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Taylorology Issue 75
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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
* *
* Issue 75 -- March 1999 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
Errors in "Fallen Angels"
Capt. Edward A. Salisbury
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood
silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given
toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it
for accuracy.
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Errors in "Fallen Angels"
We recently came across a recap of the Taylor case published in 1986, in
FALLEN ANGELS: CHRONICLES OF L. A. CRIME AND MYSTERY, by Marvin Wolf and
Katherine Mader (Facts [sic] on File Publications, 1986). While not as bad
as many recaps we have seen, that book's chapter ("Enigma: The Unsolved
Murder of William Desmond Taylor") does contain many errors. Ignoring the
many unverified and dubious rumors, here are some of the factual errors in
the book:
1. It is erroneously stated that Taylor first acted in films in 1910.
2. It is erroneously stated that Taylor first directed films in 1919.
3. It is erroneously stated that Taylor directed "Anne of Green Gables" and
"The Top of New York" prior to directing Mary Pickford.
4. It is erroneously stated that Taylor was president of the Director's
Guild.
5. It is erroneously stated that Taylor brought Sands to Hollywood.
6. It is erroneously stated that Minter was 20 at the time of Taylor's
death.
7. It is erroneously stated that Minter's mother was Charlotte "Selby".
8. It is erroneously stated that Faith MacLean was "peering out the window"
at the man she saw that evening.
9. It is erroneously stated that Edna Purviance telephoned Mary Miles
Minter and notified her that Taylor was dead.
10. It is erroneously stated that Peavey telephoned Taylor's doctor.
11. It is erroneously stated that Taylor's doctor telephoned Charles Eyton.
12. It is erroneously stated that Mabel Normand was at the murder scene on
the morning the body was found.
13. It is erroneously stated that the coroner arrived before the police.
14. It is erroneously stated that there was an "exit wound" in Taylor's
back.
15. It is erroneously stated that Taylor had been shot through the heart.
16. It is erroneously stated that the coroner called the police.
17. It is erroneously stated that Mary's mother was at the murder scene on
the morning the body was found.
18. It is erroneously stated that "upstairs in plain sight was almost $1,000
in cash."
19. It is erroneously stated that Taylor's ex-wife had tracked him down and
confronted him in Hollywood.
20. It is erroneously stated that Taylor was sending monthly child support
payments to his wife.
21. It is erroneously stated that Minter was at Taylor's funeral.
22. It is erroneously stated that Minter and her mother did not reconcile
until after Charlotte returned from Europe.
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Capt. Edward A. Salisbury
There were many rumors that William Desmond Taylor was fighting drug
gangsters at the time of his death, but the only such report which came from
an actual associate of Taylor's was made by Capt. Edward A. Salisbury (see
TAYLOROLOGY 72), who reportedly also stated "I knew Taylor ever since he came
to California." (NEW YORK SUN, February 13, 1922). Salisbury was a noted
explorer and documentary filmmaker. The following are two other Taylor-case
press items on Salisbury, followed by items pertaining to Salisbury's
expeditions between 1917-1923. Taylor did not accompany Salisbury on his
expeditions; the "Taylor" referred to as crewmember was someone else.
Another member of his crew was Merian C. Cooper, who would eventually film
"King Kong."
Some of the ethnic views expressed by Salisbury seem offensive or
insensitive by today's standards, but are reflective of the time and culture
in which they were written. They are reproduced as originally published, for
historical purposes.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
February 14, 1922
NEW YORK WORLD
Thinks Taylor Was Killed By Some One in "Drug Ring"
"Billy Taylor threatened to make an example of the drug peddlers at
Hollywood, but they evidently 'got him' first," said Capt. E. A. Salisbury,
an intimate of William Desmond Taylor, at the Waldorf yesterday.
"Just five days before he was killed I had a long chat with him, and he
told of the activities of a drug ring," continued Capt. Salisbury, formerly
of the Ordnance Department of the Army, who recently returned from a trip
around the world.
"If my theory is right Taylor sacrificed himself to save a popular movie
star from sinking deeper from the use of narcotics. She confessed to Taylor
that she was addicted to the drug habit and told where she got her supply.
In my opinion he was slain by some one whose enmity he incurred in his effort
to cut off the drug supply of the actress."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
February 14, 1922
NEW YORK CALL
Taylor Slain Because He Bothered Drug Ring, Salisbury Says
Capt. E. A. Salisbury, traveler, soldier and author, an intimate friend
and admirer of the late William Desmond Taylor believes Taylor was shot
because he interfered with the machinations of a drug ring which had enslaved
a well known film beauty in whom Taylor took a friendly interest. The woman
meant by Salisbury has been mentioned in the case several times.
Captain Salisbury, who said he will turn over to the Metropolitan Museum
a collection of curios from the Island of Borneo and from Africa, asserted
yesterday that Taylor recently was very angry because drug peddlers were
selling narcotics to the young woman. Taylor told Salisbury he would "make
it hot for these people."
Captain Salisbury's home is in Hollywood, Cal, and his observation of
Taylor, he said, enabled him to say that Taylor was not a member of the very
fast set whose parties have become notorious since the Arbuckle case became
prominent. Taylor, he insisted, was not the man to take advantage of the
fact that he possessed a certain strong charm for beautiful women.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
March 10, 1917
PICTURES AND PICTUREGOER
"The Devil's Eye" in the Tropics
Twelve thousand miles in a little motor-propelled yacht is surely a
record! In order to obtain unusual film pictures in and about South and
Central America, the cruise and travel, which occupied nearly fifteen months,
were made by the well-known naturalist, hunter, and photographer, Edward A.
Salisbury. For several months Rex Beach, the famous author and hunter, was a
member of the party.
A few weeks ago Mr. Salisbury arrived back in New York, and has since
told many interesting stories of his film-work and adventures. He brought
back with him as much as 65,000 feet of film, at least 25,000 feet of which
he anticipates will be of exceptional quality and of extraordinary interest.
Owing to the special precautions adopted, the negative, he declares, is
in better condition than any tropical stuff he has seen. The film was
carried in a large thermos bottle containing an electric-light. When the
cover was lifted to remove the film the light would be switched on, and then
switched off again when the cover was replaced. By this means all moisture
was eliminated and fungus, which grows so quickly in the tropics, was
entirely prevented.
"In the Talamanc country," says Mr. Salisbury, "we found Indians
descended from the original Incas of Central America. We studied their
habits and took pictures of them. Did they balk at the camera? Yes, they
did at first. They called the lens the devil's eye and the box his abiding-
place. But we prevailed on the chief to distribute presents, which he did
judiciously, and we had no further trouble.
"We had a similar experience with the San Blas Indians. At Colon we had
been informed on our arrival in February that the canal probably would not be
opened until the middle of April, and consequently we would be compelled to
remain on the eastern side of the continent for some time. We went down to
the Windward and Leeward Islands, visited several tribes of Indians and
looked into the pearl fisheries.
"We took some wonderful scenes of tarpon fishing. Many shots were
photographed in narrow streams, where the dense foliage lapped over the
water. The fish jumped so high at times that they touched the trees.
"In a trip into the interior with Indians as guides we indulged in
hunting. Among the tapir we shot, the largest weighed 1,000 lbs. Then, too,
we got specimens of jaguar, mountain lion, ant, bear, and sloth. The ants,
of which we found many different kinds, were very interesting. Many pictures
of these, including the umbrella ant, were taken for scientific purposes.
"These San Blas Indians are strong on seamanship. They have enormous
canoes, all carved out of mahogany, and probably the best in the world.
Their boats are not classified by the number of men they may hold, but
according to the coconuts that may be stowed in them. We saw some large
enough to carry two thousand nuts each.
"One of the finest sets of pictures I obtained will show a canoe race
which I staged myself. I induced fifty of the Indians to race around one of
the islands. It was understood that at the word 'Go' they should hoist their
sails and get away. The mix-up was too amusing for words, but finally it was
straightened out. Everything went along finely until they reached the head
of the island, when I noticed the leaders stopping. As the last boat caught
up with the party they cut loose and came down on the camera all fifty
abreast. And you may take my word for it, it was a real spectacle. When I
inquired as to why they had halted I was informed they were waiting for the
others to catch up! It's a new idea of racing about which they knew nothing,
but it made a novel picture.
"We found the San Blas Indians of unusual interest. They are scattered
over 365 islands, which for 120 miles dot the coast, and perhaps are the
least known of any Indians in the two Americas. They were the only
continental Indians ever visited by Columbus--for they are to be found on the
mainland, too--who discovered them on his third voyage. So far as is known
they are practically the same today as they were then. They have never mixed
with any other race. Up to the time we visited them they had never been
photographed. They were very much averse to the camera, but we became very
friendly and remained with then several weeks.
"We took many film-pictures of the homes on the different islands, and
the gems in these, I think, will be the babies. Youngsters of two, three,
and four years old venture out in canoes--and mahogany canoes, mind you--
4 ft. in length. If the waves come aboard the little fellows slide into the
bottom of the craft, turn over on their stomachs, and literally kick out the
water, then, reversing their positions, assume the upright and paddle off as
if nothing had happened to disturb their voyage.
"We got some fine pictures of sharks of varying lengths up to twenty
feet (they are plentiful in these waters), and some splendid films of the
turtle-fisheries. Of Central American birds we made many photographs. And
butterflies! Down there are to be found some of the most beautiful in the
world. It is my intention to have these films printed in colours.
"While we were in Costa Rica we photographed from a mountain and also
from the seacoast a total eclipse of the sun. The picture we took from the
latter position came out wonderfully well--fine and clear. It is probably
the first time it has been done. The conditions in the mountains were not so
good, as we were bothered by clouds. Nevertheless, the spectacle of the
fleecy masses crossing the sun may to some enhance the beauty of the unusual
subject.
"In the Ucuatan channel we obtained some unusual storm-pictures. The
little 'Wisdom' battled in waves that were big enough to cause one of the
fruit-steamers to turn back. We came through without a scratch, and we have
many good scenes of the water breaking over our boat.
"In Columbia we captured crocodiles. Wanting a little action, Mr. Beach
suggested that we should rope one of them and give him a ride. At the word
the bonds were loosed, the crocodile started for the water, and Mr. Beach
tried to keep his 'saddle.' He had a number of spills, but we got the
'action' all right. He's a man who will take a chance on anything. He is in
most of the pictures we took. No stunt seemed too foolhardy for him to
attempt. He supplied action. He has nerve in abundance--I know no one with
any more of it.
