Club types of nuclear Polynesia online

dreams of strutting along the Apia beach from Sogi and Savalalo,



164 CLUB TYPES OF NUCLEAR POLYNESIA.

stopping for a tale of the whale fishery at Matafele, for a hasty cast of a
pebble at the tree shrine at Matautu, possibly for a bowl of kava at
Vaiala, and so along to Moota or even to Matafagatele of the gUsten-
ing sands, proud in the possession of such a club as never before his
return was carried in Samoa even by a chief. Yet before he could
reaUze his dream, even before he had had the time to complete his club
by making the hole through the lug whereby it might be suspended by
a becket of sennit, the chance of his voyage led him to Santa Cruz.
One does not associate the thought of gentle traffic with that savage
island; no Samoan would ever give up peacefully such a club to men
whom he could not trust with arms in their hands; there is blood upon
the club beyond any doubt.

A pair of notably similar pieces represented on Plate VIII in figures
b and c may be ascribed indifferently to one or other of two eminently
peaceful trades, for they are clearly of Maori origin, both credited to
Fiji and one upon the authority of Voy. One of these trades was the
spread of the Gospel according to the tenets of that one of the Protes-
tant sects which has most firmly estabHshed itself among the Fijians.
In the division of the field of evangeHzation theWesleyan communion
claimed for its own possession the archipelagoes of Tonga and Fiji.
The port from which these emoUient expeditions set out was in the
Australian colonies, generally Sydney or Melbourne. When none but
sailing vessels were available for the service as mission tenders, the
voyage was somewhat roundabout in order to take advantage of the
prevailing winds, and New Zealand was found to be on the most direct
route to the islands. There were Wesleyan missions to be served in
New Zealand as well. In consequence of this fact of navigation, the
mission tenders were commonly manned by Maori converts, who thus
were brought into contact with the peoples of Nuclear Polynesia. A
little later than the establishment of the Wesleyan missions, about the
sixties of the nineteenth century, there was a somewhat brisk trade in
tropical fruits between Auckland and Levuka, which remained until
1880 the principal port in Fiji, and many Maori were employed as
sailors upon the Hght and speedy vessels which engaged therein. The
mission service and the fruit trade provided the channel through which
articles of Maori provenience might be collected in Fiji. The decora-
tion on the grip of one of these pieces is shown in figure 59; that of the
other is so much of the same general character that it did not appear
necessary to take a rubbing.

The whale trade, destructive of the whales, was as innocent upon men
as any contact of rude savages with rude sailors may be; the trade in
bananas and oranges with New Zealand entailed no moral obUquity.
But the last group of the erratics in this collection leads to the mute
evidences of a trade which equaled, if indeed it did not surpass, all the
iniquity and more than the shame of the Middle Latitudes and the



MIGRATION DRIFT AND ERRATICS. 1 65

Roaring Forties, the "labor trade." Merely as museum specimens
these objects are mute ; they are present simply as culture objects found
anomalously in sites in which ethnographically they are misplaced.
It is only when it is sought to account for the anomaly that these
specimens give their testimony of wrong deeds.

