Introduction

Introduction.

If you draw a line from the tip of New Zealand to the top of the Hawaiian Islands, you will be able to indicate the true Polynesian area. On the islands towards the Malay Peninsula there is a mixed people who show the Papuan strain that is in them. They are the Melanesians. On the American side of the line there is a singularly homogeneous people who are of a type like to our own. They are the Polynesians. We have been able to pay ourselves the compliment of admiring them ever since the chronicler of Mendaña’s voyages looked upon the men and women of the Marquesas and found that “they had beautiful faces and the most promising animation of countenance; and were in all things so becoming that the pilot-mayor Quiros affirmed nothing in his life caused him so much regret as leaving such fine creatures to be lost in that country.”1

And yet the Polynesians, so like us physically, have in their romances none of the familiar veins that one can discover in, let us say, the folk-tales of the darker peoples in the lands around India. I take up Studies in Religion, Folk-lore, and Custom in North Borneo and the Malay Peninsula,2 and I strike at once into:

Now the Raja had given it out that whoever could remove the dragon’s head should marry his daughter, who was shut up in an inner room and enclosed by a seven-fold fence of ivory; but nobody could do it, for the dragon’s head was as big as a mountain.

This is from a folk-tale told amongst the aboriginal tribes of the Malay Peninsula. And when I read the opening of another tale I am in an imaginative land so familiar that I know every turn and track in it.—

“Oh,” said Serunggal, “it is no use my stopping here. I had better go and marry a Raja’s daughter.”

The tale goes on, and we have the Raja setting the adventurous youth three tasks, just as the King or the Enchanter sets the youth three tasks in a story that has been told in every village in Ireland and Serbia, in Spain and Sweden, in Russia and Italy; in a story that was given literary form in classic Greece in Jason and Medea, and in mediæval Wales in Kulhwch and Olwen. And this tale of Serunggal and the Raja’s daughter belongs to one of the dark tribes of Borneo.

There are animal helpers in this particular tale, just as there are animal helpers in the ancient Greek folk-tale of Cupid and Psyche. Indeed, the stories belonging to Borneo and the Malay Peninsula are well filled with animals—turtles and deer, elephants and ant-eaters; they might be the material out of which Rudyard Kipling made his unforgettable Jungle Book and his Just-So Stories.

In Polynesia we find no romance that is based on formulæ familiar to us. Only occasionally does a helping creature appear. There are practically no animal stories, for the sufficient reason that the Polynesian did not have opportunities for forming a wide animal acquaintanceship. He brought the pig and the dog to the Islands with him; and the shark and the turtle, the owl and the plover, were the only creatures that aroused an interest in him. Even the way of counting things is changed when we get into Polynesian romance: instead of three, seven, and nine, we have four, eight, and sixteen for the cabalistic numbers.

And yet, as all human desire is the same, and as human mentality compels a certain sequence of incident, and there seem to be patterns in incident that all human beings find it delightful to work out, the Polynesian stories have the elements and the combination of elements that make fine narrative. Often the Polynesian story-teller rediscovers a formula that we have used to make a memorable tale. Thus, in the present collection, the daughter of the King of Ku-ai-he-lani will recall Cinderella, and the story of Au-ke-le will recall the story of the Irish hero Oisin and all the other stories of men who travelled far and returned to their own land; it will remind us of Odysseus and Rip Van Winkle.

In the folk-romance and in the mythological stories of Europe there are places that may not be entered, and there are women whom a man must not approach. There is Blue Beard’s Chamber; there is Danaë, and there is the Eithlinn of Celtic mythology. Polynesian romance has places that may not be entered, and women who must not be approached by men. And it has these instances in almost every story. Indeed, without the guarded maiden and the forbidden place a Polynesian story-teller would find it difficult to carry on. And one knows that when he was dealing with one or the other he was dealing with the life around him: the place was tapu,3 the maiden was tapu. And the place or the maiden was tapu simply because a king or a chief with the privilege of declaring tapu had so declared it. When we read the story of Ka-we-lu in The Arrow and the Swing, or of Kama in The Story of Ha-le-ma-no and the Princess Kama, we can easily see how, as the simplicity of tapu was forgotten, the maiden would be given a fantastic security like that of Danaë in her brazen tower, or like that of Eithlinn in her inaccessible island, and we can see how motives would be invented for keeping her apart: Danaë’s son and Eithlinn’s son are destined to slay their grandfathers. Every race has had tapu. But the Polynesians held to it and made it their single discipline. In these Polynesian stories we are at the very beginning of a romance that for Europeans has grown to be fraught with magic and mystery.

