§ 3. Food, Weapons, Tools, Houses, Canoes, Fishing

The Marquesans subsist chiefly on a vegetable diet. Their staple food is the bread-fruit, and their national dish is a paste called popoi, which is prepared from bread-fruit after it has been subjected to a process of fermentation. Fish is also a common article of diet; the natives usually eat it raw, even when it is rotten and stinking. They keep pigs, but seldom kill them except for a festival or at the reception of a stranger. Hence pork is not a regular or common article of diet with them; and apart from it they hardly taste flesh. Other sorts of food, such as bananas, taro, and sugar-cane, are entirely subsidiary to the great staples, bread-fruit and fish. The natives do not readily accustom themselves to a European diet; indeed when the experiment has been made of feeding them exclusively in our manner, they have wasted away and only recovered their health when they were allowed to return to their usual nourishment. Their ordinary beverage was water, but they were also addicted to the drinking of kava, which was extracted from the root of the Piper methysticum in the usual fashion.[23] Drawing their sustenance chiefly from the bread-fruit tree, the Marquesans paid little attention to the cultivation of the soil; however, they grew a certain amount of taro, sweet potatoes, and sugar-cane; and they had plantations of the paper-mulberry,[24] the bark of which was manufactured by the women into cloth in the ordinary way. But the bark of other trees was also employed for the same purpose. Since the natives were able to procure European stuffs, the indigenous manufacture of bark-cloth has much declined.[25] Hence agriculture engaged the men very little; fishing, though it was part of their business, they are said to have neglected; the only work of consequence they did was to build their houses and manufacture their arms, but these employments occupied them only occasionally.[26]

The weapons of the warriors were clubs, spears, and slings. The slings were made of coco-nut fibre, and the natives were very expert in the use of them. Bows and arrows were unknown.[27] Like the rest of the Polynesians, the Marquesans were totally ignorant of the metals until they acquired them from Europeans. Their tools were made of stone, bone, and shell. Thus they employed a pointed stone to bore holes with, and an axe of black, hard stone for cutting. The axe-head was shaped like an elongated wedge or mortise-chisel, and was fastened to the haft by coco-nut fibre. Some of these axes weighed as much as twenty-five pounds. The natives also used sharp-edged or toothed shells as cutting implements, and borers made of pointed bones; while rough fish-skins served them as polishers.[28] Like the rest of the Polynesians, they kindled fire by the method known as the stick-and-groove, that is, by rubbing the sharp point of one stick against the flat surface of another, so as to form a groove in it and, by continued friction, to elicit smoke and a glow, which, with the help of dry leaves, is nursed into a flame. Contrary to the usage of some peoples, the Marquesans employed the same kind of wood for both the fire-sticks, either a species of hibiscus (Hibiscus tiliaceus) or a species of poplar (Thespesia populnea); for this purpose they split a branch in two, lengthwise, and used the two pieces as the fire-sticks. In former days these fire-sticks were regularly kept in every native house.[29]

The Marquesan houses are regularly built on stone platforms, oblong or square in shape, and raised above the ground to heights varying from one to four, eight, or even ten feet. The higher platforms are approached from the ground by ladders or notched poles. The houses, constructed of timber and bamboo, are oblong in shape, and comprise a high back wall, generally inclined forward at an angle, from which the thatched roof slopes down steeply to a low front wall, while two short walls close the house at either end. The door is in the middle of the front wall, and is so low that it is necessary to stoop in entering. Sometimes the fronts of the houses are entirely open except for the low pillars which support the roof. The interior of the house forms a single chamber undivided by partitions. Two trunks of coco-nut palms extend parallel to each other along the whole length of the floor at an interval of four or five feet; the innermost log, a foot or two distant from the back wall, forms a pillow on which the heads of the sleepers rest, while the other supports their feet or legs. The space between the two logs is paved with stone, and spread with mats. In the single apartment the whole family live and sleep. Such at least were the domestic arrangements in the old days. The size of the houses naturally varies. Some of them measure eighty feet by forty, others only twenty-five feet by ten, or even less.[30]

The platforms on which the houses are built consist often of large blocks of stone neatly and regularly laid without mortar or cement, in a style which would do no discredit to European masons.[31] Sometimes the stones are described as enormous blocks of rock,[32] some of which would require ten or twelve men to carry or roll them.[33] Water-worn boulders, washed down from the mountains in the bed of torrents, were especially chosen for the purpose.[34]

Sometimes, though far less commonly, Marquesan houses were raised above the ground on posts from eight or ten to sixteen feet high. Such houses were lightly built of wood and thatched; the floor was an open work of split bamboos. Sometimes these raised dwellings resembled the ordinary Marquesan house in structure; at other times they were quadrangular, with perpendicular walls and an ordinary roof. They were approached by ladders and resembled the habitations in use among the Malay tribes of the Indian Archipelago. No dwellings of this type have been noticed in Nukahiva, the principal island of the archipelago; but they have been seen and described in Tauata (Santa Christina) and Hivaoa (Dominica).[35]

The Marquesans built canoes of various sizes, the smaller for fishing, the larger for war. These latter might be from forty to fifty feet long. They were fitted with outriggers. The prow had an ornamental projection rudely carved to represent the head of an animal. Sometimes the prows of war canoes were decorated with the skulls of slaughtered enemies. But in general the Marquesans appear to have been inferior to the other South Sea islanders in the arts of canoe-building and navigation.[36] This inferiority may perhaps have been partly due to the absence of those lagoons which, formed by coral reefs, elsewhere enabled the natives to acquire confidence and skill in sailing on smooth and sheltered waters. The same cause may also, perhaps, explain why fishing was comparatively little practised by the Marquesans. We are told that as an occupation it was despised by such as owned a piece of land of any extent, and that only the poorer class of people, who depended on the sea for a livelihood, addicted themselves to it. They caught fish by means both of nets and of lines with hooks neatly made of mother-of-pearl; also they stupefied the fish by a certain mashed root, which the fisherman distributed in the water by diving, and then caught the fish as they rose to the surface.[37]