IV.
How I Fared at Court.

At length, on August 27, Fatafehi's schooner the Malokula was declared ready for sea, and I embarked with Tukuaho, Fatafehi, and Chief Clerk Mataka. The vessel was unpleasantly crowded with old women, whose prostrate bodies made the traverse of the deck at night impossible. At sunset we passed Malinoa, where lay the four men who were shot after the attempt on Mr. Baker's life. Thence clear of reefs, we stood on with a fair wind through the night until we could see the glare of the volcano of Tofua, then in eruption. After a fruitless attempt to capture a pig at Haafeva, which wasted a precious hour, we dropped anchor at Lifuka at nearly noon. We were on the lee side of a low narrow island, nowhere more than thirty feet above high-water mark, but covered with grass and cocoanuts to the water's edge. Other islands of the same kind stretched away to the north and south of us. The town was a mere row of ironroofed stores on the beach: behind them could be seen the usual native huts dotted about among the trees, with grass growing right up to the doors, and horses tethered page 51here and there between them. A few cable — lengths to the northward of our anchorage was the spot where the privateer Port-au-Prince was treacherously taken by Finau Ulukalala, and on the beach opposite to us the master and crew were murdered. The two rusty iron guns among the ballast in the hold of our schooner are part of her armament. To this event we are indebted for a book of travels that closely approaches 'Robinson Crusoe' in style and surpasses it in interest. Mariner, one of the survivors, spent scarcely four years among the people, yet his account of the Tongans, elicited by questions put to him by Dr Martin, leaves little to be added by later travellers The book so produced has become a classic: one does not know which most to admire, Mariner's observation and wonderful memory, or Martin's ingenuity, industry, and pure style.¹

As our visit to the king was to be one of state, we had brought with us an old matabule, or master of ceremonies, who landed with a root of kava to announce our arrival. We followed him immediately afterwards along the beach to the great native house occupied by the king. Before we reached it we saw the old man coming down from the unfinished church, followed by a train of his matabules. We halted until a mat was spread under the shade of some large trees, and his attendants formed a kava-ring, a large oval, with the bowl facing the king. Fatafehi then led me round outside the oval of sitting men, and we took our seats on the king's left, with our matabule between us and him. On my left was a whitehaired man with very bright eyes, who afterwards proved

¹ Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands.

page 52to be Kaho the chief jailer, and therefore the most important authority after the Governor. The king sat quite silent and impassive except for a nervous side glance of the eyes, which would have given him a suspicious look if it had not been evidently involuntary. Tukuaho had slunk off to the place of dishonour behind the bowl, where some of the attendants were pounding the root on a flat stone that rang out melodiously. This was because his

The king's kava ring.

father is still living, and no man in Tonga has any titular rank or status until his father be dead. At the king's kava the circle is sacred to chiefs and the matabules. For fully five minutes, while the kava was being pounded, not a word was spoken. The thirty or forty men who composed the ring stared straight at the grass, oppressed by a sense of decorum as rigid as the etiquette at St James'. Suddenly, without a word of warning, our matabule shouted at the top of his voice to the matabule on the king's right, page 53"Oku lelei a Tonga" (All is well at Tonga), and the other shouted back, "Koe!" (Indeed). Then our voice yelled, "We left Tonga yesterday with a fair wind, and arrived to-day." The other barked his monosyllable, "Koe!" After this conversation languished. I looked at the king to see how he would take their flagrant breach of manners, expecting that these unmannerly vassals who talked across him at the top of their voices would receive some reproof; but he made no sign, and I was left to conclude that this mode of conversation was adopted in deference to the king's growing deafness.

