CIVILISATION IN A NUTSHELL

Radio Record, 3 June 1938, Page 10

CIVILISATION IN

A NUTSHELL

Written for the Record

by

WILL

GRAVE

Where Coconut Palms Stand By The Quiet Lagoon

UN e new NBS series of talks, "Manners Maketh Man, to + begin from 2YA on June 6, Dr. Ernest Beaglehole will speck on "The Primitive Idea of a Gentlemen." lt was in the Island of Pukepuke in the Cook Group that Dr. Beaglehole and his wife, Pearl Beaglehole, studied the manners of a primitive people. . . a people who can find almost the whole needs of their civilisation in @ coconut shell, and yet find, too, contentment.

HERE is a . pleasat par- — jour game these days in which people have to decide what books they would take- with them if they were to be

murooned on u solitary Pacific Island. It is an amusing occupation for au idle half-hour, quite good tun... For two young people, now of Wellington. + few years ago it became suddenly intensely serious. They were guing to 4 solitary coral island in the Pavitic, cut off from civilisation for eight months, There would be one white trader there and the rest Polynesian uatives. No white’ woman had ever been on the island before. . . . They Decide HAELPED by their friends, they made up their minds. They took uw complete Shakespeare, the Bible and a dictionary. For the rest they took books with the most reading for volume weight. Two volumes ef the Encyclopedia Britannica, a number of small library editions of the classics, a small volume ou tropical medicine, and just a few recent novels And they took as well a copy of "Alice in Wonderland." MRHISY brought back with them one other book. Some of it Was in their heads, some of it in 1800 manuseript pages of ethnological data. It runs to four or five fat volumes and is being published by Bishop Museum at Honolulu, whieh. is under.the directorship of the noted New Zealander and Polyvesian scholar, Dr. Buck. The first volume has just reached New Zealand. The completed work will be the most complete study of every aspect of life of a pecple on a Polynesian iSand that has ever been written. Ht is called "The Eihnelogy of Pakapulia." Puc {wo Young people were Dre Urnest Beaglehote aud his wife, Pearl Beaglehole. ‘The two of them

had worked together at Yale University, U:S.A., where Dr. Beaglehole, a New Zealander, was specialising in Polynesian research.

Both he and his American wife were anthropologists. When Dr. Beagiehole was given a fellowship by the Bishop Museum for field work in a Pacific Island. they chose for their field the island of Pukapuka, in the northeruy Cook Group, administered by the Cook Islauds Department of the New Zealand Government, The other habited islands of the Pacific . had | been studied, but Pukapuka was still at that time in’ 1934 ai unknown scientific quautity. , . Necessities | HEN they left, they took with them besides their. books and equipment and gifts for the natives. a first-aid kit. 4 primus stove, a folding table big enough to held. a typewriter, some chairs, and some supplies of European toodpowdered milk, butter, flour, sugar, tea, coffee, -and cigarettes. They took, so to speak, the merest skeleton necessities of our Western civilisation. , They found at Pukapulia a people, happy and. contented, who needed searee'y anything to live on except coconuts, The natives fished, of course, aud they grew the Polynesiun potato, the taro, But apart from that they bad found almost all the needs of their civilisation inside a coconut. They could, in short, live on coconut. "They iurade their clothing from the leaf of — the eovonut," Mrs. Benglehole told me; "the thatch of their houses, their food-platters, ond even the walls or ratber the venetian blinds that lhey

