LIFE IN NEW CALEDONIA.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5463, 30 September 1878, Page 3

LIFE IN NEW CALEDONIA.

(From the Saturday Review)

Certain tribes in New Caledonia have risen against the French occupiers of their soil, have speared the cattle, burned the huts, and, we fear, eaten the convicts and their guards. The outbreak was of that sudden sort which is common among savage people. Probably the motives which urged the natives to the massacre will never be known. Perhaps some popular preacher among the medicine-men insisted on a sacred war. Possibly a Frenchman had outraged the domestic affections of a chief. An ancient prophecy may have seemed to demand fulfilment, a fresh encroachment on territory may have called for revenge, a sudden revival of cannibal feroeity may have come to a head. By this time wc may be tolerably certain that the French have had their innings. If we may judge from the temper exhibited by a writer in La Ltepuilique justice will not carefully discriminate or take any delicate distinctions.This writer clearly knows nothing whatever of the people whom he overwhelms with random reproaches. The natives of New Caledonia, he declares, "are in the lowest scale of the ladder of human life. What they were when Cook discovered them they are still, rebels against civilisation, incapable of any progress, whether in science or art. Divided into tribes which the colonists drive before them as they advance, unable to cultivate the rich territory which they occupy even in the most rudimentary fashion, they live miserably by fishing and by the natural fruits of the soil” “The population doorcases rapidly,” says this angry person ; “ not that wc do anything to cause such a result,” although the, colonists have just been described as driving the savages out of their own lands ! He goes on to say that the natives have no weapons but their clubs and “ sagaics," by which he probably means spears, It is natural that the French should be indignant and alarmed, but no good can come out of indiscriminate and ignorant slander. The aborignes of New Caledonia, far from being on the lowest scale in the ladder of civilization, far from being “ incapable of progress,” have really reached a most important and interesting stage in the upper savagery. Wo have been permitted, by the kindness of an accomplished student of tho New Caledonian “culture,” to make use of notes and photographs taken iu the island. New Caledonia, seen.from tho sea, looks like the ridge of a huge submerged mountain. On the e»st side the crags go down sheer to tho water, and the cataracts trickle over the brows of the cliffs. Where rivers roach the deep and make a small alluvial beach, the blackfellows chiefly build their tall and hive-like houses, with roofs of lofty pitch, but with the most humble furniture and tho rudest accommodation. Nothing can be neater than the outside of these houses, which arc pretty with tho smoothness and softness of some great

bird’a-nests. The council hut, where strangers are received and palavers held, is larger than the rest. On the western side of the island the hills roll .with gradual slopes into the plains, and here the natives are settled more thickly, and lead a life more civilised. As for the “ rich territory ” of the French writer, it chiefly exists in his own fertile fancy. The larger valleys between the hills are of the s tiff eat and most worthless clay, and grow nothing hut rank sodge-graas and the sadlooking white-barked naioulie tree, with its aromatic leaves. In t’ae more hopeful soil of the smaller valleys the natives plant their yarns and taros. The writer ia the JiepuOliqae Franraise may say that they have no idea of agriculture, but this only comes from his exhaustive ignorance. The blackfellows have arrived at the stage of possessing separate property in laud, and thus are more advanced than the interesting Slavonic clients of M. Laveleye. Not only has every man his own farm (and some till ami work “ like white men ”), but ladies also can inherit land. This is sufficiently proved by a dramatic Kaneka love-song of a tender character :

Thk Swain. Ah that she would have mo, ah that she would listen to mo. The daughter of Chlchhn on the top of the rocks. She has glanced back at mo o'ten, often, many times. The daughter of Cliichim on the top of the rocks. The Shepherdess. My mother will not let mo leave her yet. I do not wish to dwell with you on the peaks of the hills. • Also yon are too lazy; I want some one strong to till vvj mother's plantation. Her only child am I, ray father is dead :

