CHAPTER XV. Death of Aumia; Funeral Chant and Burial Customs; Causes for the

Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the death of a race.

On the paepae of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a few months earlier, the beauty of the island.

"She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the pokoko has taken her."

She was pitifully thin when I first saw her, lying all day on a heap of mats, with Taipi beside her, both coughing, coughing. An epidemic of colds had seized Atuona, brought, most probably, by the schooner Papeite, for no other had arrived since the Morning Star. Aumia coughed at night, her neighbor took it up, and then, like laughter in a school, it became impossible to resist, and down to the beach and up to the heights the valley echoed with the distressing sounds. So, a breadfruit season ago, had Aumia coughed for the first time, and the way she was going would be followed by many of my neighbors.

I stopped every day to chat a moment with Aumia, and to bring her the jam or marmalade she liked, and was too poor to buy from the trader's store. She asked me this day if I had seen her grave. She had heard I had visited the cemetery, and I must describe it to her. It was the grave over which Le Moine and I had crouched from the storm.

Aumia's husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of Uranopolis. No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed. The carcass had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried underground with fire below and above him. When the meat was well done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in her black nun's habit to console Aumia with the promises of the church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun's house.

"Aumia is able to eat pig, and yet they have made her grave," I said.

"Oh, c'est ça!" replied the nun, holding the haunch carefully. "That is the custom. Always they used to dig them near the house, so that the sick person might see the grave, and in its digging the sick had much to say, and enjoyed it. Now, grâce à dieu! if Catholics, they are buried in consecrated ground where the body may rest serene until the trumpet sounds the final judgment. Death is terrible, but these Marquesans make no more of it than of a journey to another island, and much less than of a voyage to Tahiti. They die as peacefully as a good Catholic who is sure of his crown in Heaven. And as they are children, only children, the wisest or the worst of them, the Good God will know how to count their sins. It is those who scandalize them who shall pay dear, those wicked whites who have forsaken God, or who worship him in false temples."

The coffin of Aumia was then beside the house, turned over so that rain might not make it unpresentable. She had asked for it weeks before. To the Marquesan his coffin is as important as, to us, the house the newly-married pair are to live in. These people know that almost every foot of their land holds the bones or dust of a corpse, and this remnant of a race, overwhelmed by tragedy, can look on death only as a relief from the oppression of alien and unsympathetic white men. They go to the land of the tupapaus as calmly as to sleep.

"I have never seen a Marquesan afraid to die," said Sister Serapoline. "I have been at the side of many in their last moments. It is a terrible thing to die, but they have no fear at all."

The husband of Aumia, a jolly fellow of thirty, was practising on a drum for the entertainment of his wife. He said that the corpse of his grandfather, a chief, had been oiled and kept about the house until it became mummified. This, he said, had been quite the custom. The body was washed very thoroughly, and rubbed with cocoanut-oil. It was laid in the sun, and members of the family appointed to turn it many times a day, so that all parts might be subjected to an even heat. The anointing with oil was repeated several times daily. Weeks or months of this process reduced the corpse to a mummified condition, and if it were the body of a chief it was then put in his canoe and kept for years in a ceremonial way. But no mark was ever placed to show where the dead were buried, and there were no funeral ceremonies. Better that none knew where the body was laid and that the chosen friends who carried it to the sepulchre forgot the spot.

In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in the night at the foot of great trees. Or they carried the bodies to the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil. The secret of the burial-place was kept inviolate. Aumia's husband related an instance of a man who in the darkest night climbed a supposedly inaccessible precipice carrying the body of his young wife lashed to his back, to place it carefully on a lofty shelf and descend safely.

These precautions came probably from a fear of profanation of the dead, perhaps of their being eaten by a victorious enemy. To devastate the cemeteries and temples of the foe was an aim of every invading tribe. It was considered that mutilating a corpse injured the soul that had fled from it.

Afraid of no living enemy nor of the sea, meeting the shark in his own element and worsting him, fearlessly enduring the thrust of the fatal spear when an accident of battle left him defenseless, the Marquesan warrior, as much as the youngest child, had an unutterable horror of their own dead and of burial-places, as of the demons who hovered about them.

Christianity has made no change in this, for it, too, is encumbered with such fears. Who of us but dreads to pass a graveyard at night, though even to ourselves we deny the fear? Banshees, werwolves and devils, the blessed candles lit to keep away the Evil One, or even to guard against wandering souls on certain feasts of the dead, were all part of my childhood. So to the Marquesan are the goblins that cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a pareu over his head, in terror of the unknown.