Continuing the examination of Plate VIII, figure d exhibits a pan-
danus club of the type distinctively Fijian. This was collected by
Donaldson, a rare authority in this museum, in Ysobel of the central
Solomons. It seems pity that with a name so glorious in the annals of
triumphant womankind there should be linked this evidence of a
thing shameful. That Ysobel thus commemorated in remote geogra-
phy. Donna Ysobel Berreto, Admiral of Spain and the Indies by royal
patent, was the wife, she became the widow, of Alvaro Mendana de
Neira. He had discovered an unknown land in the west of the great
ocean and had filled his soul with the delusion that he had found once
more the islands of Solomon son of David, those gold-studded shores
from which ships of Tarshish fetched gold and ivory and apes and pea-
cocks. His vision rested on no ivory nor a single ape nor yet a peacock,
but he tricked himself into the behef that he had found the gold. For a
generation a discredited dreamer of dreams, he haunted the court of the
viceroy pleading ever in vain for a fleet in which to sail once again to
claim for his Most Cathohc Majesty the fabulous wealth of Tierra
Australis. At last the viceroy Mendoza, Marques de Cafiete and
grandee of Spain, issued the grudging permit which allowed Mendana
to fit out the ships of his expedition and to sweep the jails from Val-
paraiso to Callao of the future settlers of the distant lands. With this
runagate set the expedition fared forth, and with the admiral sailed
his wife. The voyage halts for a space to discover those nearer islands
which still bear the commemorative name of the Marquesas and many
a holy saint, thence with many vicissitudes to the west. The gold they
missed ; others since their time have sought gold in the Solomons and
have missed the prize. But in these islands Mendana died and was
buried, and to this day none has been able to discover his tomb. Dis-
sension split the high command. Quiros, piloto mayor, assumed to
succeed his leader and sailed stormily back to Peru with three of the
ships. Donna Ysobel aboard the admiral held to her husband's pur-
pose ; she refused the homeward voyage, and explored the islands in the
vain search for the mythical gold. At last, her victual all but ex-
hausted, she tore herself away from the islands in which her husband
lay buried, and made her way to Manila and back into the known world.
In the end she discovered in the untried region of the westerly varia-
bles a new route for the returning galleons back to Acapulco, a priceless
benefit to the commerce of Spain and of the world. Some time a care-
ful search of the muniment chambers in Lima or Santiago in the New
World, or in Seville in the Old World, may bring to light the records



1 66 CLUB TYPES OF NUCLEAR POLYNESIA.

upon which the historian may write the annals of this dauntless woman
of the sea, the only woman who has earned the title of adelantada.

This club was found on Ysobel of the Solomons. In its weight, its
size, and in its highly specialized form it is wholly alien to the far
lighter weapon types of the Solomon culture. It is quite clear that it
could not have been formed in the place of its discovery. It bears all
the evidence of somewhat modem origin, for the marks of wear are
slight. Its source may without a doubt be credited to Fiji. Yet
between Fiji and the Solomons there can have been no communica-
tion for centuries until the arrival of the better navigation of white
sailors. The canoecraft of the Solomons is so poor that it is incon-
ceivable that voyagers from Ysobel could have cruised the unknown
sea as far as Fiji and then won their way back with this article of war.
Yet this club distinctly establishes a hnk between Fiji and the Solo-
mons; not drift, but erratic.

In figure e, Plate VIII, is found yet another Fijian club, an ula. The
manuscript label pasted upon it by some earUer possessor, in all Uke-
lihood the original collector, since he has been at pains to set upon it
his initials and the date, shows that it was found in New Guinea some-
where, probably in one of the communities facing on Torres Straits. If
it be really of Fijian provenience, which seems altogether likely, it is
unique in that the shaft near the head is hexagonal in section, whereas
all the true Fijian specimens examined are round. Yet as the plane
sin-faces of the shaft alternate with the flanges which compose the
wheel-head, a characteristic Fijian treatment is recognized, for in the
fianged-head type of rootstock clubs the same design is encountered.
This erratic piece affords evidence of communication between Fiji and
Torres Straits.

The last of these erratics lies outside the theme of this work in its
more restricted content, for it is not a club. It is highly important in
that it establishes yet another link of communication athwart regions
where communication is not normal to the savage life. The erratic
clubs exhibit the transference of material objects from one culture group
to another. The last piece in its brilliancy of the colors of art and the
more gorgeous hues of nature evidences the contamination of culture by
the presence of the alien man. On this account it must stand as the
most compelling proof of the nature of the principle which underlies this
group of the erratics. In the case of the club erratics it is a matter of
inference to argue the presence of the man who was the purposeful
agent of the transport of the pieces from one culture group to the other.
In this piece it is possible to sense the presence of the man in an
ahen culture site remodeling the piece to the canons of his own unfor-
gotten art of decoration. It is not a club, yet it sheds so much Ught
upon the transport of erratics that its inclusion here is highly germane
to the theme.