"Our last jump was from Corinto, Nicaragua, straight to Los Angeles, a
distance of 2,600 miles. The reason we made this long trip without touching
at a Mexican port was on account of a tip we got from a commander of a United
States cruiser that there might be trouble with Mexico, so we put well out to
sea."
One of the constant drawbacks, in spite of which good pictures were
obtained, was the rain, which Mr. Salisbury declares was "eternal." In the
jungle, he said, there was not only darkness, but water as well.
It is the photographer's intention to select from five to seven thousand
feet of the best of his pictures for public exhibition, and cut up the rest
for scientific bodies and educational institutions.
His vessel, the "Wisdom," is now undergoing repairs in readiness for a
trip to the South Sea Islands.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
August 1922
ASIA
Cruising in Coral Seas
by Edward A. Salisbury
In 1920 I sailed from east to west straight across the South Pacific in
an 80-ton auxiliary yacht. This boat, the "Wisdom II," had been made into a
motion-picture laboratory, for I purposed to try to catch and hold for
history a photographic record of the fast dying races of the South Seas
islands.
We spent eighteen months at the work. It was not all passed in
photographing the carefree, entrancing life of the Polynesians of the Society
Islands. That, after all, was the least difficult part of our task. There
is a strangely different panorama as one sails steadily westward from the
laughter-loving, sensuous Polynesian races of the Marquessas, Tahiti and
Samoa to the blacker, less kindly mixed breeds of the Fijis, then on to the
headhunters of the Solomons and the near-savages of the New Hebrides and New
Guinea. It is as if nature had drawn a mathematical graph of descending
values--shown in no way more clearly than in the position of women.
In the eastern islands, woman is a child of pleasure. Man is not her
master, but her eternal lover. In Samoa, she is still free and happy, but
more of the wife with household labors, less of the mistress. In the Fijis,
she is looked upon as a worker for the man. And in the New Hebrides and the
Solomons, she is a slave--something to be exchanged for a pig, traded by
father to husband, often beaten, sometimes tortured, a beast of burden, an
animal less valued than a sow. There are islands on which, when a sow dies,
the woman must cease to suckle--must sometimes even kill her female
children--and take to her breasts the dead swine's offspring.
But the white races push onward, bringing with them the powerful forces
of steam, powder, electricity, and the black magic of the white man's
diseases. And as the white man masters, the native dies.
On the twenty-second evening after the "Wisdom II," with a crew composed
mostly of college boys, had slipped into the channel outward bound from Los
Angeles, star sights showed us that we had made 2,700 miles and were 75 miles
off Hiva-oa, the easternmost island of the Marquesas. At dawn we saw, dead
ahead, a mountain jutting up out of the sea, gray in the early morning light.
As we approached, the sun swooped up, the sea turned from black to purple,
the gray mass ahead hardened into a series of mountain tops with sloping
walls of dark green foliage. I thought of the hundred romantic tales I had
heard of these islands from boyhood--Bougainville, Porter, the mutiny of the
"Bounty." I pictured the island girls swimming out and swarming over the
rails of Melville's ship, clinging to their shrouds, laughing, their long,
heavy black hair only half covering perfectly formed naked bodies. Then we
dropped anchor in a little. half-moon bay on the north coast--a gem of
emerald beauty, tranquil, unspoiled. My crew of undergraduates crowded the
forward rails, waiting for the canoes full of joyous natives, for the
swimming girls with their flower-decked hair.
On the shore, no sign of life. Half an hour we waited. Then we saw a
single little outrigger canoe heading toward us. It floated against the
yacht's side. Three brown faces, sickly and drawn, one smallpox scarred,
stared up at us. The legs of the man steering were hideously swollen.
Elephantiasis.
"What place is this?" we asked in French. The bloated man lifted his
face listlessly.
"A leper village," he replied.
The village of Atuona, the capital of Hiva-oa, is a small group of
wooden shacks with galvanized iron roofs. Its population is made up of some
three hundred natives, a few half-breeds and Chinese, the French governor,
gendarmerie and a priest. It lies on a little bay at the bottom of a great
half crater of a volcano, the other half having broken away ages ago and slid
into the sea. On the inner side of the crater a lovely garden of green,
splashed with multitudinous gorgeous flowers and huge boulders, has grown up.
Everywhere coconut, mango, breadfruit and orange trees and innumerable
waterfalls make the scene strangely beautiful.
But something has been twisted out of shape in nature's scheme.
At every turn I saw rotting thatched roofs, villages not dying, but dead.
Occasionally girls and men would pass with something of the ancient beauty of
the race, but most of them were thin and sickly. The Marquesan race has
dwindled from over a hundred thousand to less than two thousand in a century.
There was no doubt of what I had so often been told. In another few years it
will have disappeared.
"And then," I asked myself, "what will become of these magnificent
islands? Will they turn into deserted gardens of loveliness?" I thought of
the slums of great cities, children by thousands, hollow-cheeked, starved for
air and sunshine. Why could they not be carried here? But all too clearly
it came to me than in these seductive islands no white man has ever done hand
labor. He may become a master, and, failing that, a beach-comber--but a
worker, never. This is not a white man's land.
I came to the outskirts of Atuona, where, on marshy ground, a group of a
dozen shacks sprawled--the Chinese colony. I stopped in the tiny trading
store of Chang, an old Chinese who had lived long in San Francisco, to ask a
drink of water. In the rear room I heard the clatter of pans where his
native wife was at work.
"Chang," I asked, "do you like it here?"
"Yes, Atuona good," he said.
"And your children?"
Gravely he walked to the door. He pointed out toward the coconut
groves. "My sons half-Chinese. THEY no play. THEY like 'um work like
hell!" he said.
That was the answer to the problem. The Chinese! Bred to labor,
immunized by a hundred epidemics from the diseases whose lightest touch is
fatal to the Marquesans, these tremendously vital Chinese have imparted to
their half-Asiatic sons the capacity to work industriously in a land where
the natives have played through all time.
Among sailormen the world over the subject of whether a shark will
attack a man is always one for heated argument. I thought at first that the
Marquesans would swim in shark-infested water anywhere. But I learned
otherwise.
One day in the "Wisdom's" launch, accompanied by two of my college men,
McNeil and Taylor, and a native boy, I skirted Hiva-oa on a goat hunt. Up
the coast, where low bluffs rose abruptly from the sea, we began to catch
sight of goats jumping from rock to rock. Occasionally we saw groups of wild
horses, probably descendants of animals brought by the early whites. These
horses are scarcely more than pony size and seem to decrease in stature with
each generation that they remain in the wild.
Finally we saw three goats silhouetted from the top of a bluff, offering
an excellent mark. I determined to pick off the he-goat, and, as I thought
the goat would drop into the water when hit, I told the native boy to strip
and get ready to jump in and haul him out. To my surprise the boy became
panic-stricken.
"No, no, I no go in water here. Bad, very bad," he said, shrinking down
in the bottom of the boat and refusing to budge.
From his explanation, mostly made by gestures, I gathered that goats
fighting on the bluffs often fell into the water and were eaten by sharks.
McNeil grinned skeptically and offered to go over the side after the animal
if I killed him. But argument was cut short by the activity of the goats.
They began to move away and I quickly lined my sights on the old whiskered
chap and fired. He leaped upward and fell straight down sixty feet into the
water, striking it a few yards from our boat. He rose, struggling, wounded.
Then a streak of a fin crossed the water, there was one agonized bleat from
the boat, and he disappeared from view. I peered over the side and through
the clear water saw a dark, writhing mass going down.
McNeil wiped his forehead. "Who said sharks wouldn't bite?" he asked.
Louis, fat, jolly, half-Portuguese, half-Tahitian, and Philip, lean,
quarter-breed Frenchman, two rival traders, and I were sitting under a rude
canvas awning on the deck of Louis's 80-foot trading schooner. The boat was
abominably dirty. Cockroaches and copra-bugs swarmed everywhere. But the
two trading captains, undisturbed and happy, bragged to each other of how
each had warned chiefs against the other as a cheating scoundrel. I think
both spoke the truth.
Then said Philip: "Why don't you sail for Papeete, Louis? You have
plenty of copra aboard."
"My engineer's mother--she die Thursday. I wait for her to die," he
answered.
Philip nodded his head comprehendingly. But I thought a moment. "This
is Monday, Louis," I said. "How do you know she is going to die on
Thursday?"
Louis explained that natives seem to see death coming from afar off.
One day a woman will appear quite well. Then she will announced that on a
certain day, perhaps a week or more later on, she will die--and die she does.
Superstition, self-hypnotism, call it what you will--she dies.
But I was skeptical, and on Thursday, with most of my crew, at Louis's
invitation, I went to the woman's village. The grave was dug, the relatives
and friends were all there--and the woman who was to die was walking calmly
among them. She insisted that the burial feast be held anyhow. The meal was
cooked in a large, home-made fireless cooker--a pit some five feet in
diameter by two feet deep, dug in the earth near a stream. The women had
been to the mouth of the stream with nets and had brought back baskets of
fresh shrimps. A half-dozen pigs had been killed. A number of chickens had
been put to death in the peculiar way of the islands. A woman pulls out one
of the large feathers from the fowl that is to die and thrusts it sharply
into the back of the chicken's neck. The luckless chickens had been cooked
over separate fires, and their meat shredded away from the bones. Green taro
leaves were cut up, mixed with the chicken meat and laid in baskets of green
banana leaves. On these baskets was squeezed the milk of coconuts. Then
breadfruit was peeled with a conch-shell and the shrimps were enfolded in
leaf baskets.
All these delicacies--pigs, shrimps and chicken--were laid on a grate
made of stalks from green coconut leaves, which had been placed on the hot
rocks in the bottom of the pit. This layer was then covered first with
banana leaves, next with mats of burau leaves, and finally with damp earth.
Every hole which emitted a jet of escaping steam was carefully plugged.
In an hour the earth was taken off, and a delicious meal served us on leaf
dishes. By each plate was a self-filled cup made by cutting away the top of
a green coconut.
First the men ate; then the women; then the dogs; and finally the pigs.
All stuffed to the utmost. And over the entire funeral feast presided the
woman who was to have died that day! We thanked her, as hostess, and went
away on the path leading past her open grave.
She died the following Monday.
One night at a dinner at Papeete, the capital of the Society Islands,
I was seated beside a beautiful woman. Gown, slippers, manners seemed to
mark her as a French woman of delicate training. She was a Tahitian, the
Princess Tekau, direct descendant of the old Tahitian kings.