I spent the months of January, February, March, and April of 1923 in the Hawaiian Islands. I went there under the following circumstances: The Hawaiian Legislature had formed a Commission on Myth and Folk-lore; the function of the Commission was to have a survey made of the stories that had been collected and that belonged to myth and folk-lore of the Islands, and to have them made over into stories for children—primarily for the children of the Hawaiian Islands. By an arrangement made between the Commission and the Yale University Press, I was invited to make the survey and to reshape the stories.

I learned something of the language; I sought out those who still had the tradition of Hawaiian romance and who could recite it in the traditional way; I made a study of all the material that had been collected; I placed myself in the hands of the very distinguished group of Polynesian scholars that is in Honolulu. Quite early in my researches I came to the conclusion that my work should be based on the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, published by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, in Honolulu, and I made it my main task to understand the background of the stories given in that collection, and to hear as many of them as possible from the lips of the surviving custodians of the Polynesian tradition in Hawaii.

I found in the Hawaiian Islands conditions that are lamentably like the conditions in certain European countries where separate and interesting cultures are being pushed aside by this or that culture that is politically and commercially important. In Hawaii there is a great breach in the native tradition: I have been in houses where a grandmother or grandfather knew traditional Hawaiian poems (mele) and could chant them in the traditional way, while a son or daughter would be able to translate them, but not able to chant them, and a grandchild would be able neither to chant the poems nor translate them. Once, I remember, in such a house, I went to see what a little girl, the granddaughter of a lady who had chanted mele to me for about an hour, was studying. This child had not allowed herself to be interrupted either by the chanting of her grandmother or by the translating that her father did for me; she was bent on mastering a lesson in a book that she kept before her—an American school geography. “Stockholm is the capital of Sweden, Vienna is the capital of Austria,” was one of the items that had kept her absorbed.

I discovered that of the stories which I knew from the Fornander Collection, few lived in the memory of the generations at present in the Islands. On the Island of Maui I met a distinguished Hawaiian lady who had been at the court of King Kalakaua, and who, in her youth, had been a trained story-teller. She tried to give me some of the stories that belonged to her repertoire. But no sooner had she begun than she declared that she was no longer familiar with the language in which the stories were told—they were in the idiom of the Alii or the Chiefs, an idiom that she had not used since her days at court.

I heard many stories told, some by men, some by women. One of the best story-tellers that I came across was a young man whom I met on the Island of Molokai. His father was Chinese, and he had learnt the stories from his grandmother. He told me several stories; one of them was the story of the rescue of Hina by her son Kana, a story given in Fornander, and evidently belonging to the folk.

