‘Ici pas de Kanaques,’ said she; and
taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to
me with both her hands. ’Tenez—a
little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques
die. Then no more.’ The smile, and
this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny
flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke
of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the husband
smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled
to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship’s
offering, which I had just brought up the den; and
in a perspective of centuries I saw their case as
ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already
numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and
no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched
me) no more literary works and no more readers.
The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in
the mind of the Marquesan. It would be strange
if it were otherwise. The race is perhaps the
handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle
height of males; they are strongly muscled, free from
fat, swift in action, graceful in repose; and the
women, though fatter and duller, are still comely
animals. To judge by the eye, there is no race
more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands.
When Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he
reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was
but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini
counted on his fingers eight residual natives.
Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman
Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar.
There are but two writers who have touched the South
Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville
and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening
of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must
have been neglected: ‘He shall be able
to see,’ ’He shall be able to tell,’
‘He shall be able to charm,’ said the friendly
godmothers; ‘But he shall not be able to hear,’
exclaimed the last. The tribe of Hapaa is said
to have numbered some four hundred, when the small-pox
came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months
later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the
disease spread like a fire about the valley, and in
less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman,
fled from that new-created solitude. A similar
Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the
tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard
this story the date staggered me; but I am now inclined
to think it possible. Early in the year of my
visit, for example, or late the year before, a first
case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen
persons, and by the month of August, when the tale
was told me, one soul survived, and that was a boy
who had been absent at his schooling. And depopulation
works both ways, the doors of death being set wide
open, and the door of birth almost closed. Thus,
in the half-year ending July 1888 there were twelve
Print
Word
PDF