A week later, I sailed with the princess, her cousin and Warren Wood,
a former California yachtsman, and his mother, for Morea, an island near
Tahiti. Here, to the natives, this princess, though divested of all power by
the French, was still their queen. At her order, a hundred girls and men
danced the hula-hula and a great feast was prepared--raw fish in lime-juice
sauce, steamed crawfish, breadfruit with coco-cream sauce, barbecued young
pig, baked taro and bananas, and a pudding made of arrowroot and dried
bananas. But the greatest of all the delicacies was heart-of-palm salad,
called the "thousand-dollar salad", because made from the heart of the leaf-
cluster of a coconut-tree eight years old. To get it the tree must be
destroyed.
At dinner in town the week before, the princess was a perfect European.
Today, she was a princess among her own people--thoroughly loyal to them,
thoroughly proud of them. She stuffed her fingers in her mouth with the food
and drew them out with a loud, sucking noise; then looked at me and laughed.
"Make lots of noise, Captain," she bantered commandingly. "They won't
think you are enjoying yourself, unless you do." I obeyed.
The women of Tahiti, lovely and easily loving, have long been famed as
the sirens of sailors. I found them in no way changed. I landed at Papeete
with my crew intact. When I sailed away six weeks later, I was short two
mates, an engineer and a third of my sailors. Some of them were ill, but
most had succumbed to the lure of the island. As I write, I catch a glimpse
of laughing girls, barefooted, dressed in gay pareus, with flowers in their
hair, going down a Pepeete street, hand in hand with my two bull-necked
Swedish mates, Chris and John. They were both honest sailors, but that was
the last I saw of them. The "coconut girls" of Papeete figured in my moving
pictures. It is true that all Tahitians innately love a lover, which is by
no means to say, however, that social lines are not drawn sharply in Papeete
society. These "coconut girls" are a class of their own. They have come to
Tahiti from many neighboring islands, brought by fair promises or the lure of
the "city," and left by the men they came with. They live up among the
coconut groves behind the town and are a happy, carefree lot, quite content
with the gift of a seat at the "movies", if from one they like. When the
fancy strikes them or they want a new pareu, they may wait on table at the
hotels. My film-taking was a great lark for them. They pictured splendidly
on the film, but my difficulty was to keep them in one place long enough to
finish a reel. San Francisco brewers who established breweries in Tahiti
when prohibition came into force in the United States, made my work no
easier. I would take down to the beach two automobiles filled with girls,
laughing and shouting at every pedestrian, but when the cameras were set up
and I was ready to begin work, too often half the girls and most of my
assistants had disappeared. So when I sailed from Papeete, I left steamer
tickets for the missing members of the crew. When I arrived in America over
a year later, a friend showed me a newspaper headline something like this:
"Returned Crew Says Salisbury Reincarnated Wolf Larsen." Wolf Larsen would
have murdered more than one man if he had had a crew ashore at Tahiti.
Daylight of May 17 found the "Wisdom II" in sight of seven islands--the
first of the two hundred of the Fijis, where Polynesian and Melanesian races
have fused into a strong, hardy people. The thing I remembered principally
about the Fijians was that a generation ago they had been the fiercest
cannibals of the South Seas.
We sailed past Taviuni, Garden of the Fijis. The next morning we stood
into Suva Harbor on the island of Viti Levu. A 15,000-ton steamer and also
two smaller ships were alongside stout concrete docks on which worked gangs
of Fijians--tall, dark, strongly made, their masses of busy black hair
impossible for any style of hat. Near them were swarms of turbaned Hindus,
imported from India for labor. Ashore, automobiles rolled merrily along well-
paved streets, lined with concrete stores. At each important street
intersection were bareheaded, barefooted, khaki-clad Fiji traffic policemen.
On the slope of the hill back of the town were numbers of fine residences
surrounded by gardens or small parks. And we dined that night at an ultra-
modern hotel, the best in the South Seas, among men and women in conventional
evening clothes. A Carnegie library on the man street completed the picture.
We had come to wild, cannibal Fiji.
A tall Fijian stood at the steering-wheel of the old cabin launch.
He held the lower spokes of the wheel gripped firmly with his feet and moved
it dexterously as he stared over the launch-house. We were going--Taylor,
McNeil, one of the camera-men and myself, with our host, Mr. Davis, a Suva
merchant of lifelong residence in the Fijis--to the island of Mbau, the
former stronghold of Thakombau, most famous of the old cannibal kings, once
master of most of this part of the Fijis. As we came close to the island, we
could see on its lee side great slabs of stone, placed upright, making a
protecting wall. At fifty-foot intervals, there were openings into which war
canoes once were hauled after raids. As Davis stepped out at one of these
openings, he stretched his arms lazily and said, "About time for a drink."
A huge, handsome, black Fijian, dressed in knickerbockers and a shirt,
but barefooted, stepped forward and speaking in a cultured English drawl
said, "Really, you know, I think that would be an excellent idea." It was
Ratu Pope Epeli Senilola, grandson of King Thakombau. A few minutes later as
we sat in his house, a frame building of hand-hewn timbers set on a
rectangular stone base, with sides of woven reeds and a thatched roof of
coconut leaves, he told us of the part he and his people had played in the
world war.
"We are a race of warriors," he said. "And so when England--to which my
father's father ceded the Fijis by signing a paper on that very table there--
went to war with her enemies, I raised a regiment of my people. When we came
to France, my warriors were astounded to find that instead of fighting we
were to do servant duty. However, the Fijians are people obedient to their
chiefs, and when I, their King, played the flunkey cheerfully, they could not
complain.
"But though I acted as a servant there, I am not here, as you will see,"
he said. He called out sharply. A man entered, squatted on one of the mats
covering the coral-pebbled floor, several feet from the King, and clapped his
hands softly three times, the Fijian sign of obeisance to a chief. With a
curt nod, the young Fijian monarch gave him permission to rise. Though shorn
by the English of much of his forefathers' power, Pope held to his privileges
of rank. Also he played the part of father to his people. While the
influenza was sweeping the Fijis some time before, he had gone fearlessly
among his people, personally attending the sick, until he himself was
stricken. According to Fijian law, he owned no land nor personal property,
but he had lala rights over the services and possessions of all his subjects.
While his villages were at work preparing for our entertainment, he
showed us his immediate domain. In the middle of the village he pointed out
the remains of an old pagan temple, the foundations of which are still
intact. Against one of its corner-stones only a comparatively few years ago,
his grandfather, before being converted to Christianity, had had knocked out
the brain of every male captive and of many a female. It was one of the
killing methods before cooking for the feast. It also had the religious
significance of a sacrifice. The victim's hands and feet were grasped by
four stalwart executioners who swung the captive back with a long swing, then
rammed him forward with four-man power, the head smashing against the
execution rock.
Near this spot stands a small stone church, built by the father of the
present King in commemoration of King Thakombau's conversion to Christianity.
The royal builder of the monument had a hollow scooped out in the old
beheading stone, which he placed in the church as a receptacle for holy
water. But the horrified missionaries quickly removed it. The rock still
remains in one corner of the church, however.
In the afternoon, for our benefit, a canoe race was held, in which we
rode as passengers. Only in one place on the New Guinea coast have I seen
canoes rigged like these of this part of Fiji. They were outrigger dugouts,
whale-backed, some thirty feet long. In the center of each canoe was a
single mast, to which was attached the upper end of a large sail of pandanus
matting. This sail was fastened on a reversible sprit. The boat was brought
about by the simple expedient of shifting the bottom end of the matting from
one end of the canoe to the other. At either end were sockets to hold it in
place. The canoes were steered by big nine-foot paddles.
To a sailor these canoes were one of the most interesting objects
imaginable. One small craft had a lone man for crew. It was a wonder of
trick seamanship to see him bring his canoe about simply by grabbing the big
paddle and the lower end of the sail and rushing to the other end of the
boat. Sailing to the leeward, the canoes skidded the outriggers so that they
barely touched water and were occasionally lifted high in the air.
At nightfall a feast was to be served in our house. Clean mats were
first brought in. Then the King entered and seated himself cross-legged,
facing the door. Thereafter no native entered without first falling on his
or her hands and knees before the King and Queen, as well as the rest of the
guests. A girl of twenty took a seat in the center of the mat. She was the
King's cousin. She acted as mistress of ceremonies. Other girls, bringing
in the dishes, handed them all to her, and she served us. I had eaten at
three o'clock and told the King that I was afraid I should be unable to
swallow a morsel. But he insisted that I try the first course, a clear fish
soup, served in a polished half coconut-shell. I ate that, then two more
bowls, and then everything else that was served. It was the most delicious
meal I had in the South Seas. Little black fish, which can be eaten by no
one but the King and his guests, were served in three forms, roasted in
leaves, boiled and crisply grilled. Then followed turtle meat, roasted
chicken, yams, breadfruit, and taro leaves steamed in coconut milk. There
was only one Europeanism--coffee was served in cups.
Dinner over, fifteen girls, their coarse hair brushed astoundingly erect
and made even blacker than natural, if possible, by a preparation of soot,
took their places in a semicircle for a sitting meke, one of the native
dances. While they moved their bodies back and forth and waved their arms in
undulations of the dance, they sang, keeping time to the music by tapping
their feet on the floor. One girl, almost a child, with a high soprano
voice, would chant the first few notes of each verse. Then the others would
join in, the movements of their bodies illustrating the words of the song,
which usually was a tale of native life--of hunting, fishing, war, love.
The tunes were chanted in a high minor key, but they bore a suspicious
resemblance to certain familiar missionary hymns.
As the girls sang, their songs grew more stirring, and one by one old
warriors of the young King's father grouped themselves about the door.
Suddenly in the midst of a war-song, one of these old men, without a word,
threw up his hands and pitched across the threshold--dead. His heart had
given out under the passion stirred by old remembrances. The King
accompanied the body to the dead man's hut, comforted the widow and children
and then returned to tell us with great regret that, because of the four-day
period of mourning to follow, he would be unable to continue the festivities
in our honor.
The Fijians are controlled by a combination political theory that to my
western mind was almost pure communism, paradoxically including government by
a chief with wide powers, who owes fealty to the King-Emperor. There is no
private ownership of property. If a man wishes anything from another, he
asks for it and according to Fijian custom, his neighbor must give it up--
whether it be pig, sulu (the native single garment that hangs from the waist)
or spear. It would appear that, under this system, the most industrious
beggar must necessarily be the richest man, and that the only reward for a
hard worker is to be able to have more to give away than his fellows. The
first part of my assumption is partially true--practically every Fijian is an
industrious beggar. But his begging is limited, for no mans looks farther
ahead than the immediate present. If he has food for the day, he is content.