MIGRATION DRIFT AND ERRATICS. 1 67

This piece (Plate VII) is a very beautiful mask of the type usual in
New Ireland adjacent to the shores of St. George's Channel, and it
comes into the collection with the record that it was collected in New
Ireland. The type is both highly developed and very narrowly
restricted. Such masks are found only in the eastern region of the
Bismarck Archipelago, on the shores of the channel which parts the
two great islands; even when they are found in New Britain on the
western shore of the channel the evidence is uniformly discoverable
that New Ireland is the place of manufacture. The masks and mask-
oids of New Ireland are all carved of a soft and readily workable wood ;
they are all covered with such brilHant pigments as were originally or
have more recently become available to the savage artist. Of such
sort is this mask, but with a significant difference. Quite in the New
Ireland style, the human head of this mask is surmounted by a carved
bird, its long beak reaching down to the brow of the man face, its wings
extending downward along the cheeks of the head below, its tail
short and pertly cocked. While this mask was still in New Ireland,
which it seems never to have left until it passed into the hands of the
collector who sent it along to London to be disposed of by Oldman, it
was subjected to an added treatment in decoration. Upon the wooden
breast of the bird was set a bkd skin with its feathers well preserved.
Naturally this placing brought the feathered tail downward from the
wooden breast in close parallelism with the carved beak. Upon the
summit of the head of the wooden bird is pinned the dried head of a
real bird, and this head faces toward the rear, as if continuing the posi-
tioning of the skin which had been appHed upon the breast below.
From the perked-up wooden tail depends a second tail of stuff rolled
into a cord as great as the finger and more than 2 feet in length. It
begins and it ends in a bunch of bird skins, and upon much of its length
are applied the bright-hued skins of various MeUphagidae, an Australa-
sian order closely akin to the TrochiUdae, which embraces the scarcely
more gemlike humming-birds of the American continents.

Feathers are but scantily employed in the decorative art of New
Ireland; the employment of the whole bird-skin is wholly foreign to
this culture group; neither observation nor the written record afford
evidence that the men of New Ireland know how to skin a bird for the
preservation of the beauty of the plumage. This decoration charac-
terizes the art of New Guinea and is widely spread through all the com-
munities of Torres Straits and of the northern coast of the island . This
piece, then, carries its own evidence that it was made in New Ireland
and that in New Ireland it was enriched by some exile from New Guinea.

These three erratics estabUsh links between Fiji and Ysobel, between
Fiji and New Guinea, between New Guinea and New Ireland. Now,
between the points of these pairs there is in savage life no more chance
of normal intercommunication than there is between Bering Sea and



1 68 CLUB TYPES OF NUCLEAR POLYNESIA.

the Solomons and Santa Cruz as established by the erratics of the whale
fishery. For the latter communication it has been possible to estab-
lish a satisfactory and quite innocent explanation ; far other in the case
of these which have just been examined. The motive of these three
erratics had its beginning half around the world in conditions which
only the wildest feat of the imagination could associate with cannibal
peoples of the western Pacific.

The long continuance of civil turmoil in this country a half century
ago was felt around the world even to these islands of the uttermost sea.
The presence of these erratics in regions where normally they should
not be found is as much a consequence of the poUtical theory of state
sovereignty and the fugitive-slave law as were Gettysburg and Appo-
mattox, for such is the balance of the world. When the blockade of the
Southern ports was complete the cotton spinners of Great Britain were
brought to penury; every warm region of the world which could be
made to grow cotton was set to the task of supporting Manchester.
Fiji was no exception, nor were the other islands of Nuclear Polynesia
where soil could be found for such agriculture, but Fiji above all by
reason of the extent of the diluvium in the deltas of its really great
rivers, the Rewa and the Ba. In the Fijian social poUty there was no
plan for the wage-earner ; each man did his Httle task for the support of
the family commune ; when that task was completed there was neither
inducement nor compulsion to essay labor from which others were to
reap the profit. Therefore, in Fiji arose the labor question, out of the
question arose the labor trade, and when the colony of Queensland
entered upon the cultivation of sugar the labor trade assumed enor-
mous proportions. To preserve a face of respectability this system of
enforced labor, technically indentured labor, was made moral by legis-
lation which really did no more than give it the dignity of capital
initials as the Labor Trade under acts of ParHament and of colonial
legislatures and the sanction of an unimportant king or two. It was
slavery none the less; it was a slave trade; and in the fifteen years
between 1865 and 1880 it depopulated the western Pacific and destroyed
the peoples of many islands.

