The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race.The thought of death sits down with him to meat,and rises with him from his bed;he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support;and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the reality with relief.He does not even seek to support a disappointment;at an affront,at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic love-affairs,he seeks an instant refuge in the grave.Hanging is now the fashion.I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888;but though this be a common form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas,I cannot think it will continue popular in the Marquesas.Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva,which offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death,and gives time for those decencies of the last hour,to which he attaches such remarkable importance.The coffin can thus be at hand,the pigs killed,the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house;and then it is,and not before,that the Marquesan is conscious of achievement,his life all rounded in,his robes (like Caesar's)adjusted for the final act.Praise not any man till he is dead,said the ancients;envy not any man till you hear the mourners,might be the Marquesan parody.The coffin,though of late introduction,strangely engages their attention.It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy.For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers;at last,but the other day,they let her have her will,gave her her coffin,and the woman's soul is at rest.I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation.The Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body.I was told the Tahitians have a word for it,ERIMATUA,but cannot find it in my dictionary.A gendarme,M.Nouveau,has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady,has routed them from their houses,turned them on to do their trick upon the roads,and in two days has seen them cured.But this other remedy is more original:
a Marquesan,dying of this discouragement -perhaps I should rather say this acquiescence -has been known,at the fulfilment of his crowning wish,on the mere sight of that desired hermitage,his coffin -to revive,recover,shake off the hand of death,and be restored for years to his occupations -carving tikis (idols),let us say,or braiding old men's beards.From all this it may be conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally.
I heard one example,grim and picturesque.In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa,an old man was seized with the disease;he had no thought of recovery;had his grave dug by a wayside,and lived in it for near a fortnight,eating,drinking,and smoking with the passers-by,talking mostly of his end,and equally unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.
This proneness to suicide,and loose seat in life,is not peculiar to the Marquesan.What is peculiar is the widespread depression and acceptance of the national end.Pleasures are neglected,the dance languishes,the songs are forgotten.It is true that some,and perhaps too many,of them are proscribed;but many remain,if there were spirit to support or to revive them.At the last feast of the Bastille,Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the inanimate performance of the dancers.When the people sang for us in Anaho,they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.
They were only young folk present,they said,and it was only the old that knew the songs.The whole body of Marquesan poetry and music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited generation.The full import is apparent only to one acquainted with other Polynesian races;who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh song for every trifling incident,or who has heard (on Penrhyn,for instance)a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch,one song following another without pause.In like manner,the Marquesan,never industrious,begins now to cease altogether from production.