I found, on the other hand, that my fear that the man who labors hard might
be robbed of the fruits of his toil by his fellow tribesman, was not
warranted--for no man in Fiji labors as an individual. All work is done in
common, and the result of the work divided equally among all. If an man's
house has been burned, he reports to his chief that he needs a new one and
the chief assigns a certain number of men to build it. Thus, literally, no
man can be richer than his fellows, and for that reason in the Fijis there is
none of the jealousy of wealth that exists in more sophisticated communities.
The tribal chief in these communistic governments theoretically owns no
personal property. But he is considered to own the bodies of all members of
his tribe and all their possessions. Formerly he had the power of life and
death. Now, though the British have done away with this, he still controls
his people's property and labor and is their judge and administrator. The
British make him directly responsible to them, and when the British resident
agent wishes men or work, he simply gives an order to the native king or
chief of the district. I saw some three hundred of Pope's men clearing a
government road through the brush and was surprised to find them working
industriously, without overseers. This was the more amazing as I had had
ample proof of the indolence of the average Fijian.
Pope's villages were typical Fijian communistic communities. The houses
were built in regular order, all almost exactly alike, rectangular-shaped and
thatched with straw. They were neatly kept and surrounded by well-clipped
grass lawns with no rubbish about. The interiors were bare except for food,
clean-looking sleeping-mats and a few spears, cooking utensils and fishing-
nets. I looked about particularly to see if any man appeared to have more
than his neighbors. As far as I could see, Pope's boast that no man was
richer than another in Fiji was correct. In some of the houses there may
have been a few more fish or coconuts than in others. But in thirty years'
wandering in many quarters of the globe I have never seen a more equitable
distribution of worldly goods.
As we returned from Mbau in our launch one day, Pope, who accompanied
us, overheard one of his underchiefs telling another of a large pearl he had
found. Without ado, Pope demanded it of the man, who immediately handed it
to his King.
"Will he not be angry with you?" I asked.
"Ah, no," replied Pope. "When we reach home, he will come to me and ask
a pig or two. And I must give them to him."
"But suppose you refuse?"
"We never refuse. That is the custom of our people, far more
unbreakable than any written law you have in the United States."
In Fiji, woman plays no part in government. She is simply a worker for
man. And, since a Fijian has only one wife as a rule, her duties are
arduous. The Fijian woman catches fish, gathers firewood, makes tapa-cloth
and mats, cooks and rears the children. She has no leisure except in her
girlhood. Her life is infinitely harder than that of the Polynesian women of
the Society Islands, and in direct contrast with these girls she is notably
chaste. But not so chaste as in former times. This is due in part to a
change in custom brought about by the missionaries. Formerly, men and women
were separated into different compounds at nightfall. Now they sleep
together in one large room of the Fijian house. This has caused much
immorality. This immorality has also greatly increased the practice of
abortion, which was always prevalent in the Fijis, perhaps more so than among
any other people of the world. Despite stringent laws, in nearly every
Fijian village there are one or more "wise women" who know certain savagely
efficient herbs for this purpose.
Because of the hard life which the Fijian woman has after marriage, she
is not anxious to marry young. In one village a chief told me that he had
become so worried over the failure of his young women to marry, that he had
arranged a betrothal dance. The young women were lined up on one side of the
dancing-ground and the young men, dressed in their gayest sulus, their bodies
glistening with oil, on the other. The young warriors danced a dance of
love, then at a signal stopped suddenly, and each rolled an orange across the
grass to the feet of one of the girls. According to the chief's plan, every
girl was to marry the man whose orange she picked up. Not a single girl
lifted the betrothal fruit from the ground.
The marriage of a high chief to the daughter of a chief of another
tribe, however, is an occasion of great rejoicing for the women of the tribe
as well as the men. As soon as the girl is established in her new home, her
husband, accompanied by all his clan, returns with her to her old home. The
visitors have the right to take everything they wish from the bride's
father's villages. And they usually make a clean sweep of it. But I was
told that the losers take their loss cheerfully, picturing the day when their
turn will come.
Before we left Mbau, the period of mourning was over, and a feast and a
dance were given in our honor. The celebration began with a kava ceremony.
Then we took places under the coconut-trees on the border of a large grassy
plot. Out came the men, led by a young chief, fantastically painted, oiled
and dragging on the ground behind him a long strip of tapa-cloth. Following
him, swinging their war-clubs high, were fifty warriors, dressed as the chief
except for the train. Then came fifty young girls, gay in many necklaces of
flowers and new sulus of tapa-cloth. After the dance the men and girls filed
before me, each placing a gift at my feet. The men gave turtles, most valued
food of the Fijis, and the women the sulus which they had worn in the dance.
The ceremony concluded when the King presented me with a whale's tooth, the
highest honor that can be paid a guest.
We left Mbau the next morning. With us went Pope and forty minor chiefs
who were going to Suva to present gifts and to hold a kava ceremony in honor
of the British Governor, who was shortly to leave for England. I found that
many of these chiefs could speak English. Some had been educated at
universities in Australia, as had Pope, and most were loyal to the British
government. It seemed hard to believe that they were leaders of a people
who, only a generation before, had been among the most feared of the savage
cannibals of the South Seas.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
September 1922
ASIA
A Napoleon of The Solomons
by Edward A. Salisbury
Gau is not a big man. In fact, among the fierce warriors of his tribe,
with their hawklike Semitic features, his thick-set body, full lips and flat
nose give him the appearance of being squat and stupid. Yet Gau is the war-
leader of the most famous head-hunters of the South Seas.
It seems queer to find these people of Bella Lavella, the island over
which Gau rules, in the Solomons. On most of the islands live the smaller,
brown type of Malanesians. But the people of Vella Lavella approach the pure
Papuan--big, black and strong. And it is queerer still to find as their
leader in war this little man, Gau, plainly of strange blood, perhaps the
child of some woman brought back as a chief's captive from a distant raid.
At any rate he sprang from obscurity, as a young man made himself master of
Vella Lavella, leader of a thousand warriors, and within a few years swept
the western Solomons. He built dozens of war-canoes, each christened with
the blood of human sacrifice. He conquered and ate of the bodies of three
great chiefs, thereby joining the mana of their courage and cunning to his
own fierce spirit. The skull-houses of his warriors were filled with skulls.
For the first time the tribes of Vella Lavella were united under one head for
war. It seemed that he would extend his little empire widely--be a king
indeed.
And then off Vella Lavella appeared, one day, a great gray canoe with
guns that could kill a score of warriors with one bullet. The natives fled
into the hills. The white men had come. They landed and, with deliberation
and thoroughness, destroyed every war-canoe they could find. Gau's power was
broken.
The great chief had led his last head-hunt. He recognized the white man
as his master, and this master made a strange law: "Thou shalt not kill."
But a law to be obeyed. For down at the foot of the hill, behind the handful
of white, galvanized-roofed government bungalows at Tulagi, the tiny capital
of the white chief, there is a tall wooden gallows, from which swing the
bodies of those who break this law. So Gau hunts heads no more.
We were sitting one July day last year under the awning spread over the
deck of my little yacht, "Wisdom II," on which I was making a tour of the
South Seas, to take motion-pictures. There were three of us: Captain Blake,
a big, "rangy" young Irishman, the British resident agent for the Solomons;
Nicholson, an Australian Methodist missionary, burned gaunt with a thousand
nights of fever; and I. Blake had lost his own boat a few weeks before, on
one of the numberless uncharted reefs of the islands, and was making his
inspection-tour in mine. Nicholson had come for supplies to Gizo, a tiny
trading post, where I had picked him up. We were speaking of my chances of
photographing a head-hunt.
"Nicholson's blacks would be the very men to turn the trick. Gau is
there, and he was the greatest head-hunter of them all," said Captain Blake.
"But I suppose it's no go. The beggar was killing off the tribes of every
island he could reach--and he and his warriors traveled incredibly far in
those big canoes of theirs. One of my predecessors had to burn the lot."
Nicholson looked up and smiled. "I'm not so sure of that, you know,"
he said. "I think that, if promised the canoes wouldn't be destroyed, they
might produce a few."
I was enthusiastic in a moment. But both Blake and the missionary were
dubious. They feared the effect; there was the possibility that the staging
of a head-hunt might arouse the sleeping passions of the natives. Finally
they yielded.
A month later I arrived at Vella Lavella to make the pictures. The
"Wisdom II" anchored off Nicholson's mission, a beautiful spot--a little
church by the side of a native village, sitting a hundred feet above the sea
on a small plateau. We landed on a wide beach, fringed with palm-trees, and
there the missionary met us. As we walked back through a coconut grove and
mounted rude wooden stairs to the plateau, he told me how he had first come
there thirteen years before.
He and his wife had arrived in Tulagi from Australia. There they heard
of the breaking of Gau's power, of his fierce lust for heads, of the terror
of his name in the Solomons. Young and eager, they volunteered to go to his
island, where never white folk had dwelt before. Their offer was accepted,
though it was thought they had chosen the death of martyrs.
The small boat from the trading schooner landed them with their few
bundles of baggage on the beach and then raced back to the ship. They looked
about. Above, on the plateau, they could see the thatched roofs of a
village, but neither man, woman nor child. Silence, but for the surf
breaking on the coral reefs, and the forest cries of birds. It was the kind
of silence that is more to be fear than the fierce shouts of the spear-rush--
a man-made silence.
The young Australian looked out toward the ship and swung up his arm, to
show that all was well. He and the woman silently watched the vessel sail
away, then turned and hand in hand walked up the rough path to the village.
Soon, as if by signal, appeared out of the jungle the people whom they had
come to teach the ways of the white man's God: naked black men, spear and
stone club in hand; women with babies on their bare hips or swung from bark-
cloth slings thrown over one shoulder; children huddling in the rear. The
white girl crept close to her husband, not daring to look at these fierce
head-hunters and cannibals. A little native boy walked boldly up to the
white man, who smiled down at him and patted him on the head. Then a squat
black man, decorated with many ornaments, made a sign--and the menacing
circle melted away. The young missionary's cool courage had won. The boy
was the favorite son of the great chief, and "the black with all the filigree-
work was Gau himself", finished Nicholson as we came to the door of his
bungalow.
I looked about wonderingly; for here was the spot where that scene had
taken place only a few years before. But now there was this neat bungalow,
through the open door of which I could see European furniture, and near by
stood a little wooden church, and stretching away from it long rows of neatly
kept thatched houses. The plateau itself was cleared, except for a splendid
coconut grove.