There was toward the end of the period some salutary pretense of
returning the indentured laborer eventually to his own. That was
insisted upon by some manner of government supervision. There is a
sense of satisfaction in the evidence of the pandanus club from Ysobel
and the ula from New Guinea that two at least of the slaves reached
their own homes and brought back with them new weapons which set
their feet on a firmer hold on Hfe.

But this commerce in humanity was carried out by men who recked
not of sympathy for the kanaka ; government could not obtain men of
better nature at the meager wages of the labor agent. So long as each
returning laborer was set ashore upon some island in order that the



MIGRATION DRIFT AND ERRATICS. 1 69

official books might balance, there was none to voice an effective pro-
test when the uncomprehended chattel was left upon some beach which
might be hostile, which at its best was an alien land and the abode of
utter strangers. This mask from New Ireland is as gay as the plumage
of bright birds can make it; it flashes when the sunlight plays upon it.
It is quite as wonderful a museum piece as one could imagine. It is as
marvelous a contribution to the recognition of the art hunger of these
primitive savages as it is possible to devise. But all this fades into
insignificance alongside its appeal to our sympathies. It is the handi-
work of a New Guinea man in New Ireland who through some miracle
has escaped the oven which was the common end of such misplaced
humanity in the dereliction of the labor trade. He had toiled through
his years of servitude at harder labor than comported with his joy of
Uving ; he had been fed on foreign viands and not overfed ; at last he was
on his homeward way and in the end was set upon a distant island and
his last hope of home perished on those rippled sands as the labor-
trader's boat pulled off unheeding his uncomprehended protestations.
How long he lived none may know ; he has left but this record that in
New Ireland among strangers he followed his bent and added to the
ornament of carving that which really gladdened his life, the decoration
of the feathers of the birds of the air, he more homeless than they.

At this point this study of the clubs of the central Pacific properly
closes. The specimens have been grouped into types; the source of
each type has been investigated. So far as has proved practicable the
genesis of the several type forms has been worked out. The character
of the ornament and its significance have been studied. In this con-
cluding chapter the material evidence of the artifacts themselves has
been assembled to the proof of the nature and direction of migration of
Polynesians in the Pacific, both in the ancient period of the first migra-
tion and in the modem period of chance dispersion under conditions
which have arisen in opposition to the smooth course of the life of the
peoples of the Pacific.



INDEX.



PAGE.

Additions to Clubs 125

Admiralty Islands, obsidian wea-
pons 1 19, 158

adze 8, 105, 1 14

Alaskan drift 161

arc design 137

arm design 144

Aua, club forms 80

axe 114

axe-bit club, metamorphism 118

type 43

band-and-zigzag 129

basketry skeuomorph 129, 133, 135

bast collar 125

bau 112

bead ornament 125

Berreto, Dona Ysobel 165

billet type 17

bird design 141

Bismarck Archipelago culture 159

body design 144

body as measuring scale 88

bonito design 140

breakage 106, 121

Buka culture 160

butt 18

cachalot ivory 126

cachalot tooth, death significance ... 39

cannibal customs 40

vocabulary 147

cap, haft end 95

carinated clubs 70

challenge 13

chunam decoration 128

circle ornament I37

circular measiu^ement 89

Clark, E. S.; collector 81

club, art 6

material 7

tools 8

vocabulary 9

club-workers, guild organization .... 7

clutch measurement 90

coconut leaf design 132

coconut milk 105

coconut-stalk type 56

comb design 130

cone haft 98

contusion 12

crescent type 75

cupping, haft 20, 34, 35

structural purpose 94



PACK.

