Society Islands

“ This island was the chief seat of the idolatry of the Society Islands. It was looked upon as a sacred isle by the inhabitants of the other islands of the group, and more idols existed and more human sacrifices were offered up there than in all the others. We were so completely deceived by the plausible manners of the king and queen and those who accompanied them, that the captain and I, the surgeon, and two of the mates, went on shore to visit them in return, accompanied by several of the crew, leaving the ship in charge of Mr Randolph, the first mate. ”

“ At the Society Islands, the natives had learned the fair value of their commodities, and would no longer exchange even their yams, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, for beads, spangles, and fragments of looking-glasses ”

“ Maitea, which rises from the sea as an exceedingly abrupt cone, and Tapamanu, appear to be the only islands without almost completely encircling barrier-reefs. The coasts are fairly indented, and, protected by these reefs, which often support a chain of green islets, afford many good harbours and safe anchorages. In this respect the Society Islands have the advantage of many Polynesian islands.
The populations of the chief islands are: Tahiti 10,300, Moorea 1600, Raiatea and Tahaa 2300, Huaheine 1300, Bola-Bola 800 ”

“ Society Islands (24) , an archipelago in the South Pacific, consisting of 13 principal islands and numerous islets, the chief being Tahiti; they are mountainous, and engirdled by belts of flat land as well as coral reefs; have a fertile soil and luxuriant vegetation, while the climate is healthy though enervating; the inhabitants are intelligent but indolent, and the land is worked by immigrant races. ”

“ The houses of the Society Islands are, indeed, little more than thatched roofs supported on pillars about seven or eight feet in height, the pillars tapering from the base to the top, and not being quite upright, but sloping a little inward. ”

“ For that purpose, I have given and entrusted the spiritual affairs of those islands to the fathers of the Society, so that by their excellent method of procedure and their gentleness they may continue to attract and convert the natives, who are very numerous. Already have they set their hands to the labor, although the number of subjects that they have is few; because those of this order come but very seldom, and they have much to which to attend, and every day they have more. ”

“ The number of those who paid tribute in this island could not have been very large in the eight missions that existed when the island came into our possession, when one considers the state of insubordination in which that multitude were living, most of whom were separated from organized society and in revolt in the interior of the territory. ”

“ As soon as Father Alonso Sanchez, a religious of the Society of Jesus, came here, ordered and empowered by all the estates of the islands to discuss certain matters regarding the service of our Lord, and the welfare and preservation of the inhabitants and natives of those islands, I ordered certain members of my councils to come together to hear him. ”

“ As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelligence must direct the man of labour. If the Tacksmen be taken away, the Hebrides must in their present state be given up to grossness and ignorance; the tenant, for want of instruction, will be unskilful, and for want of admonition will be negligent. The Laird in these wide estates, which often consist of islands remote from one another, cannot extend his personal influence to all his tenants ”

“ In the absence of any such authority the more respectable settlers at the Bay of Islands had organised themselves into a self-constituted Association, into whose hands was committed the administration of a rude justice, which recognised {4} a liberal application of tar and feathers as meet punishment for some of the offences against society. ”

“ By going away Do you think that the Missionaries have been of great Service in New Zealand?
Of very great Service; immense Service. I look upon the Northern Part of the Island as a Christian People. There are Individuals who are not Christians, but they generally are Christians. They observe the Sunday very strictly. The Population in the Bay of Islands, as far as Europeans are concerned, are Outcasts of Society, the Majority of them, are they not? ”

“ This seems to be notably true among the island women of the world. The peoples of the seas, removed from many of the pressing conditions and harsh frictions which are present in the larger countries of the continent, exhibit a freedom, if the term may be justly applied to undeveloped races, which is not the possession of many of the larger and older nations of men. One is prepared, of course, for great variety of blood, custom, and development among the peoples who inhabit the islands and the lands that lie out of the beaten track of travel and commerce. ”

“ The great business of insular policy is now to keep the people in their own country. As the world has been let in upon them, they have heard of happier climates, and less arbitrary government; and if they are disgusted, have emissaries among them ready to offer them land and houses, as a reward for deserting their Chief and clan. Many have departed both from the main of Scotland, and from the Islands ”

“ However, to a certain degree, the characteristic indolence of these Islanders is less dependent on themselves than on natural law, for the physical conditions surrounding them undoubtedly tend to arrest their vigour of motion, energy of life, and intellectual power. ”

“ And now perhaps it may be wondered at, that an island so exquisitely furnished with the conveniences of life, and so well adapted, not only to the subsistence, but likewise to the enjoyment of mankind, should be entirely destitute of inhabitants, especially as it is in the neighbourhood of other islands, which in some measure depend upon this for their support. ”

“ The islands appeared quite charming, being agreeably diversified with beautiful hills and intermediate vallies. Each family or tribe appeared to have its separate district, and to compose a separate government or community, all the land being regularly laid out into regular and fair plantations, as had formerly been observed at Pasch, or Easter island. In all respects, the natives were the most civilized and best disposed people they had seen in the South Seas. ”

“ The plenty of this Island enticed beggars to it, who seemed so burdensome to the inhabitants, that a formal compact was drawn up, by which they obliged themselves to grant no more relief to casual wanderers, because they had among them an indigent woman of high birth, whom they considered as entitled to all that they could spare. ”

“ It became necessary, however, to call at some of the groups we passed, and it surprised us to find how diversified are the manners and customs of the natives who inhabit the numerous islands of the South Seas. Not only are the people of each group governed by different laws, but frequently each island is distinct from the others in the language spoken and the manner of life followed upon it. ”