"Not bad," said Nicholson, as he saw my glance. "And all due to Gau.
He made me taboo. Without his protection our heads would have been among the
chief ornaments in the skull-house any time in the past dozen years."
But it was only the hundred-odd natives here who had become
Christianized. Not half a mile away was a village where Gau and most of his
tribe lived as had their forefathers. And the coast of all the island was
dotted with like villages.
In the cool of the afternoon, on the sand outside Nicholson's house,
I had my first meeting with Gau. Since Nicholson was down with one of his
frequent attacks of fever, the chief's son, who now lived as a "mission man",
acted as interpreter. As Gau squatted on the ground across from me,
I regarded with curiosity this chief whose powers as a leader had won him the
name of the terror of the Solomons. He was a man of fifty, I should say,
about five feet, five inches tall, strongly built and well-muscled, but fat.
He was naked, except for a loin-cloth made of tapa-bark. His nose was full-
nostriled, and his short bush hair curly and still black. His face was puffy
and stolid. Only his deep-set eyes showed his remarkable intelligence.
About his neck were three necklaces of shell money, and attached to cords
made of native vine, a beautiful tortoise-shell circular pendant, two inches
in diameter, on which were hung three rows of human teeth. Around each arm
above the elbow were ten shell armlets. Fastened just above his right eye
was his sign of chieftainship, a really magnificent thing. It was a flat
piece of shell, four inches in diameter, as exactly rounded as if machine-
made, and beautifully inlaid with tortoise-shell in curious and delicate
designs.
At the beginning of our talk, I presented him with a knife and a
hatchet, which he accepted gravely. Gift-making is customary in the
Solomons, but a man rarely ever accepts without making a return present.
I received yams, chickens and bananas aboard ship from Gau the next day.
He understood well enough my wish to see a head-hunt and told me he would
call in his warriors from all parts of this island, but I could not make him
comprehend what motion-pictures are. There was no combination of words in
the comparatively few guttural sounds of his language which could convey the
meaning. I finally resorted to superstition. I told him I had a magic eye,
which could always see again anything it had ever beheld, and that what my
magic eye saw, my followers who looked into it when I returned home, could
see also. Then I said my warriors had heard of the fighting ability of his
men, and I wished my magic eye to see for them, that they might learn.
He solemnly assented to all that, and I gave him presents of knives and
trinkets to send to his under-chiefs.
While awaiting the arrival of the tribes, I investigated the customs and
lives of the natives; for I realized that, if my pictures were to be life-
size and exact, I must learn, before the head-hunt was photographed,
something of the people themselves. Like all Solomon Islanders, they are
deeply religious, or superstitious. There are hundreds of taboos, which no
native dare disobey, for fear of the "devil-devils", to employ the beche-de-
mer term. There are multitudes of these spirits, dread powers which punish
cruelly the breaking of a taboo.
An understanding of the deeply superstitious nature of the natives
enabled me to comprehend the reasons for their head-hunting and cannibalism.
Wolves pull down a moose for food; white men shoot game for like cause, or
for love of the chase; but the Solomon Islanders hunt for a spiritual reason.
It has to do with mana, a mysterious spirit of power, which dwells in both
men and things in a thousand different forms. By virtue of this power, and
not by his own intelligence or strength, a man becomes a great chief or
famous warrior. If he is killed, it is because his enemy's mana is greater
than his own. If a canoe has its bottom torn out on a reef, it is because it
has no wonderful mana to protect it. If it carries its warriors safely, it
is because its mana is great. A certain stone or reef may have a mana that
will keep an entire tribe healthy or make a coconut grove fruitful. All
successes, all happiness, is due to mana. Solomon Islanders believe that the
more heads a man takes the greater his mana. For a powerful chief it is
imperative that his canoe-house be adorned with hundreds of skulls. Then the
mana which belonged to his victims becomes the property of himself and his
people. And when the bodies of dead warriors are eaten, their mana becomes
even more directly a possession of the feasters. Moreover, there are certain
ceremonies that require human sacrifice. A war-canoe is thought to be
without mana unless it is sprinkled with human blood and the skull of the
sacrifice is kept in the canoe-house. Or if a great sickness falls on a
tribe, there must be human sacrifice to appease the angry spirits.
Frequently I am asked how much the missionaries have been able to do
toward Christianizing the savages of the Solomons. Little, I am afraid.
It seems to me that the chief thing the natives have learned from the
missionaries is to play. Life in the wild villages of Vella Lavella is
simply a matter of existence. To get food, eat it, sleep and have children--
that is life. The mission natives are, I believe, happier. The mission
women are surely better off, for they are comparatively free. In their
primitive life the women are the property of men and do all the hard labor.
A girl is bought and sold without regard to her personal preference. She
goes to the highest bidder. I took a picture representing such a marriage.
At the beginning it was impossible to make the natives carry through their
parts. First I was forced to play each role myself--be the bride, groom,
dissatisfied suitor and father. I found, too, great difficulty in obtaining
my stars. Most of the pretty girls were stupid or afraid. But at last I
found one young girl who responded readily to instruction. She was
vivacious, and after her fashion charming--a savage Mary Pickford. We staged
the scene, as in life, outside her father's house. One suitor brought his
gifts of shell money and ornaments, but the second threw in a pig, and the
father, not able to resist this temptation, touched the second young man's
offering, a sign that he had accepted the bargain. The bridegroom gripped
his girl by the wrist and led her off unresisting. He was happy--or would
have been, had the scene been real--if she was not, for wives mean wealth.
They can make ornaments and shell money (and it is interesting that these
savage people use money) and cultivate land. When a wife has done enough
work, then with the products of her labor a man is able to buy a second wife.
When he has two wives, he can more quickly purchase a third and so on. When
a Vella Lavella man dies, his wives are killed also, for they are considered
responsible for their husband's health, and his death is therefore due to
their neglect. Nicholson told me he had done all in his power to change
this. At the mission are a number of women who fled to safety there at the
time of the death of their husbands. In some villages the natives have
submitted in part to the missionary's demands, and now, instead of killing
widows, they only require the poor women to disfigure themselves and to give
up all ornaments and forbid them the privilege of washing.
Neither men nor women are passionate. I was told that there is a mating-
season, when they breed like animals. Unmarried girls are, I believe,
chaste, principally because they are bought when very young. Women are the
cause of trouble on Vella Lavella as in our civilization. Petty wars between
tribes are brought about by the stealing of women. Also, women provide an
incentive to the young men to work. A poor man will hire himself out to work
on a plantation on some other island for three years in order to obtain
enough wealth to buy a wife. When he returns, however, his ditty-box is
usually emptied of its contents by his relatives or tribesmen; each one
taking a present, and he is almost as poor as when he started. Strangely
enough, he does not resent this.
The natives of Vella Lavella are good sportsmen. As fishermen they are
wonderful, but they find little to hunt. The only dangerous animal is the
alligator, but it is never molested by the natives, either because they have
no weapons with which to kill it or because it is taboo. Because of the fear
of alligators, villages are never built directly on streams. The woods are
full of bird-life. I made a trip across the island to visit a young chief,
Osopo. As we trudged along the jungle trails, I could hear on every side the
screeching of cockatoo and parakeet. Osopo would occasionally dart off to
shoot pigeons and doves with his small bow and arrows.
At Osopo's village I had a chance to see the natives in their primitive
state. The small, thatch-roofed huts had no windows, and the only openings
for light and air were doors about two and a half feet high and two feet
wide. The sole furnishings were grass mats. Everybody was dirty. Vermin
abounded. The natives lived from day to day. There was no reserve supply of
food, except a few bundles of coconut in each hut. There was only one meal a
day, which seemed to be eaten at any time, and at which all gorged
themselves. For this meal the women gathered taro, yams and nuts and brought
in shell-fish at low tide. The men went on pig hunts to get meat for their
feasts.
I accompanied them on one of these hunts. They stretched a net about a
hundred feet long and three feet high, made of tough vines, across a
clearing. Then some twenty men armed with spears slipped silently into the
woods. I took a station behind the net and waited. Soon I heard loud
shouting, and three pigs with the hunters after them came bursting forth from
the underbrush. The pigs rushed straight into the net, which, being only
loosely laid, dropped down, entangling them in its meshes. The savages fell
on them gleefully, tied their legs an
d carried them back to the village.
There their squeals were hushed by handfuls of banana leaves held tightly
over their snouts until they smothered to death. They were then cut open and
their entrails were pulled out. These were thrown into the fire for a few
moments, and then every man grabbed some and began to eat gluttonously, but I
made no attempt to swallow the morsels that Osopo handed me. In a trice the
hair had been scraped off the pigs, and they were placed on red hot rocks in
the center of the fire. Long before they were roasted, they were torn apart
and eaten almost raw.
Meanwhile the preparations for the head-hunt were being made. From
hidden places far back in the jungle, war-canoes that had been saved from the
British punitive expedition were brought out. These were magnificent pieces
of workmanship, 35 to 50 feet long, holding from 40 to 100 men, and though
without outriggers, seaworthy. They were made with three planks on each side
and two narrow planks forming a flat bottom. All the boards had beveled
edges and were sewed together by cords made from stems of vines. The seams
were calked with a material something like rosin, obtained from a jungle
tree. The sides of the canoes were beautifully inlaid with pearl-shells in
fantastic designs. At both stem and stern were twelve-foot beaks decorated
with conch-shells. At the bow, just below the line of shells and close to
the water, were heads carved of wood, which were supposed to watch for hidden
reefs. Nearly all the paddles had rotted away and new ones were made out of
hard wood.
When I came ashore on the day set for the head-hunt, hundreds of natives
were already lying about in the coconut grove and on the beach. They had
come in from the villages, overland, with their women carrying provisions for
the stay, or by canoe, and were now camped out in the open, their quarters
during the week I spent in photographing them. As I walked among the men and
they closed around me, staring curiously, I thought I had never seen a
hardier type of fighting-men. They were taller and blacker than most of the
Solomon Islanders I have seen and more frank and fearless in expression, and
they all had teeth stained fiercely dark from betel-nut chewing. They were
fully armed for battle. Most of them had carved spears eight feet long, made
of hard palm-wood and decorated with bands of colored hemp. When Gau joined
me, I asked him through Nicholson what kind of bones the spear-points were
made of. He reached down and touched his shin, indicating that his was made
from a man's shin-bone. In addition to spears, a number of the warriors
carried the stone clubs, which are called tomahawks by the traders. These
clubs had three-foot straight handles, inlaid with pearl-shells. All the men
carried light shields about two and a half feet long by ten inches wide, made
of reeds fastened together by native hemp. They had streaked their faces and
the upper part of their bodies with a paint made of white lime, so that in
the dark or in the heat of attack they might easily recognize one another.