curved shafts m

curviHnear decoration 135

decoration 126

dimensions 85

dog decoration 139

domed cap 95

dot design 133

drift specimens 157

edged clubs 47, 106

entrails design 1 46

episodic pictures 146

erratic specimens 157

fa'alautaliga 76

feather ornament 167

feet design 145

fencing 11

Fiji ethnography 3,4

fire, use in carpentry 8

fish design 140

flange 20, 58, 93

flare 20

foaga 105

Futuna ethnography 4

genitalia design 145

girth measurement 91

goat, introduction 78

grip 18

guard 14

gimi 107

hand design i44

hand-grasp measurement 86

head, design 142

trophies 78

types loi, 106

herringbone 132

hip design i44

homed clubs 77

incised ornament 12, 127

inlays 126

Irwin, Allen; collector 83

kava myth 56

Kingsbury, James; collector 82

knobbed stone heads 109

labor trade 165

lapalapa 56

leg design '45

length 17.85

171



172



INDEX.



PAGE.

lipped clubs 46

metamorphism 113

lizard design 139

loop-and-tie 139

Louisiade Archipelago, club forms. . . 80

lozenge design 131

lug 21,29,58,95

mace 52, 112

Malietoa, origin of name 7

man design 142

Maori drift 163

Marquesas annexation 162

maskoid 166

matai 6

Matamatame battle 7

meke ni wau 11

Melanesian culture groups 3

melon-head clubs no

Mendana de Neira, Alvaro 165

metamorphs of stone weapons 105

metathesis, Rotuma 5

metrology 85

migration movements 157

Miller, W. H 82

missile clubs 32, 106

Moanus culture 158

Moso, turtle tabu 140

mukmuk 112

mushroom type 76

Mycenaean grip measurements 93

Myers, L.; collector 82

nacre inlays 126

narwhal ivory club 161

nassa shell ornament 107, 125

neck design 143

nifo'oti 77

Nine, culture 159

ethnography 4

uluhelu club 79

Nuclear Polynesia i

numeration 133

obsidian weapons 119, 158

octopus design 141

Oldman, W. O. ; vendor of ethnica . . 82

'olo 32

Owyhee 163

paddle clubs 14, 62

Patau 107

pandanus club 39. 1 1 1

pandanus myth 39

pandanus ties 125

parade at arms 13

arinariutn laurinum gum 119

parry 14

Pava myth 56



PAGE.

perforation 20, 29, 35, 40, 47, 58, 97

perspective 141, 147

phalloid club 109

pictorial decoration 139

pineapple club misnomer 39

plank 8, 63

povai 17

Proto-Samoan migration 2, 157

pun, Figian 34



rainbow design

rasp

Ratu Lala

rectilinear decoration .

rootstock type

Rotuma ethnography .



Safotulafai titles

Samoa ethnography ....

Samoa Stream

Savea, first Malietoa . . .

saw teeth

scrapers

seconds in club matches .
selu design



138

8

40

136

25

4

6

4

164

7

123

105

13

130

sennit ornament 126, 129

serrated clubs 72

serration design 131

shaft section 98

shark design 140

shark-tooth burin 8, 136

sheep, flesh objectionable 78

shell blade 114

shoulder design 143

sickle type 79

sky, design 137

symbol 131, 133

socket J19

soul journey, Fiji 39

Spear, Dr. Reginald ; collector 83

spike 121

stance 13

stars and stripes 142

staves 80

stingray design 140

stone axe 8

stone-ball head 107

stone weapons 106

stroke 14



talavalu type

tap-root motive

tattoo myth

thrust

Tonga ethnography .



54

26

96

J5

4

Tongafiti migration 2, 157

tooth ornament 107, 126

totokia 39. m

tree growth 25



INDEX.



173



PAGB-

triangle design 131, 134

tridacna blades 114

tufuga 6

turtle design 140

ula 33. 89, 106

tdalei 143

uluhelu 79. 159

Uvea ethnography 4

Voy, C. D.; collector 81



PAGS.

walrus ivory figurine 161

Wardle, Miss H. Newell 5

wedge 63

weight of clubs n

whaling voyages 162

wheel-head clubs no

whetstone 105

wounds, character of 12

Wuvulu club forms 79

zigzag ,29



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