But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to sleep at the end of a sad day. Aumia, eating her burial meats and looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built by her husband's hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child. But the melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the House of the Golden Bed.

It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious air stirring the breadfruit leaves. I plunged into the river, and returning to my house was about to dress--that is, to put on my pareu--when a shriek arose from the forest. It was sudden, sharp, and agonizing.

"Aumia mate i havaii" said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build the fire. Literally he said, "Aumia is dead and gone below," for the Marquesans locate the spirit world below the earth's surface, as they do the soul below the belt.

The wailing was accompanied shortly by a sound of hammering on boards.

"The corpse goes into the coffin," said Exploding Eggs. The first nail had been driven but a moment after Aumia's last breath.

All day the neighborhood was melancholy with the cries from the house. All the lamentations were in a certain tone, as if struck from the same instrument by the hand of sorrow. Each visitor to the house shrieked in the same manner, and all present accompanied her, so that for ten minutes after each new mourner arrived a chorus of loud wails and moans assailed my ears. I had never known such a heart-rending exhibition of grief.

But the sorrow of these friends of Aumia was not genuine. It could not be; it was too dramatic. When they left the house the mourners laughed and lit cigarettes and pipes. If no new visitor came they fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed person started them off again in their mechanical, though nerve-racking, cry.

I had known Aumia well, and at noon, desiring to observe the proprieties, I stepped upon the paepae of her home.

"She loved the Menike!" shouted the old women in chorus, and they threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one of the dead's husbands. The followed me up the trail to my cabin and sat on my paepae wailing and shrieking. It was some time before I realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me. There was not a moan as the rum went round.

I had puzzled at the exact repetition of their plaint. Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the "Ue haaneinei" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side." The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it over her shell of consolation, thus:

"Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke! A a a a a a a a a a a a a a! E e e e e e e e e e e e e e e! I i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i! O o o o o o o o o o o o o o o! U u u u u u u u u u u u u u u!"

To omit a vowel, to say too many, or to mix their order, would be disrespect to the spirit of the dead, and a reflection on the mourner. Nine times the "ke," fourteen "a's," fifteen "e's," eighteen "i's" and fifteen "o's" and "u's."

Aumia was carried to Calvary in the afternoon and put in the grave for which the pig had been paid. So strongly did the old feeling still prevail that only three or four of her friends could be persuaded by the nuns to accompany the coffin up the trail.

Exploding Egg's consignment of Aumia to Havaii, the underworld, spoke strongly of the clinging of his people to their old beliefs in the destiny of the spirit after death. They share with the Ainos of Japan--a people to which they have many likenesses, being of the same division of man--a faith in a subterranean future.

Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of "going to the world below," where he hopes to find real wisdom?

Havaii or Havaiki is, of course, the fabled place whence came the Polynesians, as it is also the name of that underworld to which their spirits return after death. One might read into this fact a dim groping of the Marquesan mind toward "From dust he came, to dust returneth," or, more likely, a longing of the exiled people for the old home they had abandoned. Ethnologists believe that the name refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed.

Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no suffering, either for good or bad souls. It is simply the place where the dead go. It is ruled by Po, the Darkness.

There is, however, a paradise in an island in the clouds, where beautiful girls and great bowls of kava, with pigs roasted to a turn, await the good and brave. The old priests claimed to be able to help one from Po to this happy abode, but the living relatives of the departed spirit had to pay a heavy price for their services. The Christianized Marquesan fancies that he finds these old beliefs revived when Père David tells him of purgatory, from which prayers and certain good acts help one's friends, or may be laid up in advance against the day when one must himself descend to that middle state of souls.

All Marquesans live in the shadow of that day. They see it without fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it is indescribable.

"I have seen many go as Aumia has gone," said Father David to me. "All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is passing. Some day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of the dead."

A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one hundred.

A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults. I visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me.

Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva. One of the tribe of merciless American whaling captains having sent ashore a sailor dying of tuberculosis, the tattooed cannibals received him in a Christ-like manner, soothed his last hours, and breathed the germs that have carried off more than four-fifths of their race, and to-day are killing the remnant.

The white man brought the Chinese, and with them leprosy. The Chinese were imported to aid the white in stealing the native land of the Marquesan, and to keep the Chinese contented, opium was brought with him. Finding it eagerly craved by the ignorant native, the foolish white fastened this vice also upon his other desired slave. The French Government, for forty thousand francs, licensed an opium farmer to sell the drug still faster, and not until alarmed by the results and shamed by the outcry in Europe, did it forbid the devastating narcotic. Too late!

