Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (824 page)

The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a parapet.  At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands into an oblong peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and summer parlour of the king.  The midst is occupied by an open house or permanent marquee - called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now pronounced, a maniap’ - at the lowest estimation forty feet by sixty.  The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of coral, within by a frame of wood.  The floor is of broken coral, divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.

It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright shed, we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful people, some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of Butaritari.  The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled.  Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers.  At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved, upon examination, to be a privy on the European model.  In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Tebureimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces.  He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull: he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension: a pepper rajah muddled with opium, and listening for the march of a Dutch army, looks perhaps not otherwise.  We were to grow better acquainted, and first and last I had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet always to hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is no doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.

The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming.  But the queen, who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible; and there was present an interpreter so willing that his volubility became at last the cause of our departure.  He had greeted us upon our entrance:- ‘That is the honourable King, and I am his interpreter,’ he had said, with more stateliness than truth.  For he held no appointment in the court, seemed extremely ill-acquainted with the island language, and was present, like ourselves, upon a visit of civility.  Mr. Williams was his name: an American darkey, runaway ship’s cook, and bar-keeper at
The Land we Live in
tavern, Butaritari.  I never knew a man who had more words in his command or less truth to communicate; neither the gloom of the monarch, nor my own efforts to be distant, could in the least abash him; and when the scene closed, the darkey was left talking.

The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence.  So much the more vivid was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the islet, the Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his unmelodious David, Mr. Williams, chattering through the drowsy hours.

CHAPTER II - THE FOUR BROTHERS

The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little Makin; some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-independent chieftains do him qualified homage.  The importance of the office is measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be absolute; and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents.

On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa’s father, Nakaeia, the eldest son, succeeded.  He was a fellow of huge physical strength, masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some intelligence of men and business.  Alone in his islands, it was he who dealt and profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and his subjects toiled for his behoof in servitude.  When they wrought long and well their taskmaster declared a holiday, and supplied and shared a general debauch.  The scale of his providing was at times magnificent; six hundred dollars’ worth of gin and brandy was set forth at once; the narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry: and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the fore-hatch of a wrecked vessel, king and commons howling and singing as they went.  At a word from Nakaeia’s mouth the revel ended; Makin became once more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot eye.

The fear of Nakaeia filled the land.  No regularity of justice was affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and midnight murder were the forms of process.  The king himself would play the executioner: and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help and countenance of none but his own wives.  These were his oarswomen; one that caught a crab, he slew incontinently with the tiller; thus disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance, which he would then execute alone and return well-pleased with his connubial crew.  The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to conceive.  Beasts of draught, and driven by the fear of death, they were yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign’s life; they were still wives and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold their faces.  They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood.  In the days of Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which commanded the enclosure.  It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered.  Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal.  But during the remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms, accessories to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down.  Such was the ideal of wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise.  And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia’s well-guarded harem.  He was at that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a pleasure-house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one day he summoned a new wife.  She was one that had been sealed to him; that is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets.  She would be arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded, decked with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed; for death, as she well knew.  ‘Tell me the man’s name, and I will spare you,’ said Nakaeia.  But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover and the queens strangled her between the mats.

Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated.  Deeds that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice; his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed and kept at arm’s-length, give him the name (in the canonical South Sea phrase) of ‘a perfect gentleman when sober.’

When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign.  The warning was taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia’s.  Nanteitei dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag.  To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered.

The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief means of buttressing the throne.  Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others.  In his days, for instance, Messrs.  Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the town.  The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang.  For some time already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari - Maka and Kanoa, two brave childlike men.  Nakaeia would none of their doctrine; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some affection for their persons.  In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some expressions of respect.  Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more completely under the spell.  Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the king which soon grew paramount.  Nanteitei, with the royal house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced.  It was a compendious act.  The throne was thus impoverished, its influence shaken, the queen’s relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market.  I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married to two of these
impromptu
widows, and successively divorced by both for misconduct.  That two great and rich ladies (for both of these were rich) should have married ‘a man from another island’ marks the dissolution of society.  The laws besides were wholly remodelled, not always for the better.  I love Maka as a man; as a legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime, stern to repress innocent pleasures.

War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the storm burst.  The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain and perhaps alternated with monarchy.  The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king’s chief superiority is a form of closure - ‘The Speaking is over.’  After the long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous of the influence of Maka.  Calumny, or rather caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings.  In the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the dust.  The king sat in the maniap’ before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the succours as they came.  They came singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about his neck.  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the chief.  ‘The king called us,’ they would reply.  ‘Here is your place.  Sit down,’ returned the chief.  With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was summoned and surrendered.  About this period, in almost every part of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition.  Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was stripped of power.  The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt.

He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor.  This was by repute the hero of the family.  Alone of the four brothers, he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.  Nontemat’,
Mr. Corpse
, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned it well.  Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families.  Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia
redux
.  He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man’s character was much commented on in the island, and variously explained by opium and Christianity.  To my eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency.  Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men.  Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of government.  He played his part of bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits among his guards in dreadful expectation.  The same cowardice that put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre of a king.