What impressed me most in these recitals was the gesture of the story-teller. Every feature, every finger of the man or woman becomes alive, becomes dramatic, as the recital is entered on. The gesture of the Hawaiian makes the telling of a story a dramatic entertainment. Scholars have written of the long and monotonous stories told in the old days in Hawaii. The stories were long, but the gesture of the story-teller must have saved them from an unrelieved monotony. I was made to recall again and again Melville’s description of an entertainment given him by a genial Marquesan youth; it is a description that gives the spirit in which the unspoiled Polynesian dramatizes his moods and his reactions. Says Melville: “Upon my signifying my desire that he should pluck me the young fruit of some particular tree, the handsome savage, throwing himself into a sudden attitude of surprise, feigns astonishment at the apparent absurdity of the request. Maintaining this position for a moment, the strange emotions depicted on his countenance soften down into one of humorous resignation to my will, and then looking wistfully up to the tufted top of the tree, he stands on tip-toe, straining his neck and elevating his arm, as though endeavoring to reach the fruit from the ground where he stands. As if defeated in this childish attempt, he now sinks to the earth despondingly, beating his breast in well-acted despair; and then, starting to his feet all at once, and throwing back his head, raises both hands, like a school boy about to catch a falling ball. And continuing this for a moment or two, as if in expectation that the fruit was going to be tossed down to him by some good spirit on the tree-top, he turns wildly round in another fit of despair, and scampers off to a distance of thirty or forty yards. Here he remains a while, eyeing the tree, the very picture of misery; but the next moment, receiving, as it were, a flash of inspiration, he rushes again towards it, and clasping both arms about the trunk, with one elevated a little above the other, he presses the soles of his feet close together against the tree, extending his legs from it until they are nearly horizontal, and his body becomes doubled into an arch; then, hand over hand and foot after foot he rises from the earth with steady rapidity, and almost before you are aware of it, has gained the cradled and embowered nest of nuts, and with boisterous glee flings the fruit to the ground.” Imagine this spontaneous gesture applied to the telling of a story, every incident of which gives rise to gesture. But the gesture in the story-recital was not merely spontaneous; it was trained, as was the gesture in the hula or Polynesian ballet. Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has a chapter on gesture in his Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, and he gives this instance amongst others: “To indicate death, the death of a person, the finger-tips, placed in apposition, are drawn away from each other with a sweeping gesture and at the same time lowered till the palms face the ground. In this case also we find diversity. One old man, well acquainted with hula matters, being asked to signify in pantomimic fashion ‘The king is sick,’ went through the following motions: He first pointed upward, to indicate the heaven-born one, the king; then he brought his hands to his body and threw his face into a painful grimace. To indicate the death of the king he threw his hands upward towards the sky, as if to signify a removal by flight.”

This unconstrained, dramatic gesture is being lost. There is no longer a school for gesture in the hula. And the Hawaiian is checking his movements towards gesture. It used to be said: “Tie an Hawaiian’s hands and he can’t talk.” The older men and women still have that wonderful command of their features and their hands—a command that made them the greatest ballet-performers that the world, I believe, has ever had—but the younger generation feel that to use gesture is to be rustic, to be “Kanaka.”.

There is still, amongst the Hawaiians who live in the old Polynesian way, in villages along the beaches, with the taro patches near, a great treasury of poetry and native lore. But the newspaper and the victrola are taking up the time and the interest that used to be devoted to poetry, traditional games, riddles, and the like. I have been in cottages where the people still sit or lie on their mats on the floor, ignoring tables, chairs, and beds, and where they eat with their fingers, lifting the poi out of the common bowl. In such houses I have found a real scholarship, a delight in poetry, and the possession of such a quantity of it as would put to shame a cultivated American, Englishman, or Frenchman. But even in such houses I was aware that the tradition was passing. Sitting on the floor in one such house, around a petroleum lamp also on the floor, I have spelled out news items in an Hawaiian newspaper that told of the French in the Ruhr and preparations for elections in Ireland.

The world surges in on the Hawaiian Islands. And the Hawaiian can no longer give himself solely to the tradition that bound him to the valleys and the mountains, and that knit him to Wakea and Papa, who begat and brought forth the islands and the men and women upon them. That separate tradition, which for thousands of years he lived by, is being broken up, as the surge breaks up the lava on his coast. The Hawaiian who, at the time when the Americans were making their declaration of independence, was still working with tools of stone, knowing nothing of metals, of pottery, of the loom, and knowing of no animal larger than a dog or a pig, has now to take some account of the continents.

With one exception the titles in this collection cover stories that are Hawaiian in the sense that they were given their shape upon the Hawaiian Islands. That exception is The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui. Although the scene of the demi-god’s adventures is Hawaiian, I have used incidents related of him in other Polynesian islands—in New Zealand, Samoa, and the lesser islands. I have treated Ma-ui, not as an Hawaiian, but as the Pan-Polynesian hero that he is. With this exception the stories are all out of the Hawaiian tradition, or rather out of the Polynesian tradition as it has been shaped in Hawaii.

And the stories are mainly taken from that treasure house of Hawaiian lore, the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, which form Volumes IV–VI of the Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Honolulu, published 1916–1919. I have gone outside the Fornander Collection in several instances. The Seven Great Deeds of Ma-ui comes out of Mr. Westervelt’s valuable book, Ma-ui the Demi-God; the stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne come out of Mr. Thrum’s Stories of the Menehunes and Mr. Rice’s Hawaiian Legends; and I have drawn the story about Hina, the Woman of Lalo-hana, from David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities, and the story about the Shark-god from an old publication of the Islands, The Maile Quarterly. But it is the Fornander Collection that has given a cast to this book, and I must now give a brief account of it.