Smallpox came with a Peruvian slave-ship that stole thousands of the islanders and carried them off to work out their lives for the white in his own country. This ship left another more dread disease, which raged in the islands as a virulent epidemic, instead of running the slow chronic course it does nowadays when all the world has been poisoned by it.

The healthy Marquesans had no anti-toxins in their pure blood to overcome the diseases which with us, hardened Europeans and descendants of Europeans, are not deadly. Here they raged and destroyed hundreds in a few days or weeks.

The survivors of these pestilences, seeing their homes and villages desolated, their friends dying, their people perishing, supposed that these curses were inflicted upon them by the God of the foreigners and by the missionaries, who said that they were his servant. In their misery, they not only refused to listen to the gospels, but accused the missionaries in prayer before their own god, begging to be saved from them. Often when the missionaries appeared to speak to the people, the deformed and dying were brought out and laid in rows before them, as evidences of the evilness and cruelty of their white god.

But after one has advanced all tangible reasons and causes for the depopulation of the Marquesas, there remains another, mysterious, intangible, but it may be, more potent than the others. The coming of the white has been deadly to all copper-colored races everywhere in the world. The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the red races of America perished or are going fast. The numbers of those dead from war and epidemics leave still lacking the full explanation of the fearful facts. Seek as far as you will, pile up figures and causes and prove them correct; there still remains to take into account the shadow of the white on the red.

Prescott says:

The American Indian has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Even when this foreign influence comes in the form of civilization, he seems to sink and pine under it. It has been so with the Mexicans. Under the Spanish domination their numbers have silently melted away. Their energies are broken. They live under a better system of laws, a more assured tranquillity, a purer faith. But all does not avail. Their civilization was of the hardy character that belongs to the wilderness. Their hardy virtues were all their own. They refused to submit to European culture--to be engrafted on a foreign stock.

Free! Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, in this earth.

I am persuaded that the Polynesians, from Hawaii to Tahiti, are dying because of the suppression of the play-instinct, an instinct that had its expression in most of their customs and occupations. Their dancing, their tattooing, their chanting, their religious rites, and even their warfare, had very visible elements of humor and joyousness. They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic feeling, emotional, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. The rule of the trader crushed all these native feelings.

To this restraint was added the burden of the effort to live. With the entire Marquesan economic and social system disrupted, food was not so easily procurable, and they were driven to work by commands, taxes, fines, and the novel and killing incentives of rum and opium. The whites taught the men to sell their lives, and the women to sell their charms.

Happiness and health were destroyed because the white man came here only to gratify his cupidity. The priests could bring no inspiration sufficient to overcome the degradation caused by the traders. The Marquesan saw that Jesus had small influence over their rulers. Civilization lost its opportunity because it gave precept, but no example.

Even to-day, one white man in a valley sets the standard of sobriety, of kindness, and honor. Jensen, the frank and handsome Dane who works for the Germans at Taka-Uka who was in the breadline in New York and swears he will never return to civilization, told me that when he kept a store in Hanamenu, near Atuona, to serve the bare handful of unexterminated tribesmen there, the people imitated him in everything, his clothes, his gestures, his least-studied actions.

"I was the only white. I planted a fern in a box. Every one came to my store and, feigning other reasons, asked for boxes. Soon every paepae had its box of ferns. I asked a man to snare four or five goats for me in the hills. They were the first goats tethered or enclosed in the valley. Within a week the mountains were harried for goats, and the village was noisy with their bleating. I ate my goats; they ate theirs. Not one was left. When I forsook Hanamenu, the whole population moved with me. Sure, I was decent to them, that was all.

"I never want to see the white man's country again. I have starved in the big cities, and worked like a dog for the banana trust in the West Indies. I have begged a cup of coffee in San Francisco, and been fanned by a cop's club. Here I make almost nothing, I have many friends and no superiors, and I am happy."

Had these lovable savages had a few fine souls to lead them, to shield them from the dregs of civilization heaped on them for a century, they might have developed into a wonder race to set a pace in beauty, courage, and natural power that would have surprised and helped Europe.

They needed no physical regeneration. They were better born into health and purity--bloody as were some of their customs--than most of us. Their bodies had not become a burden on the soul, but, light and strong and unrestrained, were a part of it. They did not know that they had bodies; they only leaped, danced, flung themselves in and out of the sea, part of a large, happy, and harmonious universe.

If to that superb, almost perfect, physical base that nature had given these Marquesans, to that sweetness simplicity, generosity, and trust acknowledged by all who know them, there could have been added a knowledge of the things we have learned; if by example and kindness they could have been given rounded and informed intelligence, what living there would have been in these islands!

All they needed was a brother who walked in the sunlight and showed the way.