CHAPTER IX
THE CRUISE OF H.M.S. GALATEA (Continued)
We arrived at Tahiti in June, 1869. Here is the most lovely climate in the world. The inhabitants never seemed to do any work, with the single exception of carrying bananas. In this exercise they were extraordinarily expert, bearing enormous weights upon the shoulders, the skin of which becomes hard like leather. I considered myself to be fairly strong; but when I tried to carry one of the masses of bananas under which the natives march swiftly all day long, up hill and down, I found that I was able to carry it only for a short distance, and with difficulty, on level ground. The people were perfectly delightful. We went ashore and lived among them; and it was then that I understood how it was that the men of the Bounty mutinied. The fact was that those discontented mariners could not bear to leave islands so delectable. I do not of course, desire to justify their very reprehensible conduct. All I say is that I can understand the strength of its motive. It was simply the desire to remain in an earthly paradise which inspired the men of the Bounty when they left Otaheite in April, 1789, to set Captain Bligh adrift in an open boat, with the nineteen men who stayed by him, and a small stock of provisions. The captain and his men made an astonishing voyage of nearly 4000 miles, and fetched up at the island of Timor, south of the Malaccas, in the following June. Some of the mutineers were subsequently brought to justice in the year 1792. Six of them were condemned and three were executed. In 1814 it was discovered that ten among the mutineers had colonised Pitcairn Island.
We in the Galatea stayed at Tahiti as long as we possibly could, and enjoyed every moment of the time. One of our amusements was to float down a narrow and swift stream and shoot the waterfall. At a point some little distance from the coast, the stream ran deep and rapid between banks which were about three feet apart. The natives, boys and girls, used to drop into the stream and let themselves be carried down feet foremost to a waterfall, which descended some 40 or 50 feet in a wide pool; and it occurred to me that what they could do, I could accomplish. I watched these intrepid children very carefully, and I observed that they always came to the surface some distance away from the fall. In spite of some dissuasion, I determined to attempt the enterprise. I floated down the stream feet foremost, shot the fall, and the moment I reached the foot of it I struck out under water. I was amazed to find that the water was just like air, or an enormous cauldron of soda water, buoying one up, and I came to the surface without the slightest difficulty. Afterwards I went down head first. The only thing to remember was not to come up under the fall itself. Shooting the waterfall became a popular amusement.
Another of our diversions was surf-playing. This enchanting exercise is performed with the aid of a long board shaped like a wedge. The swimmer takes his board, pushes it before him over the breakers, while he dives through them, then turns, and, leaning on the board, rides back on the crest of the surf. The speed, whatever it may be, feels like sixty miles an hour. It is one of the most exhilarating pastimes in the world.
I remember that we all went to church on Sunday. During the service, the Queen of Tahiti suddenly clapped her hands, whereupon the clergyman desisted from his ministrations, while her Majesty distributed tobacco among the congregation. When it was well alight the Queen again clapped her hands, and the clergyman went on with the service.
We left Tahiti with profound regret, receiving and giving many presents on parting. From Tahiti we proceeded to the Sandwich Islands, where I met many old friends, made during my sojourn four years previously. The American population had quite forgiven and forgotten my boyish freak, which had so agitated them at the time. Our old friend Queen Emma, whom we had taken to Panama on her way to England to see the Queen, had returned. I went to call upon her, driving tandem, as already related. Turning in at the gate, I took the corner too sharply, the wheels locked, and the buggy capsized. In the meantime the Queen, having heard the jingling of the Canadian sleigh bells attached to the harness, came out to find her visitor sitting on the grass at her feet. The horses galloped on and wrecked the vehicle and also themselves. Altogether it was a very expensive drive.
CHAPTER X
THE CRUISE OF H.M.S. GALATEA
When Lord Charles Beresford visited Nippon (from the Chinese Jih Pun, the place or rising of the sun, changed by English pronunciation to Japan), it was the old Japan that he saw; the Japan of centuries of isolation, inviolate save for the intrusion of the Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century, and the little wedge of Dutch traders. It had been the Japan of the Mikado, who was as a god; of the Tycoon, his temporal representative, who, like a man walking the tight-rope above a wood of transfixing swords, maintained a delicate equipoise of power among the feudal seigneuralty, the great Daimios, each lord of his domain and master of life and death over thousands of retainers. It was the Japan of the Samurai, the two-sworded rufflers; of the Ronins, the masterless men, the outlaws, who roved the country in bands, patriotic, ferocious and pitiless. It was still the Japan in which the common people, men and women and maidens, walked naked and unashamed; in which the warriors went to battle clad in armour wrought of tortoise-shell and silk, girt with swords and carrying bows and arrows; in which the life of a barbarian foreigner was never safe from hour to hour, so that he must be guarded by the two-sworded Yaconins, the Government officers, who, knowing the hatred of the Government towards their charges, seldom drew sword in their defence until it was just one blood-stained second too late; in which a fault in honour was instantly expiated by hara-kiri, the fatal cross-cut upon the belly, performed in the public eye, which was justly offended if the incision were so clumsily executed that the entrails protruded. Such, at least, is the ceremonial theory. In practice, the dagger is driven in below the ribs, drawn horizontally across the belly, and up the other side; an operation requiring inconceivable courage.
It is the land of tea-houses and temples, of running footmen and palanquins; where houses and string and handkerchiefs are made of paper; where the people wash themselves every day and their clothes never; where the oldest profession in the world is counted honourable service, and the pictures of courtesans adorn the temples in which the bonzes intone prayers in the midst of games and dances: where the writing is done from top to bottom, from right to left, and keys are turned from left to right, and carpenters draw their planes towards them, and the houses are built from the roof downwards, and horses are mounted on the off-side, and ladies black their teeth. It was a land of immense processional pageants: the processions of the high Daimios, who once a year quitted their ancestral homes with a great train to dwell in Yedo, the capital of the Tycoon, for six months; and returned again, leaving as hostages for their loyalty their wives and children for another six months. The two-sworded Samurai march in front, crying "Shitanirio!" and all the spectators drop upon their knees and hide behind their legs while the long procession ambles by, spearmen and banners and baggage-carriers and palanquins; the norimons, which are the palanquins of the notable, and the cangos, which are the palanquins of the humble.
When the foreigner rode abroad in state, he was attended by the Ward-guards, who marched in front, striking the earth at every step with their long staves whereon loose iron rings were strung, so that their jingling warned the populace to make way.
At night, festivals were celebrated by immense processions filling the streets, in which everyone carried a lighted lantern swaying upon the end of a flexible bamboo, and the lanterns were painted with bats and dragons, and the people wore horrible masks, distended with the monstrous rictus of the devil-gods. In the Yoshiwara, where the women, painted and gilded, sashed and bedecked, sit in a double row, each with her price placarded upon her knee, there were the great priapic processions, concerning which the English works upon Japan preserve a shocked reticence.
In old Japan, the common ideal of the ruling classes was that their country should maintain for ever intact its immemorial laws, traditions and customs; an ideal whose attainment the entrance of the foreigner would render impossible. As for the common people, they had no aspirations beyond the day's work.