They are Christians,
church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their
books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract
Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our
tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the
Roman wall. We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of
the patriarchal. We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in
a period of communism. And this makes them hard to understand.
To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of a land of
despotism. An elaborate courtliness marks the race alone among
Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;
commoners my-lord each other when they meet--and urchins as they play
marbles. And for the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart.
The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife, a
pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in his presence, as the common
names for a bug and for many offices and members of the body are taboo in
the drawing-rooms of English ladies. Special words are set apart for his
leg, his face, his hair, his belly, his eyelids, his son, his daughter,
his wife, his wife's pregnancy, his wife's adultery, adultery with his
wife, his dwelling, his spear, his comb, his sleep, his dreams, his
anger, the mutual anger of several chiefs, his food, his pleasure in
eating, the food and eating of his pigeons, his ulcers, his cough, his
sickness, his recovery, his death, his being carried on a bier, the
exhumation of his bones, and his skull after death.
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