All were bareheaded, but a few wore curious sunshades woven of fiber. Every
man had on all the ornaments he possessed: tortoise-shell belts, necklaces
and armlets. Each chief had his inlaid circular shell disc fastened either
directly between his eyes or over one eye. The Solomon Islander always wears
ornaments in war, because he is a firm believer in ghosts, and thinks that
his ghost will have the use of all his most valued trinkets if they are kept
with his skull. If he is killed, these treasures are never stolen. The
natives believe that, if the dead man's ornaments are taken away, his ghost
will haunt the thief.
Nicholson was down with fever, but, using Gau's son as interpreter,
I prepared to begin my pictures immediately. The natives entered into the
spirit of the game. But first I gave them small presents and a feast of
canned salmon and dog-biscuit, a meal they vastly preferred to native food.
And I promised them further presents and feasts if all went well. Food was
my best card.
The chief difficulty was to prevent the savages from staring into the
camera. That "magic eye" fascinated them. But by saying that to look at it
was taboo and that its mysterious spirit would bring down terrible punishment
on whosoever stared into it, I was soon able to induce them to go ahead as if
the camera were not there. As the picture progressed, things became easier.
The hunt ceased to be acting. I am sure that, if the savages had not all
been under Gau's influence, my screen production would have ended in an
actual battle with heavy casualties. The likelihood of such an outcome
became so apparent that, before the fighting began, we had all the bone barbs
removed from the spears. What Gau proposed to do was merely to feign a
repetition of his last famous raid on Choiseul Island, from which he had
brought home over two hundred heads.
He called his under-chiefs into conference, and, as they squatted in a
circle on the sand, talking earnestly, the women prepared food for the
voyage, which, if actually made, would have been a hundred and fifty miles.
Gau and his chiefs decided on a plan of attack. Then Gau addressed his
warriors. It was a wonderful scene, but many feet of film were spoiled,
because the mission men, dressed in shirts and breeches and unarmed, were so
stirred by the sight of their great chief making a war-speech that they crept
in among the savage warriors to listen to him. I had to stop the cameras and
drive them away. When Gau had finished, the young chiefs spoke, working
themselves into a frenzy, dancing up and down and waving their spears. The
warriors answered their enthusiasm with savage cries and gesticulations.
Finally, at a word from Gau, all rushed down to the canoes and in a second
were making for an opening in the reef. The women and children followed to
the water's edge, waving excited good-byes. The dozen men who had been left
behind as guards remained silent. They stood on the beach and stared grimly
and sadly at the rapidly disappearing canoes. And the mission men, downcast
and miserable, huddled together--outcasts from the wonder and glory of the
hunt for heads.
The handling of the canoes was marvelous. The men sat double-banked on
thwarts, with the exception of the chiefs, who stood. In the stern of each
boat was a stern-man equipped with a big paddle, which he handled with both
hands and feet, and in the bow was the stroke-maker, a warrior picked for
strength and skill. The men kept perfect time, the paddles rising and
falling rhythmically, in time with a wild chant which they sang in a high,
minor key. The stroke was about fifty to the minute, but every fifteen
minutes they would change it, make a rapid short spurt and then drop back
into the regular time. Occasionally all the canoes would stop. During the
few minutes' rest every man chewed betel-nut. And always I could see Gau's
squat, immovable figure as he stood in the stern of the canoe in the lead.
Gau had chosen one of his own villages, ten miles up the coast, as a
place to be attacked. Around the houses were built three stone walls, two
feet thick and five feet high, about fifty feet apart. From behind these
walls the village men could hurl their spears at the unprotected enemy
without great danger to themselves. A guard was usually stationed at the
outer wall, and an enemy making a surprise attack would have to fight his way
over two walls before arriving at the main body of defenders, who had had
time, on account of these obstructions, to get their weapons and make ready
for the battle. It was a system of defense devised by Gau himself.
When the canoes neared the village, Gau directed Kavi, one of the older
chiefs, with a hundred men, to separate from the main party and land on the
far side of the village. I went ahead in my launch and had the camera-men
ready.
We came upon an idyllic scene. Women were cooking around open fires in
front of the huts or hunting shellfish in the shallows of the blue lagoon;
children were playing about; a few men were gathering coconuts, climbing the
trees with monkey-like agility. Then, of a sudden, the war-canoes shot into
sight from behind a nearby curve in the coast. I could scarcely see the
paddles flash and dip--so rapid was the stroke. One of the women who were
fishing looked up and saw them. She screamed loudly and ran for the village.
In a second there was the wildest disorder. Women and children scampered
pell-mell for the woods, crying and howling. The village men all vanished
into the houses, but appeared again on the instant, waving spears and clubs.
All had been informed that it was only play, but the sight of those war-
canoes filled with yelling warriors was too much.
It was then that Kavi's warriors came pouring out of the woods, cutting
off escape and Gau's men, with the old chief at their head, beached their
canoes with a rush and ran across the sand like mad. From behind the outer
wall the village men met them with a volley of spears. Gau's warriors poured
over the first wall, thrusting with their spears and swinging their tomahawks
at the outnumbered villagers, who retreated. Then both sides lost their
heads. They jabbed and hammered at one another in deadly earnest, while Gau,
perched on top of the wall, jumped up and down, waving spear and shield,
cheering his men on. The villagers made a determined stand before the last
wall, but were overwhelmed. Then Gau and I rushed in, separating the
struggling mob. When order was finally brought about, many of the savages
were bleeding from wounds. It was the most realistic screen-fight I have
ever seen.
Gau took back a number of captives with him. It had always been the
custom to take prisoners, if possible, breaking their legs if they attempted
to escape. Captives were considered necessary, so that human sacrifices
might be ready whenever the spirits demanded. The life of a prisoner in the
Solomons was far different from what it was in most other lands; he was
allowed to live freely with his captors, sometimes for years, until his fatal
day came when a head was necessary--then he was killed without compunction.
I shall never forget the sight of the home-coming of the head-hunters.
As the canoes appeared in the far distance, the women and children came down
to the shore, waving their arms in greeting. As the canoes drew near land,
the men began to paddle very slowly, lifting the paddles high out of the
water with each stroke and singing a wild, mournful melody, as if for their
dead. Then, at the end, they broke into a pean of triumph and dashed the
canoes almost up to the beach with terrific speed. Gau had had a number of
skulls of his former victims brought down from his skull-house in the
mountains, and these, wrapped in coconut leaves, were brought ashore by the
warriors. As they stalked up the beach between the lines of admiring women,
skulls held high, one would have thought from their proud appearance that
they hat brought home real trophies of war. A great fire was built on the
beach by the women, and into this the heads would have been cast, if they had
been newly taken spoils, and left there until the flesh had been burned away.
Around the fire the fighting-men danced, singing, while the women sat about
and watched, their bodies swaying to the music. Then the skulls were placed
in coconut leaf baskets and thrust on the top of four-foot poles set at
regular intervals along the beach. Around these once more the wild dance
swirled.
And standing outside the circle, leaning on his spear, watching, his
face expressionless, was Gau, greatest of the head-hunters, dreaming, perhaps
of the hundred times that all this had been reality, or, it may be, of a time
when it would become real again.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
June 15, 1923
NEW YORK TIMES
Finds a 'Dry' Tribe of Island Pygmies
"The white man's days in the East are numbered; fifty years will see
Sumatra, India and the Philippines all under native rule," is the prediction
made by Captain Edward A. Salisbury, who arrived yesterday aboard the Conte
Rosso, completing a tour of the world made in the interest of the
Southwestern Museum of California. "The one topic of conversation among
white colonists in the East, whether they be Dutch, English, French or
German," he said, "is, how long can it last?"
Captain Salisbury and his companions made the greater portion of the
voyage in an eighty-three ton sailing yacht. They visited the South Sea
Islands, Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, New Hebrides, New Guinea, Bali,
Timor, Java, Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Andaman Islands, Ceylon, Sokotra,
French Somililand, and Abyssinia. At Moka, in the Arabian Sea, the yacht was
wrecked. It was salvaged and brought to Italy where it went up in flames as
the result of an explosion. The fire destroyed many valuable gifts received
by the party from native chiefs they had visited during the course of the
journey.
Among many interesting explorations was that of the Andaman Island.
Little has been known hitherto of the natives of this group, and Captain
Salisbury believes that his party was the first to study their lives and
customs. He describes these islanders as the only people on earth who really
enjoy the blessings of prohibition. They are a race of nomadic pigmies,
living in jungles. Neither tobacco nor intoxicants are known to them, and
their only form of punishment for criminals is the disdain of their fellow
tribesmen. Crime is almost unknown among them, Captain Salisbury says, and
such is the harmony which reigns that a domestic fight is considered an event
of great importance, and causes all the tribe to turn out.
For food these islanders rely on turtles, which are found in great
quantities near the shores of their islands. They hunt these turtles in
canoes paddled by the women. The game is speared by the men, who leap into
the water and drive their bone weapons through the turtle's shell.
The Andaman islanders also use bows which would do credit to the
strength of Ulysses, says Captain Salisbury. In spite of their size, he
says, they are able to bend these bows double, while the strongest members of
his party could scarcely draw them more than taut.
The only animals on these islands are a species of lizard which grows to
a length of eight feet or more and a huge coconut crab. These crabs, Captain
Salisbury says, are capable of crushing a coconut with their claws, of which
they have three sets. The crabs are shaped like lobsters, except that they
have very long legs and are adept at climbing trees. Some of them were
captured by the party before it left the islands and were placed in boxes.
One night during a hurricane in the Indian Ocean they ate through the wooden
boxes, Captain Salisbury says, and made an attack upon the party en masse.
Great difficulty was experienced before the crabs were finally driven from
the ship.
The lizards, he says, feed on turtle eggs which they dig from the sand.
In the morning, when the party first landed, they appeared in droves on the
beach, resembling huge alligators, and delaying the landing--somewhat.
One of the islands in the Indian Ocean the party found a colony of
10,000 murderers deported by the Indian Government. But the details of this
visit the Captain preferred to keep for use in a special article he is
preparing.
In the islands about Sumatra the party spent some time among the Karo-
Bataks, a tribe of which little is known. Observing that many women in the
tribe had their teeth chipped off, Captain Salisbury inquired why this was.