Abraham Fornander, the author of The Polynesian Race, lived on the Islands for over forty years. He edited a journal called The Polynesian, and he was Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Islands in 1865–1866. He had married an Hawaiian lady, and he was a strong partisan of the native race.

The theory which he expounds in The Polynesian Race is that the Polynesian people carried with them into the islands of the Pacific a culture and a set of ideas that connect them with the East Indians—with the pre-Sanscrit culture and with an Arabian culture that touched both the Hebrews and the East Indians. There is no reason to take this theory into account now. The important thing is that Abraham Fornander, in order to substantiate it, made an appeal to the traditions that were then current amongst the natives of Hawaii.

At that time, over forty years ago, there was considerable native scholarship. Haleole, who made an attempt to found a native literature with his romance Laieikawai, was writing and publishing. The Mission School in Lahainaluna on the Island of Maui had become a sort of Hawaiian university. Abraham Fornander had the good sense to appeal to native scholars, and he was able to get the best of them to interest themselves in his project of collecting all the native lore that could throw a light on the migrations of the Polynesian people. The Hawaiian monarchy was then in undisputed existence; native institutions were still vigorous; everywhere there were men and women whose memories were stocked with the historical traditions and the romances of Hawaii.

With the help of a corps of native scholars a great deal of the surviving tradition of Hawaii was collected by Fornander. Some of it was published in the Hawaiian newspapers of the time, but no extensive publication was given to it. The manuscripts were kept together; then, on the death of Abraham Fornander in 1887, the collection was acquired by Charles R. Bishop, the husband of Bernice Pauahi, an Hawaiian royalty whose estate went to the foundation of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History in Honolulu.

Forty years after it had been got together, the publication of the material was begun by the Bishop Museum. That was in 1916. The volumes have appeared under the editorship of that veteran Hawaiian scholar, Mr. Thomas Thrum, with the Hawaiian text on one page and the English translation by Mr. John Wise on the other. It is Mr. Wise’s translations that have furnished me with the bulk of the material for this book.

Although the stories are described in the Museum publications as folk-lore, I doubted from the time of my first reading of them that they were folk-lore in the strict sense of the word; that is, I doubted their coming out of an unlearned and popular tradition. The greater number of them seemed to me to be deliberate compositions intended for a rather select audience. And then I found that a great master of Hawaiian tradition, Mr. William Hyde Rice, favored this opinion. In the Introduction to his Hawaiian Legends4 it is said:

Mr. Rice’s theory as to the origin of these legends is based on the fact that in the old days, before the discovery of the Islands by Captain Cook, there were bards and story-tellers, either itinerant or attached to the courts of the chiefs, similar to the minstrels and tale-tellers of mediæval Europe. These men formed a distinct class, and lived only at the courts of the high chiefs. Accordingly, their stories were heard by none except those people attached to the service of the chiefs. This accounts for the loss of many legends, in later years, as they were not commonly known. These bards or story-tellers sometimes used historical incidents or natural phenomena for the foundation of their stories, which were handed down from generation to generation. Other legends were simply fabrications of the imagination, in which the greatest “teller of tales” was awarded the highest place in the chief’s favor. All these elements, fiction combined with fact, and shrouded in the mist of antiquity, came, by repetition, to be more or less believed as true. This class of men were skillful in the art of the “apo”—that is, “catching,” literally, or memorizing instantly at the first hearing. One man would recite or chant for two or three hours at a stretch, and when he had finished, his auditor would start at the beginning of the chant and go through the whole mele or story without missing or changing a word. These trained men received through their ears as we receive through our eyes, and in that way the ancient Hawaiians had a spoken literature much as we have a written one.

