CHAPTER III—­THE SORROWS OF LAUPEPA, 1883 TO 1887

You ride in a German plantation and see no bush, no soul stirring; only acres of empty sward, miles of cocoa-nut alley:  a desert of food.  In the eyes of the Samoan the place has the attraction of a park for the holiday schoolboy, of a granary for mice.  We must add the yet more lively allurement of a haunted house, for over these empty and silent miles there broods the fear of the negrito cannibal.  For the Samoan besides, there is something barbaric, unhandsome, and absurd in the idea of thus growing food only to send it from the land and sell it.  A man at home who should turn all Yorkshire into one wheatfield, and annually burn his harvest on the altar of Mumbo-Jumbo, might impress ourselves not much otherwise.  And the firm which does these things is quite extraneous, a wen that might be excised to-morrow without loss but to itself; few natives drawing from it so much as day’s wages; and the rest beholding in it only the occupier of their acres.  The nearest villages have suffered most; they see over the hedge the lands of their ancestors waving with useless cocoa-palms; and the sales were often questionable, and must still more often appear so to regretful natives, spinning and improving yarns about the evening lamp.  At the worst, then, to help oneself from the plantation will seem to a Samoan very like orchard-breaking to the British schoolboy; at the best, it will be thought a gallant Robin-Hoodish readjustment of a public wrong.

And there is more behind.  Not only is theft from the plantations regarded rather as a lark and peccadillo, the idea of theft in itself is not very clearly present to these communists; and as to the punishment of crime in general, a great gulf of opinion divides the natives from ourselves.  Indigenous punishments were short and sharp.  Death, deportation by the primitive method of setting the criminal to sea in a canoe, fines, and in Samoa itself the penalty of publicly biting a hot, ill-smelling root, comparable to a rough forfeit in a children’s game—­these are approved.  The offender is killed, or punished and forgiven.  We, on the other hand, harbour malice for a period of years:  continuous shame attaches to the criminal; even when he is doing his best—­even when he is submitting to the worst form of torture, regular work—­he is to stand aside from life and from his family in dreadful isolation.  These ideas most Polynesians have accepted in appearance, as they accept other ideas of the whites; in practice, they reduce it to a farce.  I have heard the French resident in the Marquesas in talk with the French gaoler of Tai-o-hae:  “Eh bien, ou sont vos prisonnieres?—­Je crois, mon commandant, qu’elles sont allees quelque part faire une visite.”  And the ladies would be welcome.  This is to take the most savage of Polynesians; take some of the most civilised.