He was informed that it was the custom with all married women, and the party
was permitted to witness the process of chipping the teeth.
First a bowl made of a half coconut shell was filled with water.
In this were placed some leaves from the sacred trees which grown in the
tribal garden. Then came the victim, a girl of thirteen. The medicine man
took a big iron chisel and, with a stone for a mallet, chipped the teeth off
one by one. After this was done he procured a large file, like those used by
blacksmiths for filing horses' hoofs, and added the finishing touches. Not a
sign of a whimper escaped the girl. This, it was explained, would have
disqualified her for marriage. The object of the custom was to determine
whether the woman was capable of bearing brave sons as warriors for the
tribe.
The religious customs of the Karo-Bataks are described as particularly
interesting. When a man died, in order to deceive the "death demon," the
people carve out a log in the shape of a man, wrap it in a cloth, hire a long
train of mourners and bury it with pomp. The "death demon" then goes to the
grave of the fictitious corpse, the natives believe, while the true corpse is
buried somewhere else. Nor is this the only precaution. A corpse is never
carried out through a door or window of the Karo-Batak houses, lest the demon
should learn the way in and return. Instead, the people cut a hole in the
wall of the house, and as soon as the corpse has been passed through, the
hole is closed. The houses are all built on bamboo stilts about six feet
above the ground.
The Karo-Bataks believe that Heaven is a neighboring mountain. Few of
them dare venture thither except the medicine men, who usually return with
weird tales of the dead who haunt those places.
"In dealing with natives," Captain Salisbury said, "the first thing we
impressed on them was that we didn't want their women; and then that we
didn't want their land. We tickled their vanity by telling them that our
country didn't have such great people as they were, and by asking that they
teach us how to be as great as they were. Always we gave them gifts. But we
never carried firearms. The one thing that will make a native commit murder
is the opportunity to obtain firearms."
The Karo-Bataks, he said, have all their money invested in earrings.
The earrings they wear of solid silver and weigh about three pounds each.
It is estimated that $2,500,000 in silver could be reclaimed from the Karo-
Batak earrings in Sumatra.
The expedition sailed from Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 1920. The first draw
was composed of college boys, most of whom took a homeward bound ship at the
first stop, as soon as they had seen that South Sea Islanders were not as
picturesque as usually described. Thereafter the crew consisted mostly of
natives. Edward Burghard, a Columbia University graduate; Merian C. Cooper,
a former Captain in the United States Air Service, and George MacNeil of Yale
and Captain Nelson Taylor of Los Angeles accompanied Captain Salisbury.
Captain Cooper joined the expedition at Singapore. In South America the
party met Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dr. Rinehart and Rex Beach.
The "Wisdom II," in which the trip was made, was destroyed by fire at
Savona, Italy. All the crew was ashore at the time. An Italian watchman
went into the hold of the vessel with a lantern. Workmen on the vessel had
cut into a gaspipe during the day, and gas had gathered in the bilge. The
explosion which followed destroyed the ship and a large number of valuable
presents which had been given the party. Other presents had been previously
shipped to the Southwestern Museum from Singapore.
Captain Salisbury was born in California. He has been engaged in
similar expeditions for many years.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
September 1923
ASIA
Murderer's Island
by Edward A. Salisbury
In a New York club the other day I met a globe-trotter who said to me:
"A white man must live in a white man's country to be happy. Whites who
dwell in the lands of yellows and browns and blacks consider themselves
always as exiles. In their hearts they are never content."
"I'm not sure of that," I replied. "As contented white men as I have
ever known--and cultured white women, too--live in a land of all three colors-
-a lonely island in a lonely sea."
"Impossible," said he. "What place are you talking about?"
"Murderer's Island," I replied.
"Murderer's Island!" he exclaimed.
I looked him in the eyes so that he might know I was dealing neither in
jokes nor lies. "A lonely island with only one settlement; that settlement
composed of ten thousand convicted brown and yellow murderers; all the rest
of the island dense jungle in which roam naked coal-black savage dwarfs; and
ruling over the lot a half-hundred whites." Then I added firmly, "And the
whites are very happy there."
"Why?"
"Listen."
For two years I had been wandering up and down the world in my yacht,
"Wisdom II." Last January I was sailing north from Sumatra up the Bay of
Bengal. One hot dawn we sighted a group of low-lying hills, dark shadows in
a purple sea. Along the coasts of these island hills there were no signs of
life--no villages, no fisher-boats, no living beings. Only the dark jungle
which ran down to the silent sea.
But charts showed a harbor; and as the sun was coming up blazing red
against the cloudless sky, we sighted a break in the jungle. As we sailed
in, we saw that a tiny island hill, dotted with a score of red bungalows, lay
off the mainland. We swung in around this islet, and there, a quarter of a
mile away on the mainland, on a low, grass-covered hill in a clearing on the
edge of the jungle, stood a huge, square, forbidding pile of red brick.
I looked through my binoculars and saw that every window was iron-barred.
On the tower which crowned the stern structure, there were leaning motionless
on their rifles two bearded brown men in khaki, who wore the turbans of the
Sikhs. It was a prison. Around and about the prison, I could just make out
through the trees the thatched roofs of villages.
On the little island, a signal-flag fluttered up, telling us to anchor.
A rowboat came alongside, and a slow-speaking Scotchman, an officer of the
Indian marines, stepped on board. He was the Port Officer. Cooper and I
went ashore with him and walked over to a low bungalow at the water's edge.
This was the club. Breakfasting in its big central room was a one-armed
Major wearing on his tunic the ribbon of the D. S. O. As we were served with
cool drinks, the Major asked us our impressions of the Andaman Islands.
"We haven't had much of a chance to get any as yet," I told him and
asked what there was to see.
"Well, not much," he replied. "Only about ten thousand murderers. You
know Port Blair, this place, is where they send into exile the murderers from
all over India. We have 'em of all kinds here." He called, ""Boy". Some
one outside answered loudly and shrilly, "Sahib", and in trotted a bare-
footed Indian to replenish our glasses. The Major laughed. "That boy is a
murderer, too."
I thought to myself, "What a life!" And the Major apparently read my
thought from my expression. "Oh, it's not so bad as that," he said. "Wish I
could stay here, by Jove, but no such luck. I'm ordered back to Burma. Now
here comes a lucky man. He's been here twenty years." He pointed at a dry
little man in spectacles who came in, was introduced and passed on into
another room.
"That chap's a forester. Dane or something by birth, but he saved a
British ship. He was the engineer. The government asked him what he wanted
as a reward and he chose a permanent billet here. Lucky dog."
The Port Officer, who had gone out, came in to say that the Governor was
waiting to see us. As we plodded up the winding gravel road to the big
mansion on top of the hill, we passed a two-wheeled carriage. It had no
horses, but six sweating, half-naked natives were pulling heavily at the
shafts. By its side walked a Sikh guard. Half reclining in the carriage-
seat was a woman, her face almost as pale as her cool white linen dress.
It was the work of the tropical sun, that pallor. I had been long accustomed
to recognize its disastrous effect on the complexions of white women.
"A white woman living in the midst of ten thousand murderers,"
I murmured to myself. "Unhappy creature." But as I looked closely at her,
as she returned our bow, I could see no marks of discontent. Rather she had
the air of one to whom life has been good--very good.
At the door of the Governor's mansion, a great white parrot screamed an
unfriendly greeting. Several Indian servants met us and led us through a
long hall, hung with queer bows and arrows, to a library. Its windows
overlooked the great red prison across the little bay. I wondered what sort
of man ruled over this colony of turbulent convicts. I created a lionlike
figure with bold features and hard eyes. The door opened and, instead, there
came toward us a short, stooped, middle-aged man, the type one sees, book in
hand, wandering under the elms of a college campus. He said in the low voice
of the cultured Englishman, "Welcome to the Andamans, gentlemen."
This was Colonel Beadon, with almost despotic powers. With a handful of
whites and a company or so of soldiery, he rules over the thousands of
criminals, most of whom are allowed to live quite freely in villages of their
own. The prison across the bay was used only for the most desperate
characters and seditionists and new prisoners. This bookish Governor seemed
to take the convicts as a matter of course, but even he appeared gripped by
the mystery of a race of pigmies who inhabited the jungle. One tribe, he
said, roamed the forest only a few miles from the colony, but could not be
captured or hardly seen. The only sign the colony ever had of them was when
sometimes at night they crept out of the jungle, killed a few convicts and
escaped back into their impenetrable wilderness. When the Governor spoke of
these queer little jungle people, his voice lost a little of its tone of
semiboredom.
But I was much more interested just then in the life of these whites I
had seen walking unarmed among the murderer convicts. So I asked for more
information. "Are all these Indians walking around, apparently quite freely,
really murderers?"
He smiled. "Not quite all," he answered. "We have some famous dacoits
(bandits) and a few political prisoners, but the majority are murderers."
He pointed at the musty row of files which lined one side of the room.
"In those books," he said, "are the records of enough romances to keep a
dozen story-writers at work for life. But perhaps the editors might not
print the yarns; for they all have the same tragic climax--a killing and then
exile to this place."
"But if all these men are murderers, isn't there great danger for you
whites walking about unarmed?"
The Governor looked up as if a little surprised. "Why, no. There are a
few--er--accidents now and then, but no real danger. No."
The accidents to which he referred are of the kind that happened to a
Viceroy of India who visited the island one winter many years ago. It was a
Mahommedan convict who stabbed him to death in the midst of his retinue.
I found this same attitude among all the white rulers of this strange
place. This little group--not more than fifty in all--after the fashion of
the English took their bizarre surroundings as the most natural thing in the
world. Instead of worrying about either convicts or savages, they had built
themselves a club where we had met the Major--when half a dozen Englishmen
settle anywhere they must have a club.
This club was a delight, with card-, billiard- and lounging-rooms. Part
of the sea which washed up to its doors was fenced off from sharks to make an
enormous outdoor swimming-pool. A tennis-court was near by, and wonder of
wonders, a golf-course. These rulers lived in spacious bungalows on the
hills. Big windows opened on every side with the sea-breezes every blowing
through. They had literally swarms of servants. And the servants had one
peculiarity--they were all murderers.
This I did not know until one dark night Cooper and I went to dine with
an officer and his wife, who live on the mainland on a hill above the convict
villages. It was pitch-black when we landed, and we could just make out by
torchlight a carriage drawn by six brown fellows, naked except for loin-
cloths. We got in and our human horses started up a winding road. We could
see nothing but the glimmer of the lantern on the naked brown backs before
us. We stopped at last before a brilliantly lighted two-story bungalow-like
house. Half a dozen servants, dressed in bright colors, were drawn up at the
door. In front of these was standing our host.