The pounded root, which had fallen from the stone upon a small mat, had been from time to time shot into the bowl, which was now handed to a man who sat directly opposite to the king with a crowd of commoners behind him. He tilted it up to show the contents, and cried, "Koe kava enį kuo tuki" (This kava is pounded). The matabule on the king's right shouted, "Palu" (Mix), and two men came forward and sat one on each side of the bowl facing one another—the one with a fan to keep off the flies, and the other with some water-gourds. The man who presided at the bowl now rinsed his hands by pouring water over them from one of the gourds, and then squeezed the pounded root into a pyramid in the bottom of the bowl. The matabule now cried, "Lingi ae vai" (Pour in the water), and the contents of the gourds were slowly poured in, while the kava-maker kneaded the mass with both hands. Then the matabule cried, "Tuku ae vai" (Stop pouring), and the man dropped his gourds, and took up a banana-leaf to help his fellow in keeping off the flies. The matabule now cried, "Ai ae fau" (Put in the page 54strainer), and a tassel of the fibres of the yellow hibiscus, in shape and size looking not unlike a deck-swab, was laid floating upon the surface of the kava. The kava-maker now pushed the edges of this strainer carefully down to the bottom of the bowl, drawing it gently towards him, and bringing it up to the rim of the bowl till it overlapped the part that still floated, thus enclosing the fibres of the root in a sort of net. Then drawing the whole to the broad rim of the bowl, he folded it double, and wrung it out till the muddy fluid had slopped back into the bowl, and the strong fibres of the strainer cracked. He now handed it to his companion on the left, who shook it out and combed out the fibres with his fingers before giving it back. This process was repeated until all the fibres of the kava suspended in the fluid had been removed. These waste fibres, called efi, were afterwards pounded again in one of the neighbouring houses by some of the commoners.

During this operation the most perfect silence was kept. Three men now came into the circle carrying baskets of boiled plantains, which they emptied in a heap on banana-leaves, and, by the direction of the matabue, distributed amongst us—two plantains each. Before eating mine I waited to see what the others would do, but no one touched them, and before the end of the ceremony they were swept up and taken away in baskets. In Mariner's time, eighty-seven years ago, they would have been eaten: now the custom has become an empty form, and survived like the buttons on the back of the modern dress-coat.

The straining of the kava being now completed, the man at the bowl cried, "Kuo ma ae kava ni" (This kava is clear), and the matabule answered, "Fakatau" (Pour out). page 55Three or four men rose from behind the bowl and squatted within the circle, each holding a polished cocoa-nut shell. The kava-maker filled each in turn, using the strainer as a sponge, and, as each shell was filled, the man holding the fan cried in a peculiar long-drawn wail, "Kava kuo heka" (The kava is lifted), and the matabule replied, "Angi maa-," naming the title of each recipient. As each was named he clapped his hands to show the cupbearer where he was sitting. Two of the king's matabules drank first, then the king, then Fatafehi, then another matabule; then there was a pause, for the presiding matabule had to ascertain my name, which, being imperfectly caught, was reproduced as "Angi maa Tobisoni." After several others had drunk, the matabule cried, "Mai ma'aku" (Bring it to me), and received his own share. The distribution followed certain strict laws of precedence, which it is the matabules trade to know. The first cup is given to the principal matabule, the second to the chief next in rank to the presiding chief, the third to the chief himself. Had Fatafehi been a visitor instead of Governor of the island, he would have received the first cup, but being regarded as a chief of the place, to whom no special compliment was necessary, he received it immediately before the king, a sure indication that he was next in rank to him. In kava-parties of less ceremony, when the kava is brewed more than once, the order is changed. At the second brew the president drinks first, and the person next to him in rank third, the matabule intervening.

The Tongans give a rather crude piece of folk-lore to account for this custom, the opposite of that observed in Fiji, where the chief always drinks first. They say that page 56there was a time, many years ago, when their fathers believed that the kava, growing everywhere wild in the forest, was a deadly poison. But one day a man going to his plantation saw a rat gnawing a kava-root. He waited expecting to see it die, but it ate on greedily, and at last ran off uninjured. Much excited by what he had seen, he hastened to tell the Tui Tonga, taking the gnawed root with him to bear out his statement. The chief listened to him and said, "If the rat gnawed the kava and lived, then surely is the plant not poisonous: perhaps it is even a useful medicine; let us try it. "So they took shellknives, and scraped the root, and kneaded it with water, and presented it to the Tui Tonga in a cup. But he, looking at it, said, "Perhaps this fellow lied, and the kava is poison after all: let another drink first, that we may know." And he gave the cup to the matabule on his left hand, bidding him drink, and the chief sat gazing at him to see if he would die; and after a while he called for another cup, and gave it to the matabule on his right hand, saying, "Drink, for perhaps your fellow has a stronger stomach than I, and that which harms him not may kill me." And when both had drunk and were unharmed the Tui Tonga drank the cup, and found it pleasant to the taste, and bade them gather the kava from the forest, and let him drink of it daily. Thus it became the usage of the chief to drink the third cup, after the fashion of that Tui Tonga who made a trial of it on the bodies of his matabules.