Chichiiu, the chief. Is dead upon the rocks. This idyl proves that the natives at least cultivate the lands which they inherit from their fathers—when the French colonists do not infere. As to their mode of cultivation, it is, we regret to say, magical. They believe .that certain magical or “fetish” stones increase the fertility of the soil. Most magical, medireval or savage, is based on the doctrine that like affects like. The Kanekas therefore sow, with yams or taros, stones in the shape of yams or taros. In the same way, when they go hunting or fishing, they rub their spears and hooks with stones which resemble the creatures they wish to capture. The fetish stones are discovered by their happy owners in the following way. A native walks alone, “ shunning the path of men,” till he hears a low cooing or twittering, for coasts twitter in New Caledonia as they do in the Hades of Homer. He hunts on the spot where the sound is heard, and in due time discovers the stone. Sorcerers are .called in, just, as, in other and more civilised lands, the priest blesses the fields. The blackfellows, however, do not trust entirely to magic. They collect soil with great industry to form their plantation, and so acquire a recognisable right in the land. Not a weed is to be seen on tbeir plots. It is pretty to watch the men delving on the hill-side, and loosening the proper sort of earth, while the women below collect the lumps of soil, crumble them, and spread them on the garden, and the little naked children play or sleep under the shade of a large tree. That the plantations maynot bo rifled by indolent tribesmen,a strict “taboo” is placed on them. In the cultivation of taro, irrigation is necessary, and streams of water are directed along the various terraces on the sides of the hills. These terraces sometimes extend for miles, and thousands of tons of earth must have been moved in making them. The aqueducts are carried over immense distances ; the water is led across ravines in hollowed logs, and over the large valleys in raised earthen aqueducts. New Caledonia is covered with traces of ancient aqueducts, and it may be inferred either that the land was once more populous and prosperous than it is to-day, or that plantations were allowed to lie fallow when the soil was in danger of exhaustion. It-raust nob be supposed that the New Caledonians are entirely given up to tillage. They are fond of dress, which, in the case of the meu, is purely decorative. A dandy wears a bright-red flower stuck behind his ear, as did the dandies of Queen Elizabeth’s time, but then he wears scarcely anything else. The skirts of the women are scanty, but the western are shocked by the niggardly costume of the eastern ladies. A good deal of time is occupied in the process of tattooing. The women are the artists. Armed with the branch of a thorn-tree and a small mallet, they tap the prickles on the part of the skin where the pattern is to appear; When this process is ended they rub in a pungent decoction, the effect of which is to make the warrior scream and dance with pain. When there is no tattooing to bo done, and when no village gives one of the great dances or Pellew-pellews, the tribes pass their hours in bathing or in smoking i over the fire. If the traveller traces a stream up its course into the bush he may come on a pleasant sight enough. Forty or fifty natives may be dabbling about in the clear shallow water, frightening the “silver eyes” (a fish not unlike the trout or grayling), while other men on. the bank pelt their friends with goldenskinned oranges. These fruits are pretty to look at, but too bitter to be pleasant to the taste. A little lower down the rivulet the women and children make a separate group. The water breaks in jets of silver on their of bronze ; the artist finds himself in the presence of such models as no European academy can show him. The old men are squatting in the soft grass iu the shade of the palm trees. At other times you find men patching canoes, sewing up the hole as a shoemaker cobbles a boot. The rest carve ornaments out of shells, or make fishing nets; and occasionally you come on a tribe burnishing its weapons of war. Each warrior has a piece of slate like stone, and by a most laborious process of rubbing it against another stone, he forms it into the egg-like pellets, reminding one of similar Greek missiles, which the Kanekas throw from their slings. When the spears are sharpened, the bullets polished, and war declared, the New Galedonians are not very keen fighters. They like the chance of fighting 4 another day, and they are more accomplished as freebooters than as soldiers. Just as the men are not brave, so the women are not chaste. There seems, however, to b© nothing like polyandry, though the ideas of marital revenge are such as might have been learned from the novels of M. Charles de Bernard. The worst charge against the natives, a charge not neglected by their accuser ia the Fepubliquc Franqaise, is that of cannibalism. While the Kanekas had no animals bigger than lizards or rats, they were certainly confirmed man-eaters. The pig, when introduced to the island, exercised his usual benign and civilising influence. Pork has taken the place, as a general rule, of the “strange meat” of former days ; and a case is well known in which the lives of captives have been spared when a pig was offered as ransom. The usual way of treating an enemy is to broil him on hot stones cn papillate, with banana leaves‘for a wrapping. At all times human flesh was a rarity ; and the New Caledonian way of describing a greatT victory is to declare that “ there was plenty to cat and to spare, even for the women.” A chief of a large inland clan avers that cannibalism is only lawful between men of different tribes. Criminals are occasionally devoured by order of the executive. Their misdemeanors put them outside the pale of law. We have not attampted to extenuate the bad qualities of the Kanekas. They are not very industrious, brave, or chaste, but they are not needlessly cruel, they are goodhumored to their women and children, they are contented and cheerful. Their religion is not very highly organised, but they have a confirmed belief in the existence of something sunt aliquid manes , after the death of the body, There are certain men in most tribes who fall into trances during which they are supposed to visit the departed. When they awake they are unconscious of what has been done on earth, but have much to say aboutthe “powerless heads of the dead.” One Poinfli had a reputation for disappearing bodily before the very eyes of his friends and coming up again at places many miles distant. He described the existence of the ghosts as like that of men, bub more opulent in yams. The good are rewarded, the bad scourged. There is no head chiefs of the shades, but there are gruesome, gigantic, and mischievous beings iu Hades, After one visit Poindi brought back from Hades such a strange spear and wonderful feathers as no man had seen before. With such legends the Kanekas beguile their time, and lay the foundations of morality anti religion. They arc not faultless, but there is a good deal to bo learned from them.