THE trader accustomed to the manners of Eastern Polynesia has a lesson to learn among the Gilberts.The RIDI is but a spare attire;as late as thirty years back the women went naked until marriage;within ten years the custom lingered;and these facts,above all when heard in description,conveyed a very false idea of the manners of the group.A very intelligent missionary described it (in its former state)as a 'Paradise of naked women'for the resident whites.It was at least a platonic Paradise,where Lothario ventured at his peril.Since 1860,fourteen whites have perished on a single island,all for the same cause,all found where they had no business,and speared by some indignant father of a family;the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived.The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions;gin is the more likely key.The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case;they drank;their brain was fired;they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance;and the dart went through their liver.In place of a Paradise the trader found an archipelago of fierce husbands and of virtuous women.'Of course if you wish to make love to them,it's the same as anywhere else,'observed a trader innocently;but he and his companions rarely so choose.
The trader must be credited with a virtue:he often makes a kind and loyal husband.Some of the worst beachcombers in the Pacific,some of the last of the old school,have fallen in my path,and some of them were admirable to their native wives,and one made a despairing widower.The position of a trader's wife in the Gilberts is,besides,unusually enviable.She shares the immunities of her husband.Curfew in Butaritari sounds for her in vain.Long after the bell is rung and the great island ladies are confined for the night to their own roof,this chartered libertine may scamper and giggle through the deserted streets or go down to bathe in the dark.The resources of the store are at her hand;she goes arrayed like a queen,and feasts delicately everyday upon tinned meats.And she who was perhaps of no regard or station among natives sits with captains,and is entertained on board of schooners.Five of these privileged dames were some time our neighbours.Four were handsome skittish lasses,gamesome like children,and like children liable to fits of pouting.They wore dresses by day,but there was a tendency after dark to strip these lendings and to career and squall about the compound in the aboriginal RIDI.Games of cards were continually played,with shells for counters;their course was much marred by cheating;and the end of a round (above all if a man was of the party)resolved itself into a scrimmage for the counters.The fifth was a matron.
It was a picture to see her sail to church on a Sunday,a parasol in hand,a nursemaid following,and the baby buried in a trade hat and armed with a patent feeding-bottle.The service was enlivened by her continual supervision and correction of the maid.It was impossible not to fancy the baby was a doll,and the church some European playroom.All these women were legitimately married.It is true that the certificate of one,when she proudly showed it,proved to run thus,that she was 'married for one night,'and her gracious partner was at liberty to 'send her to hell'the next morning;but she was none the wiser or the worse for the dastardly trick.Another,I heard,was married on a work of mine in a pirated edition;it answered the purpose as well as a Hall Bible.
Notwithstanding all these allurements of social distinction,rare food and raiment,a comparative vacation from toil,and legitimate marriage contracted on a pirated edition,the trader must sometimes seek long before he can be mated.While I was in the group one had been eight months on the quest,and he was still a bachelor.
Within strictly native society the old laws and practices were harsh,but not without a certain stamp of high-mindedness.
Stealthy adultery was punished with death;open elopement was properly considered virtue in comparison,and compounded for a fine in land.The male adulterer alone seems to have been punished.It is correct manners for a jealous man to hang himself;a jealous woman has a different remedy -she bites her rival.Ten or twenty years ago it was a capital offence to raise a woman's RIDI;to this day it is still punished with a heavy fine;and the garment itself is still symbolically sacred.Suppose a piece of land to be disputed in Butaritari,the claimant who shall first hang a RIDI on the tapu-post has gained his cause,since no one can remove or touch it but himself.
The RIDI was the badge not of the woman but the wife,the mark not of her sex but of her station.It was the collar on the slave's neck,the brand on merchandise.The adulterous woman seems to have been spared;were the husband offended,it would be a poor consolation to send his draught cattle to the shambles.Karaiti,to this day,calls his eight wives 'his horses,'some trader having explained to him the employment of these animals on farms;and Nanteitei hired out his wives to do mason-work.Husbands,at least when of high rank,had the power of life and death;even whites seem to have possessed it;and their wives,when they had transgressed beyond forgiveness,made haste to pronounce the formula of deprecation -I KANA KIM.This form of words had so much virtue that a condemned criminal repeating it on a particular day to the king who had condemned him,must be instantly released.
It is an offer of abasement,and,strangely enough,the reverse -the imitation -is a common vulgar insult in Great Britain to this day.I give a scene between a trader and his Gilbert Island wife,as it was told me by the husband,now one of the oldest residents,but then a freshman in the group.