When the bowl was empty I whispered to Fatafehi that he should announce me as the bearer of a letter to the king from the High Commissioner. He passed the mes-page 57sage on to our matabule, who shouted a mangled version of it across the king to the fellow sitting on his Majesty's right hand. This functionary as usual shouted "Koe!" to the sea-birds circling over the reef. My letter was then passed to the king, who laid it down without looking at it.

Meanwhile the second brew was being prepared, and although the formalities were sufficiently relaxed to permit conversation, still the king stared straight before him, speaking to no one, and seeming not to hear the conversation which was carried on at speaking-trumpet pitch out of compliment to his deafness. As soon as the cup had gone round again he rose without any warning, passed behind Fatafehi, and stooping over me, extended three fingers of his right hand in welcome, not from any motive of hauteur, but because the fourth finger had been sacrificed in his old heathen days to the manes of a deceased relative. Then without a word he walked off, carrying rather than leaning on his staff for all his ninety years, and disappeared into the long native house where he was staying. The kava-party at once broke up and went their several ways; and Tukuaho emerged from his humble seat behind the bowl, and led us to a large but ruinous house that had once been the king's palace. This was to be our quarters during our visit. Fatafehi left us here to go to Government House and attend to his executive duties. A glance at that building—we could see it from our verandah—convinced me that whoever may have squandered the public funds, the Governor of Haapai was as guiltless as the Minister of Finance, whose house I had seen in Nukualofa.

In Government House there were traces of a weatherboard bungalow, but the shingles had long ago rotted away, and been replaced from time to time with odd scraps of galvanised iron, rust-eaten through and through. The verandah posts had fallen, bringing down the roof with them, and the gaps in the flooring were mended with bits of an old canoe. But dilapidated as the house of his Majesty's representative was, it was a mansion in comparison to that of the Minister of Finance in Nukualofa, which seemed only to hold together to clear the character of its owner from any suspicion that an empty treasury might reasonably attach to him.

It now transpired that Tukuaho had in his suite a couple of spies devoted to his interests, whose business was to loaf into the houses of their acquaintances and gauge public opinion. One of them, Peter Vi, would have surpassed even the "Sham Squire" if they had been contemporaries. His fat empty face and rotund person disarmed suspicion; and he had besides an odour of the cloth about him, for his father and grandfather were both reverend pillars of the Free Church. The latter, indeed, was the oldest native minister, and a contemporary of the king. He paid us a visit in a hand-cart soon after we arrived, with a black coat over his vala, and a tall hat, carefully brushed the wrong way, upon his reverend head. The poor old gentleman had lost the use of his lower limbs and of part of his intellect; but he said a prayer over us, and went his way, leaving a vapour of respectability behind him which doubtless served to rehabilitate such disreputable politicians as we were believed to be: for although his son, as a Free Church minister, is dis-page 59affected to the present Cabinet by profession, old Peter is long past polemics, for all creeds seem much alike when one is ninety, and expecting every day to have one's doubts explained away. Young Peter was only a third clerk in the Treasury at £10 a-year, and bad at arithmetic, and he wanted to be Sub-Inspector of Police at

"He paid us a visit in a hand cart."

£25; so, having his way to make in the world, he was a loyal spy. The other was Tukuaho's cousin. He was an ex-convict, and looked his part of spy so well that I suspect that the conversation at once turned upon the weather in any house that he entered; but this did not prevent him from bringing blood-curdling reports of the hostility of the people, drawn probably from hearsay aided by a facile imagination.

