William Henry Furness

“ A canoe is usually sighted long before it turns into the entrance to the lagoon, and then the members of the failu stand or squat on the stone platform at the seaward end of the house and quietly watch the slow approach of their daring comrades. When they are within a half a mile or so of the shore where the water is shoal and thickly sown with many protruding treacherous boulders,—the remains of ancient fish-weirs,—the mast with its sail of matting is unstepped and stowed ”

“ During their brief seasons of needful rest, not a fishermen dare leave the failu or, under any pretext whatsoever, visit his own house; he must not so much as look on the face of woman (with one exception) be she his own, or another’s, mother, wife or daughter. If the heedless fisherman steal but a glance, flying fish will infallibly bore out his eyes at night. They may not even join in song or dance with the other men of the failu in the evening, but must keep strictly and silently apart ”

“ From this blessing a philanthropist in Uap is shut off; no alms can there be given in secret; there is there no keeping the left hand from knowing what the right hand doeth; for open, trumpet-tongued proclamation, the ponderous fei and the jangling shells are as efficient as a housetop. Likewise, there can be no pocket-money in Uap,—even granting the pockets.
Next higher in value to the botha-ayar is the single large pearl shell, called yar-nu-betchrek; it, too, may be trimmed at the sides, but the thin outer edge is always left in its natural state, no matter how chipped and ragged. ”

“ They cannot starve, there are no wild beasts or snakes to harm them, and should they tear their clothes, nature mends them, leaving only a scar to show the patch; what matters it if they sleep under the high, star-powdered ceiling of their foster mother’s nursery, or curled up on mats beneath their father’s thatch? There is no implication here that parents are not fond of their children; on the contrary, they love them so much that they see their own children in all children. It is the ease of life and its surroundings which have atrophied the emotion of parental love. ”

“ When the grave was nearly filled in, a sprouting coconut was planted at the head and banked round with earth and lumps of coral. It was to provide food for Mafel on his journey to Falraman, and also to furnish oil not only for light, but also for his hair; a coconut is always thus planted at the head of a corpse,—witness the young trees in the graveyard. Slabs of stone and coral were piled up all about the grave for a distance of two feet, and earth tightly packed in the crevices, so that the big lizards,—“monitors,” the only large reptile on the island,—should not disturb the body. ”

“ In a short preface the Padre tells us that the modest treatise is the work of a residence in the island of Uap of about a year.
It is almost needless to remark that when a language has never been set forth in writing, its forms and even its pronunciation are as shifting as the sands of a beach. The only object of those to whom it is native is to understand and be understood. ”

“ To defer the funeral is a tribute of honour to the corpse; haste in burial affords the chance of a visitation from the athegith, wherefrom sickness and mishaps surely follow.
Old Livamadai, toothless, bald, and bent in the knees, hobbled down the next day and decided that the following day, or the third day after death, would be a delay sufficient to show respect to Mafel’s remains. Poor Gyeiga had one more weary night of vigil; they said she never left the side of the body and took barely a mouthful of food or a wink of sleep all those three long days and nights. ”

“ I rejoined Fatumak just outside the fence to watch and wait and ask questions. It was evident from the number of presents deposited at one end of the yard, beyond the group of guests, that Mafel had been very popular and that his friends were wealthy, and lavish withal, both in money and sympathy. “Yes,” whispered Fatumak, “Mafel was truly a fine man; we all liked him; those presents will be pretty nearly all returned after he is buried; they bring them to show their sorrow, but it is always expected that they will get them back again.” ”

“ A matting of bamboo grass, or else panels of interwoven fronds of the coconut palm form the side walls of the house; security and secrecy, it must be remembered, are hardly necessary in such small communities, where all are acquaintances, and every article of household use or of luxury is almost as well known to everybody as to the actual owner; stolen goods are not marketable and thefts are quite rare, except, of course, of coconuts that happen to fall unexpectedly and temptingly from a neighbour’s tree.
The interior of the house is neither bright nor cheerful ”

“ Is it any wonder then that the return of a canoe full of friends, fathers, and husbands, who, for the common good, have ventured forth on the vasty deep, far beyond the sight of their little world, should be hailed, as it always is by the simple islanders, with emotions almost akin to awe? ”

“ Standards of beauty vary so widely among different races, from the fat, round-faced beauties alleged to predominate in Turkish harems, to the thin oval-faced belles of Japan, and to the long-eared, black-toothed maidens of Borneo, that I was anxious to learn what in masculine eyes of Uap constituted feminine beauty. One day, after a phonograph recital for the men, fifteen or twenty from different parts of the island lingered behind to watch the putting of the tom-tom in its box ”

“ TATTOOING A desire to add to Nature’s scanty endowments of beauty, seems to be one of our earliest endeavours, after we have shed our fur and abandoned the arboreal abodes of our four-handed and conservative brothers. Whether, or not, we have in every instance, succeeded in improving on Nature’s unadorned charms must remain pretty much a matter of taste. ”