And as to the substance of this spoken literature, Miss Martha Warren Beckwith, who has made by her edition of Haleole’s romance of Laieikawai a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Polynesian poetry and romance, states that the traditional Hawaiian romance belongs to no isolated group but to the whole Polynesian area. “We find,” she says, “the same story told in New Zealand and Hawaii, scarcely changed, even in name.” Miss Beckwith thinks that the bulk of Hawaiian romance consists of stories about the demi-gods—beings descended from the gods, or adopted or endowed by them. These legendary tales reflect actual Polynesian conditions—“Gods and men are, in fact, to the Polynesian mind, one family under different forms, the gods having superior control over certain phenomena, a control which they can impart to their offspring on earth.… The supernatural blends with the natural in exactly the same way as to the Polynesian mind gods relate themselves to men, facts about one being regarded as, even though removed to the heavens, quite as objective as those which belong to the other, and being employed to explain social customs and physical appearances in actual experience.”

The bulk of the stories in the present volume are founded, then, on Polynesian literature rather than on Polynesian folk-lore. They are based on the compositions of men who were trained in the handling of character and incident. There are stories in the volume that obviously belong to folk-lore, however. The stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne, which are not given in the Fornander Collection, but are taken from the work of Mr. Thrum and Mr. Rice, are folk-lore, I believe. The stories of Ma-ui the demi-god are folk-lore, too. The story of Hina coming from the land under the sea, and the other story of her going to the moon and becoming the woman in the moon, undoubtedly belong to Polynesian folk-lore.

I do not believe that the Polynesian language, with its sounds that seem to belong to the forest and the sea, is going or that it has to go. Indeed, there may be a Polynesian revival similar to the national revivals which we have seen in European countries; the Polynesian, with tragic exceptions in the case of the people of the Marquesas, is coming back. He has turned the corner; our diseases no longer threaten his very existence. And yet, although his language and parts of his culture will probably remain for many generations, his children, if they are in the American territory of Hawaii, and if they are to read the romances of old Hawaii, will have to read them in English. For them, and for the neo-Hawaiian children—the children of American, British, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese parents, mixed or unmixed with Hawaiian blood—these stories have been reshaped. I have had to condense, expand, heighten, subdue, rearrange—in a word, I have had to retell the stories, using the old romances as material for wonder-stories. The old stories were not for children; they gave an image of life to kings and soldiers, to courtiers and to ruling women. As in all stories not originally intended for children, much has had to be suppressed in retelling them for a youthful audience.

And retelling them has meant that I have had to find a new form for the stories. The form that I choose to give them is that of the European folk-tale.

In Hawaiian romance there is a feeling that is rare in any body of popular European romance—a feeling for the beauty of nature, for flowers and trees, the aspect of the clouds, the look of the sea, the sight of mountains, for the beauty of the rainbow and the waterfall. And part of the delight in retelling these stories is in recalling the beauties of places that are beautifully named. To be true in any measure to the originals these stories of my retelling should have in them the rainbow and the waterfall, the volcano, the forest, the surf as it foams over the reef of coral. In the hula or Hawaiian ballet, and in the poetry that is related to the hula, there is, as Dr. Nathaniel Emerson has observed, always an idyllic feeling. This idyllic feeling pervades Hawaiian romance also. The scene of many of the stories, when not laid in lands that are frankly mythical, is laid in an Hawaiian Arcadia. And how memorable these lands are!—Ku-ai-he-lani, the Country that Supports the Heavens, and Pali-uli, the easeful land that the gods have since hidden. Who would not roam through these lands with those who first told of them and who first heard of them—the gracious and vivid children of Wakea and Papa?

PADRAIC COLUM.

1 Quoted by Melville in Typee, Chapter XXV. The chronicle of de Figeroas’s voyage—the voyage by which the Marquesas were discovered and the Polynesians looked upon for the first time by European man—was published in Madrid, according to Melville, in 1613. Mendaña’s voyage was made in 1595. ↑

2 By Ivor H. N. Evans, M.A., Cambridge University Press, 1923. ↑

3 Written kapu in Hawaiian and taboo by the mariners who came first amongst the Polynesians. I have been instructed to write the word tapu. Its meaning is not merely “forbidden”: it means “sacred,” “inviolate,” “belonging to the gods.” In the four stories in the present collection where tapu is in operation I have made no attempt to explain its significance; I have merely said that it was forbidden to go to that place or go near that person. ↑

4 Published by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History, 1923. ↑