CHAPTER XXVIII

Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the "survival of the fittest."

"I pictured myself cultivating many hundreds of acres when I first came here," said Grelet. "I laid out several plantations, and once shipped much coffee, as good, too, as any in the world. I gather enough now for my own use, and sell none. I grew cotton and cocoanuts on a large scale. I raise only a little now.

"There were hundreds of able-bodied men here then. I used to buy opium from the Chinese labor-contractors and from smugglers, and give it to my working people. A pill once a day would make the Marquesans hustle. But the government stopped it. They say that the book written by the Englishman, Stevenson, did it. We must find labor elsewhere soon, Chinese, perhaps. Those two Paumotans brought by Begole are a godsend to me. I wish some one would bring me a hundred."

The two Paumotan youths, Tennonoku and Kedeko-lio, lay motionless on the floor of the veranda twenty feet away. They had been sold to Grelet for a small sum by Begole, captain of a trading-schooner. In passing the Paumotan Islands, many hundred miles to the south, Begole had forgotten to leave at Pukatuhu, a small atoll, a few bags of flour he had promised to bring the chief on his next voyage, and the chief, seeing the schooner a mile away, had ordered these boys to swim to it and remind the skipper of his promise. Begole meanwhile had caught a wind, and the first he knew of the message was when the boys climbed aboard the schooner many miles to sea. He did not trouble to land them, but brought them on to the Marquesas and sold them to Grelet.

They spoke no Marquesan, and Grelet had difficulty in making them understand that they must labor for him, and in enforcing his orders, which they could not comprehend. There was little copra being made in the rainy weather, and they lay about the veranda or squatted on the paepae of the laborers' cookhouse, making a fire of cocoanut-husks twice a day to roast their breadfruit. Their savage hearts were ever in their own atoll, the home to which the native clings so passionately, and their eyes were dark with hopeless longing. No doubt they would die soon, as so many do when exiled, but Grelet's copra crop would profit first.

The dire lack of labor for copra-making, tree-planting, or any form of profitable activity is lamented by all white men in these depopulated islands. Average wages were sixty cents a day, but even a dollar failed to bring adequate relief. The Marquesan detests labor, which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white owners of plantations. Since every man had a piece of land that yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for the government in payment for taxes.

The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with the native. They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the Marquesan to procure a modicum of labor. They saw fortunes to be made if they could but whip a multitude of backs to bending for them, but they either could not or would not perceive the situation from the native's point of view.

In America I often heard men who were out of employment, particularly in bad seasons, in big cities or in mining camps, argue the right to work. They could not enforce this alleged natural right, and in their misery talked of the duty of society or the state in this direction. But they were obliged to content themselves with the thin alleviation of soup-kitchens, charity wood-yards, and other easers of hard times, and with threats of sabotage or other violence.

Here in the islands, where work is offered to unwilling natives, the employers curse their lack of power to drive them to the copra forests, the kilns and boats. Thus, as in highly civilized countries we maintain that a man has no inherent or legal right to work, in these islands the employer has no weapon by which to enforce toil. But had the whites the power to order all to do their bidding, they would create a system of peonage as in Mexico.

An acquaintance of mine in these seas took part in, and profited largely by, the removal to a distant place of the entire population of an island on which the people had led the usual life of the Polynesian. He and his associates sold three hundred men to plantation labor, which they hated and to which they were unaccustomed. Within a year two hundred and fifty of them had died as fast as disease could sap their grief-stricken bodies. Their former home, which they died longing to see again, was made a feeding-place for sheep. The merchants reaped a double toll. They were paid well for delivering the owners of the land to the plantations, and in addition they got the land.

Now, my acquaintance is a man of university education, a quoter of Haeckel and Darwin, with "survival of the fittest" as his guiding motto since his Jena days. Says he, quoting a Scotchman:

"Tone it down as you will, the fact remains that Darwinism regards animals as going up-stairs, in a struggle for individual ends, often on the corpses of their fellows, often by a blood-and-iron competition, often by a strange mixture of blood and cunning, in which each looks out for himself and extinction besets the hindmost."

Further says my stern acquaintance, specially when in his cups:

"The whole system of life-development is that of the lower providing food for the higher in ever-expanding circles of organic existence, from protozoea to steers, from the black African to the educated and employing man. We build on the ribs of the steers, and on the backs of the lower grade of human."

Scientific books have taken the place of the Bible as a quotation-treasury of proof for whatever their reader most desires to prove. Now I am no scientist and take, indeed, only the casual interest of the average man in the facts and theories of science. But it appears to me that in his theory of the survival of the fittest my acquaintance curiously overlooks the question of man's own survival as a species.

If we are to base our actions upon this cold-blooded and inhuman view of the universe, let us consider that universe as in fact inhuman, and having no concern for man except as a species of animal very possibly doomed to extinction, as many other species of animal have been doomed in the past, unless he proves his fitness to survive not as an individual, but as a species.

Now man is a gregarious animal; he lives in herds. The characteristic of the herd is that within it the law of survival of the fittest almost ceases to operate. The value of a herd is that its members protect each other instead of preying upon each other. Nor, in what we are pleased to call the animal kingdom, do herds of the same species prey upon each other. They rather unite for the protection of their weaker members.

So far as I am informed, mankind is the only herd of which this is not true. Cattle and horses unite in protecting the young and feeble; sheep huddle together against cold and wolves; bees and ants work only for the welfare of the swarm, which is the welfare of all. This, we are told, is the reason these forms of life have survived. But ship officers beat sailors because sailors have no firearms and fear charges of mutiny. Policemen club prisoners who are poorly dressed. Employees make profits from the toil of children. Strong nations prey on weak peoples, and the white man kills the white man and the black and brown and yellow man in mine, plantation, and forest the world over.

He defends this murder of his own kind by the pat phrase "survival of the fittest." But man is not a solitary animal, he is a herd animal, and within the herd nature's definition of fitness does not apply. The herd is a refuge against the law of tooth and fang. Importing within the herd his own interpretation of that law, man is destroying the strength of his shelter. By so much as one man preys upon or debases another man, he weakens the strength of the man-herd. And for man it is the herd, not the individual, that must meet that stern law of "the survival of the fittest" on the vast impersonal arena of the universe.

"Bully 'Ayes was the man to make the Kanakas work!" said Lying Bill Pincher. "I used to be on Penryn Island and that was 'is old 'ang-out. 'Ayes was a pleasant man to meet. 'E was 'orspitable as a 'ungry shark to a swimming missionary. Bald he was as a bloomin' crab, stout and smiling.

"'E 'ad two white wives a-setting in his cabin on the schooner, and they called it the parlor. Smart wimmen they was, and saved 'is life for 'im more 'n once. 'E 'd get a couple of chiefs on board by deceiving 'em with rum, and hold 'em until 'is bloomin' schooner was chock-a-block with copra. The 'ole island would be working itself to death to free the chiefs. Then when 'e 'ad got the copra, 'e 'd steal a 'undred or two Kanakas and sell 'em in South America.

"'E was smart, and yet 'e got 'is'n. 'Is mate seen him coming over the side with blood in his eye, and batted 'im on 'is conch as 'is leg swung over the schooner's bul'ark. 'Ayes dropped with 'is knife between 'is teeth and 'is pistols in both 'ands.

"'E'd murdered 'undreds of white and brown and black men, and 'e was smart, and 'e got away with it. But 'e made the mistake of not having made a friend of 'is right 'and man."