“ PERCEPTION OF COLOUR It must be indeed a strange world to live in where black, blue, and green are identical in colour; yet apparently it is in such a world that the men of Uap live. As far as the colour of their heads and hands is concerned, they might as well be Jumblees, whose heads, according to Edward Lear “were green and whose hands were blue;” to them such freaks would not be amiss; for all I could make out, the verdant coconut frond, the azure sky, and their own dark bodies are all of one colour. To them blue and green are only lighter shades of black ”

“ It was too dark for photographs, so I packed up my camera and, following Vincenti, I too plunged into the undergrowth, and in an incredibly short time, as it seemed, was in Dulukan. I learned that the route we had followed to the graveyard was as circuitous as could be devised, and that this was always the custom in the burial of people of importance; a poor man is hurried as quickly as possible to his grave, but a wealthy man is taken past as many houses as possible and in a roundabout way, so that the grief of his relatives may be seen and heard far and wide. ”

“ The ill omen attached to the flying sparks is devised to frighten poor women into taking care lest they set the house on fire; and, by the way, it is, indeed, almost miraculous that they [122] do escape daily, nay hourly conflagrations, even with this dread omen hanging over them. In the first place, their skirts are composed of four or five layers of dried leaves and strips of bast, and are so voluminous and distended that they stand out all round the body, outrivalling the old-fashioned hoopskirts; even when sitting down, the women are surrounded by a mound of veritable tinder. ”

“ In dress the mispil is in no wise distinguished from other women, except by tattoo marks on her hands and legs. In this tattooing there seems to be, however, no set pattern, and the designs are not so elaborate as lasting, and, since it is not the custom for any other women to be thus ornamented, I found it occasionally possible to decipher on hands and legs of highly respectable, albeit wrinkled and shrivelled, old grandmothers, a former chapter in their history when to them all the world was young and they were the cynosure of every eye in a failu. ”

“ MONEY AND CURRENCY In a land where food and drink and readymade clothes grow on trees and may be had for the gathering, it is not easy to see how a man can run very deeply in debt for his living expenses,—for which, indeed, there need be no barter, and if no barter, there is no need for any medium of exchange. ”

“ In the coconut groves, which form a broad band [22] along the coast all round the island, each house is surrounded by a neatly-swept clearing, and this little lawn, if that can be called a lawn which is devoid of grass, is brightened here and there by variegated crotons, suggestive of the neatness of the Uap housewife, and affording an attractive playground of chequered shade under the lofty palms. The houses are always built upon a platform, about two and a half to three feet high, of masses of coralline rock, which look like huge pieces of pumice stone ”

“ If a tafenai find that it had not been befittingly honoured at burial, it brings sickness to the household and will not desist until its dead body has been laid away with due lamentations and funeral songs, and the mach-mach man has pronounced a charm exhorting it to desist. It is the tafenai trying to escape out of the body that makes a person ill, and all the charms said over sick people are exhortations to the tafenai to remain; when a man is delirious, his tafenai has left his body and it may or may not be enticed to return. ”

“ The men of the failu treat their mispils with far more respect and devotion than is generally shown by the men outside to the wives of their own household. The mispils are absolutely faithful to the men of their failu or pabai, regarding themselves as unquestionable property, having been sought and captured at the risk of men’s lives, and paid for withal in costly pieces of stone money. ”

“ The mispil’s food, and her luxuries, such as tobacco and betel nut, are supplied by the men, and she is never required to work in the taro fields, as are the wives and daughters of the district. At quite a distance, in the bush behind the failu, a little house is built for her sole use when she wishes to be secluded; here she occupies her time in making new skirts for herself of leaves, and during her sojourn in her little home, known as tapal, the men sedulously place her food near by, but dare not so much as take one step within the enclosure around her house. ”

“ In every failu and pabai there lives a young woman, or sometimes two young women, who are the companions without preference to all the men of the house; I was assured repeatedly, moreover, that this possession of a wife in common never awakens any jealous animosity among themselves in the breasts of the numerous husbands. A mispil must always be stolen by force or cunning, from a district at some distance from that wherein her captors reside. ”

“ When a man sleeps, his tafenai escapes and wanders about playing all manner of queer pranks; in the morning when he awakes, it is the tafenai creeping back into his body through the nostrils that rouses him, wherefore a man so often wakes up sneezing or coughing. “A wise man has his tafenai in his head; a fool has it in his belly,” said Fatumak. ”

“ During the fishing season every fisherman, while plying his craft, lies under a most strict taboo. Wherefore, one very important use of the failu, or “house on the shore,” possibly its primitive cause, is to provide a place of seclusion for the tabooed fishermen during their intervals of rest. After three or four days and nights of hard work in boats on the open sea outside the lagoon, the fishermen return to the failu to distribute their haul of fish and to repair damages to their boats and nets. Whether the sea has been calm or stormy, they are always an exhausted crew ”