“ The Population of the Northern Island is certainly very great; the Southern is much more thinly populated; quite a different Race of Men; they are much blacker; they are a very inferior Race of Men altogether. I had an Idea of colonizing Cloudy Bay myself.
Where is that?
That is on the Southern Island. What deterred you from that?
The Circumstance of Captain Stewart having gone down to assist those Natives deterred me; I was afraid to go among them after that. I expected that they would take every Ship connected with New South Wales and Great Britain. ”

“ The more I saw of their life, the more desirable it seemed that they might continue to escape any serious encroachments of European or American civilization. They have no doctors, because illness is almost unknown in their islands. Crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, evils all too common with us, are of such rare occurrence that one may say they do not exist. It may be said, too, without overstatement, that their community life very nearly approaches perfection. Every atoll is a little world to itself with a population varying from twenty-five to perhaps three hundred inhabitants. ”

“ Not a score of them returned to their island homes—the rest perished under the lash and brutality of their cruel taskmasters.
Towards 1870 the demand for South Sea Islanders became very great. They were wanted in the Sandwich Islands, in Tahiti and Samoa; for, naturally enough, with their ample food supply, the natives of these islands do not like plantation work, or if employed demand a high rate of pay. ”

“ The Missionaries themselves, I believe, have not been much upon the South Island; it is very little known, I believe.
You say the Natives have not any thing in the Nature of a native Manufacture of Ropes?
They have not what may be called a native Manufactory, but each Person makes Ropes for himself; but at the same Time that they have Ropes of their own they esteem ours superior. Do not they make remarkably good Fishing Lines; so good that our People here supply themselves with them? ”

“ The comparative handful of proprietors who own the surface of the British Islands would be doing only what English law gives them full power to do, and what many of them have done on a smaller scale already, were they to exclude the millions of British people from their native islands. ”

“ The white population is leaving the islands—those who can get away. Those who can't, whose fortunes are tied up in the islands, put one in mind of a lot of ship-wrecked voyagers, who, with all hope of succor abandoned, are waiting for their ship to sink.
They have expatriated themselves (it amounts to that) , and for sixteen years have become acclimated—invested their lives and fortunes in the islands. But they are not the right color—their color is against them. ”

“ Of all the foreign ships which reach there five sixths are of our country. Such are the ties of beneficence and of commerce by which we are bound to these islands. No other nation there has an interest comparable in character or amount to ours. Meanwhile the native population is constantly decaying, so that I presume now it is not more than fifty thousand.
This brief review furnishes a glimpse of our interest in these islands. They are the wards of the United States. We cannot turn away from them. The Government must add its contribution also. ”

“ On nearly every island they are dying to-day—a tragedy, an inevitable one, which the coming of the European has hastened, but not caused.
"Whether or not it may be accounted for on grounds of a distant kinship, it is impossible to stop long in the islands without absorbing, to a certain extent, the native point of view. Things which seemed rubbish at first slowly acquire significance; one begins to wonder if, after all, there may not be varieties of knowledge lost to us in the complexities of civilization.... ”

“ I think, with the Exception of myself and some others, very few Gentlemen have ever visited the Country. There are a great many bad Characters on the Island; but they are well able to distinguish between the Gentlemen and the Individuals alluded to. ”

“ What the Islands are they are because of American effort, American enterprise, American capital. American missionaries civilized them; Americans gave them laws wisely adapted to the customs and habits of their people; American enterprise and Boston capital established the sugar culture and other of the important industries; perhaps I ought to add that American sailors spread among the Islands the vices and diseases which, more than all else, have caused the rapid decrease of the population, and to combat and check which added toil and trouble to the labors of the American missionaries. ”

“ It is a singular fact in the physiology of the inhabitants of this part of the world that the chiefs, and persons of hereditary rank and influence of the islands, are, almost without exception, as much superior to the peasantry or common people in stateliness, dignified deportment, and physical strength as they are in rank and circumstances, although they are not elected to their station on account of their personal endowments, but derive their rank and elevation from their ancestry. This is the case with most of the groups of the Pacific, but peculiarly so in Tahiti and the adjacent isles. ”

“ Emigration and colonization from islands.
Even when agriculture, fisheries and commerce have done their utmost, in the various stages of civilization, to increase the food supply, yet insular populations tend to outgrow the means of subsistence procurable from their narrow base. Hence islanders, like peninsula peoples, are prone to emigrate and colonize. This tendency is encouraged by their mobility, born of their nautical skill and maritime location. ”

“ There is, besides, a further benefit to be anticipated from the islands becoming, as proposed, the future seat of a whaling station, on a systematic plan, which is, that their colonization will grow out of their being so appropriated; and what population could be more fitted to inhabit them than a race of hardy, enterprising British seamen? ”

“ It was sufficient for a Laird of the Hebrides, if he had a strong house, in which he could hide his wife and children from the next clan. That they are not large nor splendid is no wonder. It is not easy to find how they were raised, such as they are, by men who had no money, in countries where the labourers and artificers could scarcely be fed. The buildings in different parts of the Island shew their degrees of wealth and power. ”

“ The few people left there are sufficient to conquer the country, and the island would thus remain without danger to them, they keeping order among themselves.
“In all these islands it appeared to me the men are contented with one wife, but to their governor or king they allow twenty. The women seem to work more than the men. I have not been able to discover whether they respect personal property, for it appeared to me things were common to all, especially in the particular of provisions. ”