certainly confusing. Worse confusion still is caused by the odd habit of changing these commonly accepted names on any great occasion that seems to need special commemoration. The natives themselves never seem to become puzzled over all these name-changes, but so much can hardly be said of the whites. It is, at the least, perplexing to employ a gardener called Zebedee by the missionaries, Thunderstorm by his friends, and Tin Roof by his relatives—like the notable character in The Hunting of the Snark,


Whose intimate friends called him Candle-Ends,

And his enemies Toasted Cheese.


But it is even worse to be informed—some day, when you go to look after Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin Roof down in the village, and ask why he has not turned up to weed your pineapples—that his name isn’t any of the three, but “Barbed Wire,” because he has just finished putting up a fence of barbed wire round the grave of his boy who died last year, and has resolved to call himself henceforth, “Barbed Wire,” in memory of his son!

Native notions about European clothes often provide a feast of fun for the whites, who set the copies in dress.

When a lace-trimmed garment of mine, usually reserved for private wear under the shades of night and the shelter of a quilt and sheet, went to Sunday morning church as a best dress in full daylight, on the person of the laundress who had been entrusted with my clothes for the wash, the funny side of the affair was so much the more conspicuous, that the borrower never got the reproof she certainly ought to have had. And when a certain flower toque, made of poppies (a blossom unknown to the Pacific) first drove the women of the island half-distracted with excitement, and then led to thirty-six native ladies appearing simultaneously at a dance in Makea’s grounds, wearing most excellent copies of my Paris model, done in double scarlet hibiscus from the bush, the natural outrage to my feelings (which every woman who has ever owned a “model” will understand) was quite swallowed up in the intense amusement that the incident caused to everybody on the grounds.

I was unfortunate enough to be away on the island schooner when a great wedding took place—the nuptials of one of the queen’s nieces—and so missed the finest display of native dress and custom that had occurred during the whole year. The bride, I heard, wore fourteen silk dresses—not all at once, but one after the other, changing her dress again and again during the reception that followed the wedding ceremony in the mission church, until she almost made the white spectators giddy.

The presents were “numerous and costly” from the guests to the bride, and from the bride to the guests, for it is Raratongan custom to give presents to the people who come to your wedding; a fashion that would considerably alleviate the lot of the weary wedding guest, if only it could be introduced over here. The gifts for the bride were carried in by the givers, and flung down in a heap one by one, each being duly announced by the person making the present, who showed no false modesty in describing his contribution. “Here’s twenty yards of the most beautiful print for Mata (the bride), from Erri Puno!” “Here’s three baskets of arrowroot, the best you ever saw, for Mata, from Taoua.”

“Here’s eighteen-pence for Mata and Tamueli, from Ruru,” flinging the coins loudly into a china plate. So the procession went on, until the gifts were all bestowed, the bride meanwhile standing behind a kind of counter, and rapidly handing out rolls of stuff, tins of food, ribbons, gimcracks of various kinds, to her guests as they passed by. When all is added up, the amusement seems to be about all that any one really clears out of the whole proceeding.

The Cook Islanders are among the most musical of Pacific races. They have no musical instruments, unless “trade” mouth-organs, accordions, and jew’s harps may be classed as such, but they need none, in their choral singing, which is indescribably grand and impressive. Here as elsewhere in the islands, one traces distinctly the influence of the two dominant sounds of the island world—the low droning of the reef, and the high soft murmur of the trade wind in the palms. The boom of the breakers finds a marvellously close echo in the splendid volume of the men’s voices, which are bass for the most part, and very much more powerful and sonorous than anything one hears in the country of the “superior” race. The women’s voices are somewhat shrill, but they sound well enough as one usually hears them, wandering wildly in and out of the massive harmonies of the basses.

A Philharmonic conductor from the isles of the North would surely think himself in heaven, if suddenly transported to these southern isles of melody and song. The Pacific native is born with harmony in his throat, and time in his very pulses. It is as natural to him to sing as to breathe; and he simply cannot go out of time if he tries. Solo singing does not attract him at all; music is above all things a social function, in his opinion, and if he can get a few others—or better still, a few score others—to sit down with him on the ground, and begin a chorus, he is happy for hours, and so are they.