Having despatched our spies on secret service, we had page 60time to examine the three great rooms that formed our quarters. There was a depressing air of decayed grandeur about the worm-eaten furniture and weather-stained floor. A large room at the end became our pantry, and through the reed screen that divided it from the rest of the house came the incessant chatter of a Princess and two ladies from the jail who had been told off to attend to our wants. When not engaged in the menial service of washing dishes, they were drinking kava and retailing the local scandal in an atmosphere reeking with the fumes of sulukas. Lest I should seem to boast of my single experience of eating from the hand of a Princess of the Blood Royal, I hasten to add that Charlotte, the lady in question, was a member of Fatafehi's household, and since we were his guests, it was in accordance with native etiquette that she should take charge of the culinary department. She discharged her task admirably, and rang the changes on fried chicken, fried sucking-pig, with baked cocoa-nuts and raw fish¹ for dessert, in the most practised manner.

The first thing to do was to persuade the king to hold a Privy Council, and to appoint me a Minister of the Crown; the next, to pass certain draft Ordinances restraining the public expenditure within the limits of the Budget. First, I had to explain to my fellow-conspirators what a Budget really is. "But," I asked, "how is it that you do not page 62know all about this? It is provided for in clause 19 of the Constitution." "That may be," retorted Tukuaho; "many things are provided for in Mr Baker's Constitution, but we have never seen any of them done in Tonga. When has there been a ballot? Yet the Constitution says no one may sit in Parliament without being first elected by ballot. It is unlawful to confine any person without a warrant, yet where are the warrants for the prisoners in Tofua? There are none, because the men were taken there without trial."

I produced my draft Estimates, drawn up by Mr Campbell, and unfolded the idea that no expenditure not first authorised by the Privy Council could be incurred. My colleagues scarcely contained their admiration; but when I modestly produced voucher forms, and explained that not a penny could be spent without the signature of the Premier and the Auditor-General, and then only when proper detailed accounts are attached, my reputation as a statesman was thoroughly established. Fatafehi, giving short barks of half-comprehending appreciation, asked me to say it all over again. Then he leaned back in his chair, and laughed long and loud, looking all the while at Tukuaho, and crying, "How now, boy? If it had been like this in Mr Baker's time, eh? Would there now be debts, eh? Would the money have been stolen, eh? This is a real thing. Look here," he added, becoming grave, "you go and see Tubou now, and tell him all about it. Get him to fix the Council for tomorrow,—just we three, and we will pass this law, and keep our money."

"Wait a moment," I interposed; "you must first have page 63me appointed one of the Ministers and a member of the Privy Council."

"Oh, Tubou will do that, of course. We cannot pass it without you. Look here, boy," he said, addressing his leader, "go to Tubou now—he's alone: I saw him as I came up. I will send a policeman to keep the listeners off."

So Tukuaho rather reluctantly girded on a ragged mat and walked down the slope to see his sovereign, and a policeman in a smart uniform tunic and bare legs followed to clear the anteroom. This precaution proved to be useless, for anon we heard the voice of our colleague proclaiming State secrets in a voice that wounded the ear. He came back delighted with himself. The king had laughed more than once. The policeman had seen him laugh and would tell the town: it would have great results. Tubou had told him all about the church he was building, and he told Tubou the news from Tongatabu. It was this that had made him laugh.

"But did he say that he would have a Council?" I asked anxiously, surprised at my colleague's levity.

"Yes, at ten o'clock. I had almost forgotten."

"And did he say that I should be appointed Assistant Premier?"

"Yes, so he did. I am to write a letter of appointment for you."

Then we laid our plans. The new Ordinances must first be passed, and as the king knew that the Privy Council had power to pass Ordinances between the sessions of the Legislative Council, there ought to be no difficulty in persuading him to sign them. Then, if he page 64were still in a good humour, we were to urge upon him the necessity of returning to Tongatabu to hold a great meeting of the people, and order them to pay their taxes We sat on far into the night, discussing our plan of campaign between the bowls of kava, until the Head Jailer and the Sub-Inspector of Police, both malcontents, came in, ostensibly to do us honour, but in reality to hear us talk and spread the news. But when they had all gone Peter's moon-face clouded, and he whispered his dire tidings into Tukuaho's willing ear. The town was suspicious and uncomfortable. "Tukuaho sits all day with the while man writing. Let them write on. The country will not be lost to us by writings. There will be war before that happens."