After a dinner served by an Indian butler with numerous aides, as we
were sitting in the many-windowed drawing-room, having coffee, I remarked to
our hostess that she did not seem to be bothered by the servant problem.
"Well I do manage to get enough of them," she replied.
"All convicts, I suppose," said I.
"Yes, indeed," said she smiling.
"I don't suppose you ever take in any murderers," I remarked.
"No murderers!" she answered in mock indignation. "I wouldn't have
anything else. You don't suppose I would tolerate a lot of thieves and
robbers running about my house. No indeed, give me a nice honest murderer
for a servant any time."
I thought a minute. "And those fellows who dragged us up the hill, are
they murderers, too?" I asked.
"She smiled again and nodded yes. And when it was time to say good
night, we rode down the hill through the night in the same rig with the same
team.
To me, those women of the Andamans will never seem quite real. They are
figures of a dream. There are only about a dozen in all. Each has her own
bodyguard, a great, bearded, uniformed brown Sikh, with gun and bayonet,
without whom she is never allowed to go out. When her husband is not at
home, which is the better part of the day, her bodyguard must stay near her.
Then, too, the Indian maid who dresses her hair each day may be a murderess
serving a life-sentence. Also, though she has the luxury of a private
carriage, there are no horses for it, and she uses the same kind of a team of
six murderers as the one which took us up the hill that night. That white-
faced woman, then, whom we had first seen with the contented look on her
face, had had a team of murderers! But soon we became so accustomed to
seeing these white women riding about to pay their calls, drawn by murderer
human horses, that we came to think little of it.
And these women "carry on" happily, as do their men. From four to six
each day is the time for sports, when, as the burning tropical sun begins to
seek the horizon, they play at tennis and golf. Afterward comes a plunge in
the ocean pool, and finally cool drinks in the room set aside for the ladies,
before going home to dress for the little dinners they delight in giving one
another.
But in contrast to the life of the white woman is that of the brown and
yellow and black-skinned women murderers I occasionally saw walking along the
sun-baked roads. If it is woman's chief desire to be desired by man, then
these women convict exiles should be the happiest of creatures. But I don't
think they are. They are only a few among ten thousand men, most of whom
have already killed because of love and jealousy. They are hot-blooded,
desperate men--these Indian killers. They are Orientals and to them women
are the beginning and the end of all human delights--better than the tinkle
of gold coins one against the other; better than the blood of an enemy on the
knife-blade. And here in exile these desperate men must forego the taste of
the honey of life.
However, a small percentage get women in a most peculiar way. When
women murderers are sent to the island, Colonel Beadon has them lined up on
Saturdays and put on the marriage-market. Then the exiles gather about in
fierce crowds and bid for the treasures. Only a dozen odd can be successful.
When these carry away their brides, they are followed by raging glares from
the disappointed suitors. Too often tragedy follows. When her husband is
away in the fields, the woman finds a hundred lovers ready to dare all for
one soft glance from her eye. Then comes a knife-thrust in the dark, or an
open killing of both woman and the lover and the end--with the hanging of the
husband. The hanging is sure. The mild-mannered, bookish man, with whom
Cooper used to play at chess, knows that the safety of all rests on swift
punishment. Only a few hours at most, and then up in the great red prison on
the hill the gallows-trap is sprung; there is a tolling of the bell, and all
of Murderers' Island knows that their soft-voiced Governor is still the
Master of Life and Death.
I saw this gallows once when I visited the prison, and learned to my
surprise that we were not the only Americans on the island. In the prison
was a man who, though he might not strictly be called an American, for he was
a Mexican half-breed, had come from the United States. He was a native of
southern Texas. He was the most hated, the most feared and the most despised
of all the prisoners. Men spat on the ground his feet touched, yet cringed
before him as if he had the evil eye. He was the official hangman. How he
came to be a life convict in this queer island prison on the other side of
the world I did not learn. But there he was, receiving ten rupees a head for
each man he hanged and some lesser sum for his work at the whipping-post.
There was in the prison also another man who had lived long in America.
He was a Sikh, who had been in California for many years. When we told him
good-by, his eyes seemed to look over the seas and see the orange groves and
smiling fields of that distant land, as he said to us: "You are going back
to America. Back to America. Oh, if I could only see it once more!" There
were tears in his eyes as we turned and went away.
In the prison, too, I remember one old, bowed convict who wore around
his neck the tag which showed he had three times made a break for liberty.
Nevermore would he see the light of day outside of prison-walls. Upon these
men who try to escape, the punishment is ruthless. They are put back into
the prison, and there they stay until the end. This old man, a Burmese, and
a woodsman who knew the stars, had braved the cyclone-swept Bay of Bengal in
a canoe he had burned out of a log. He was picked up three-quarters of the
way to safety, paddling gamely on, though half dead from exposure and thirst.
Indeed, few of the murderers ever escape, despite their freedom from guards
and prison-walls. If they try, the sea, an upturned canoe marks their end.
If they try the forest, they are usually found with an arrow in their backs.
But sometimes they are never heard of again, and only the jungle pigmies can
tell how they died.
In all the years the English have lived on the Andamans, they have never
been able to do anything with the Jawaras, as is called the tribe of the
Andamanese dwarfs on this prison island. These pigmies resist both force and
kindness. Just before we arrived, a punitive expedition had been out after
them, as the result of a raid, and had spent three miserable weeks in the
jungle without even coming in contact with them. Sometimes, however, Burmese
dacoits among the convicts are given long knives and a bag and turned loose
in the jungle. Once in a while they come back with a diminutive black head
in the bag and receive a reward of a few rupees, but more often they never
return.
I became tremendously interested in these pigmies, for I learned that
they were among the most primitive of all humans. If it is true, as some
anthropologists believe, that life first came into being in southern Asia,
then these little aborigines may be forerunners of mankind; for it is
probable that they inhabited this part of the world before the migrations
swept down from southern Asia and obliterated all traces of them except in
three remote localities. In two of these, one a wild spot in the
Philippines, and the other a district in the central part of the Malay
Peninsula, they have lost many of their original traits by contacts with
other peoples. On the Andaman Islands alone have they remained isolated.
Though no contact can be made with the Andamanese who live on the island
of Port Blair, occasionally some of the wild little fellows from some of the
other islands paddle up to a spot three miles from the prison, where the
British have had a hut erected for them. A few years ago, before the British
gave up in despair of ever civilizing them, the little forester, whom I had
met in the club, had been the officer charged with attempting negotiations.
With him I went to this hut, and was lucky enough to find several families.
A half-dozen were standing at the water's edge when our launch chugged up.
I thought at first that the reports of their smallness had been
exaggerated, but as we stepped ashore, I realized that they are indeed dwarfs-
-so perfectly formed, however, that it was not until I stood beside them that
I realized how small. One of the tiny women, not more than four feet, three
inches in height, caught my attention immediately. She had what appeared to
be a huge white ornament hanging about her neck. I went closer and almost
jumped with astonishment. The ornament was a ghastly human skull, white and
grinning against her bare black breasts.
The forester laughed. "The women wear the skulls of their dead husbands
as loving souvenirs," he said. And then he told us how, when a man dies, the
little people blow on his face to say good-by, bury him, and then desert the
camp in which they are living. After several months they come back, dig up
the bones and wash them in the sea. Finally they hold a dance in honor of
the dead man's skull, paint it with red ocher and white clay and give it and
the jaw-bones to the chief mourners, who wear them hung about their necks on
fiber strings, like huge stones on a necklace.
Another woman we saw squatting on the ground, apparently examining her
child's arm. But when we went forward to see her, she was cutting a row of
little cuts around it--the boy's body covered with rows of scars. The
Andamese believe that every child is born with evil spirits within him.
So the mother every two or three months lets the spirits escape through these
cuts. As a result, all the men and women have their entire bodies covered
with scars.
At the request of our forester, the Andamanese held a mock marriage
ceremony. Two who had recently been married acted as the bride and groom.
There was a dance; then the young man pretended to flee into the jungle. The
other men ran after him, bringing him back to where the bride was sitting on
the ground, surrounded by the women. With loud shouts, the men plumped the
lad down in the girl's lab, and all, men and women alike, threw themselves on
top of the bride and groom, like football players on a loose ball, weeping
and wailing as if in mortal grief. From fifty yards away, the bridal party
looked like a huge black ball.
Standing near this marriage ball was a girl, her body covered with long
zigzag designs in white. She refused to enter into the fun. The forester
explained that she was a debutante, as her paintings showed, and that
marriage was much too important an affair for her to enter into a sport about
it. She had but lately received her "flower name". Every pigmy girl must be
called after a flower when she matures into womanhood. She passes through an
elaborate three-day ceremony to receive this name, during which she is
neither allowed to eat nor sleep. At the end of that time a name is selected
for her after one of the jungle trees or plants in bloom at that time, to
show that the girl herself has bloomed into womanhood. Henceforth she is
never known by her childhood name. She is now a young lady of very few
social restrictions, and considerable influence.
But to my mind the strangest thing about these pigmy nomads is that they
know no way of making fire. Each family has a fire of their own, which they
keep always going. When they travel, they carry the fire with them, thinking
it a gift from the gods that, if once extinguished, they may never relight.
The Andamanese are the only human beings I have ever heard of who do not know
how to make fire.
When I had finished telling of this far-away island in a lonely sea, my
globe-trotter said to me: "Great--brown and yellow murderers and naked black
savages on a jungle island! You mean to tell me that white men are really
content to live there?" And he added with scorn, "And white women, too?"
Then, with a near-sneer, "Why?"
"The answer is simple," I replied. "We Anglo-Saxons will suffer
anything to stand on top of the dung-hill. And of all Anglo-Saxons, the
English gentleman has this spirit bred deepest. In India, he has already
begun to slide down the heap. Therefore India is becoming intolerable. But
Murderers' Island is the India of long ago. There at the present day the
white man is a god, his lady a goddess. Around them are nothing but dark-
skinned convict murderers and black aboriginal pigmies. Far above these
stand the lordly whites, looking from their eminence on the lesser beings
below. The whites are the caste. Therefore content."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
[All of the above articles reprinted from ASIA were originally published with
many accompanying photographs. Additional articles by Salisbury appeared in
the October 1922, January 1924, and April 1924 issues of ASIA.]
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