Transcribed from the 1912 Swanston edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
An affair which might be deemed worthy of a note of a few lines inany general history has been here expanded to the size of a volume orlarge pamphlet. The smallness of the scale, and the singularityof the manners and events and many of the characters, considered, itis hoped that, in spite of its outlandish subject, the sketch may findreaders. It has been a task of difficulty. Speed was essential,or it might come too late to be of any service to a distracted country. Truth, in the midst of conflicting rumours and in the dearth of printedmaterial, was often hard to ascertain, and since most of those engagedwere of my personal acquaintance, it was often more than delicate toexpress. I must certainly have erred often and much; it is notfor want of trouble taken nor of an impartial temper. And if myplain speaking shall cost me any of the friends that I still count,I shall be sorry, but I need not be ashamed.
In one particular the spelling of Samoan words has been altered;and the characteristic nasal n of the language written throughoutng instead of g. Thus I put Pango-Pango, insteadof Pago-Pago; the sound being that of soft ng in English, asin singer, not as in finger.
R. L. S.
VAILIMA,
UPOLU,
SAMOA.
The story I have to tell is still going on as I write; the charactersare alive and active; it is a piece of contemporary history in the mostexact sense. And yet, for all its actuality and the part playedin it by mails and telegraphs and iron war-ships, the ideas and themanners of the native actors date back before the Roman Empire. They are Christians, church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship,hardy cricketers; their books are printed in London by Spottiswoode,Trübner, or the Tract Society; but in most other points they arethe contemporaries of our tattooed ancestors who drove their chariotson the wrong side of the Roman wall. We have passed the feudalsystem; they are not yet clear of the patriarchal. We are in thethick of the age of finance; they are in a period of communism. And this makes them hard to understand.
To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of aland of despotism. An elaborate courtliness marks the race aloneamong Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;commoners my-lord each other when they meet—and urchins as theyplay marbles. And for the real noble a whole private dialect isset apart. The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo,a bamboo knife, a pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in hispresence, as the common names for a bug and for many offices and membersof the body are taboo in the drawing-rooms of English ladies. Special words are set apart for his leg, his face, his hair, his belly,his eyelids, his son, his daughter, his wife, his wife’s pregnancy,his wife’s adultery, adultery with his wife, his dwelling, hisspear, his comb, his sleep, his dreams, his anger, the mutual angerof several chiefs, his food, his pleasure in eating, the food and eatingof his pigeons, his ulcers, his cough, his sickness, his recovery, hisdeath, his being carried on a bier, the exhumation of his bones, andhis skull after death. To address these demigods is quite a branchof knowledge, and he who goes to visit a high chief does well to makesure of the competence of his interpreter. To complete the picture,the same word signifies the watching of a virgin and the warding ofa chief; and the same word means to cherish a chief and to fondle afavourite child.
Men like us, full