To the Pacific traveller, this endless chanting is as much a part of the island atmosphere as the palms and the reef and the snowy coral strand themselves. One comes, in time, to notice it hardly more than the choral song of beating breaker and long trade wind, to which it is so wonderfully akin. But at the first, wonder is continually awakened by the incomparable volume of the voices, and the curious booming sound—like the echo that follows the striking of some gigantic bell—which characterises the bass register of island men’s singing. The swing and entrain of the whole performance are intoxicating—the chorus, be it ten or a thousand voices, sweeps onward as resistlessly as a cataract, and the beat of the measure is like the pulse of Father Time himself. There are several parts as a rule, but they wander in and out of one another at will, and every now and then a single voice will break away, and embroider a little improvisation upon the melody that is like a sudden scatter of spray from the crest of a rolling breaker. Then the chorus takes it up and answers it, and the whole mass of the voices hurls itself upon the tune like the breaker falling and bursting upon the shore.

It is very wonderful, and very lovely; yet there are times—at one in the morning, let us say, when the moon has crept round from one side of the mosquito curtain to the other since one lay down, and the bats have finished quarrelling and gone home, and the comparative chill of the small hours is frosting the great green flags of the bananas outside the window with glimmering dew—when the white traveller, musical or unmusical, may turn over on an uneasy couch, and curse the native love of melody, wondering the while if the people in the little brown houses down the road ever sleep at all?

What are the subjects of the songs? That is more than the natives themselves can tell you, very often, and certainly much more than a wandering traveller, here to-day, and gone next month, could say. Many of the chants are traditional, so old that the customs they refer to are not half remembered, and full of words that have passed out of use. A good number now-a-days are religious, consisting of hymns and psalms taught by the missionaries, and improved on, as to harmony and setting, by the native. The island love of choral singing must be an immense assistance to the church services, since it turns these latter into a treat, instead of a mere duty, and the native can never get enough church, so long as there is plenty of singing for him to do. Some of the secular songs are understood to refer to the deeds of ancestors; some are amatory; some—and those the most easily understood by white people who know the native languages—are in the nature of a kind of society journal, recording the important events of the last few days, and making comments, often of a very free nature, on friends and enemies, and the white people of the island. Most of these latter are not good enough scholars to understand the chants, even if they can talk a little native, which is just as well, when oratorios of this kind are to be heard every evening among the “rau” roofed huts:


“Big-Nose who lives in the white house has got a new

suit of clothes.”

Chorus. “A new suit of clothes, a new suit, suit, suit of

clothes!”

“Big-Nose cannot fasten the coat, he is so fat, ai! ai,

fat like a pig fit for killing!”

Chorus. “Ai, Ai! a pig for killing, like a pig for killing,

Big-Nose is like a pig fit for killing!”

“Big-Nose had a quarrel with his wife to-day, a quarrel,

a great quarrel, Big-Nose drank wisiki, much wisiki.”

(All together, excitedly.) “A quarrel, a great quarrel,

much wisiki Big-Nose drank, Big-Nose!”

“The wife of Big-Nose of the white house has long hair,

though she is very old, long hair that came to her in

a box by the sitima (steamer)!”

Chorus. “Long hair, long hair, long hair, in a box on the

steamer. A box on the steamer, on the steamer,

long hair for the wife of Big-Nose who lives in the

white house.”


A resident who really understood the natives and their music once or twice translated choruses for me that were quite as personal as the above. I have never since then wondered, as I used to wonder, where on earth the merry peasants of opera, with their extraordinary knowledge of the principals’ affairs, and their tireless energy in singing about them, were originally sketched.

(Scholars will probably trace a resemblance to the Greek chorus here. I leave it to them to work out the wherefore, which makes me giddy even to think of, considering the geographical elements involved in the problem.)

But now enough of Raratonga, for the schooner Duchess is waiting to carry me away to the other islands of the group, and, after many thousands of miles travelled by steamer upon “all the seas of all the world,” I am at last to learn what going to sea really is.