use for the walls of their houses were all made from the leaf of the coconut. They could use coconut wood tu build their houses and to make their implements, their agricultural tools. "Their fishing lines were made from the fibre of the coconut, and their fishing nets. The nut gave them their most important food. ‘The milk of the young nut was their drink, and its flesh their food. The flesh of the matured nut was good for cooking, and the cream from the matured nut was a sauce for tasty dishes. "They could muke their clothes, their sleeping mats from the coconut fibre aud ropes for the Iushing ef their houses and canoes." Via Apia "PuE two investigators sailed first from ‘Frisco to Apia. From Apia they caught the only passenger line service fo Pukapuka, a trading schooner that called twice a year. They knew very little about the island, except that it hud been discovered in 1765 by Commodore Byron, who called it "Danger Island." No ship could find access to it: there was just a break in the reef uavigable by the Polynesian canves. . : They knew the island had been missionised by the Loudon Missionary Society sixty years ago and that native missionaries were on the island. Sometimes a warship from New Zealand called and stood off the reef. The journey from Apia in the trading schooner, with the wind behind them, took three days. HE schooner anchored off the reef, the natives came out and the Beagleholes went ashoie with their equipment in an outrigger canoe. "It was a typical coral atoll," said Mrs. Beaglehole, "with a reef all round it and the land inside, three small. coral islets strung in a lagoon inside the reef. The 600 inhabitants lived all on the one island and grew reserve food supplies on the others," At the season of the year the natives would all leave the main island to make copra on the coconut plantations, collecting the matured nuts, husking them, breaking them open, drying them and taking the flesh out of the shell. They sold the copra and bought European goods of clothinz. fish-hooks and knives. Sometimes they met disaster through the hurricanes and tidal waves, Five hundred years ago a tidal wave swept the island that wiped out all the inhabitants except 13 men and their families who had found refuge on a 40foot hill, the highest point on the atoll. And, in 1914, a tidal wave had washed away the taro beds and the coco-

nut cultivation and the people were faced with famine. This time the Cook Islands came to the rescue and took away a number of the people. N a house made of coral limestone with a corrugated iron roof-‘‘A fine house," says Mrs. Beagleholethe two strangers settled down to their job. The house had been built by a native carpenter from the Lower Cook Islands, who had come te Pukapuka seven years before te build a church and had stayed on because no boat arrived that was going the right way to take him home. "The house had one room,’ says Mrs. Beaglehole. "There was a bedroom at one end of the room and the study was at the other. The sitting-room was somewhere in between." ITH this as their headquarters they set to work to explore the lives of the people and gather data for their book. ‘ They found themselves among a contented, generous and happy race who had evolved a system of existence that fitted in with their needs and environment. All the basic economic property, of land, and the food cultivated on the land, was owned by the village as a whole. Private ownership was limited to such things as clothes, fish-hooks and small canoes. But the land and the food grown on the land was owned by and shared out to every man, woman and child in the anny «= VIC.

Communal Life "Te a village grew papaia fruit," says Mrs. Beaglehole, "and the trees produged 60 papaia, these 60 would have to be M&vider among the 200 people of the village. The men might get only a half each and the women and children a quarter each, but the fruit was always shared." In each village there was a special guard of police set up to look after the village property. Property offences-of damage or theft -were considered the most serious of crimes. The explorers found a lovable people with an economic and social system evolved to meet their needs, a knowledge of astronomy, and a good understanding of anatomy. For serious illnesses they had their native medical practitioners who gave the patients some psychological help with their magic, but could do little else. . Every man and woman on the island was a practised obstetrician. HE Beagleholes, during their stay, studied every side of the life on the island, assisting at births, deaths and marriages, attending feasts and competitions; took the physical measurements of 200 natives to check up with (Continued on page 37.)

Civilisation In a Nutshell

(Continued from page 11.) the racial characteristics in other groups; studied the native mythology and chants, and analysed the language. All their findings, from such things as techniques for fishing to the life cycle on the island, are set ont in their hook, Bulletin 150, of the Bishop Museum, published at Honolulu. They lost themstlyes happily on the island. "When we went there," Mrs, Beaglehole told me, "we were anxious about mils and wondered what was golns

to happen about Abyssinia. When we left we had no interest in the outside world and its wars. We had been utterly absorbed in the small world of the island. We did not hurry to open our mail," And when they sailed away they took with them as a gift from the natives a complete collection of all the objects of native life on Pukapuka. The whole island took a week off to make the objects for them, They were given models of canoes, of every kind of house, of every kind of fish-hook and every type of garment. The collection, dear to the heart of the anthropologist, numbered nearly 1000 objects.