R. L. S.
VAILIMA,
UPOLU,
SAMOA.




CHAPTER I--THE ELEMENTS OF DISCORD: NATIVE


The story I have to tell is still going on as I write; the characters are
alive and active; it is a piece of contemporary history in the most exact
sense. And yet, for all its actuality and the part played in it by mails
and telegraphs and iron war-ships, the ideas and the manners of the
native actors date back before the Roman Empire. They are Christians,
church-goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their
books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract
Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our
tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the
Roman wall. We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of
the patriarchal. We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in
a period of communism. And this makes them hard to understand.

To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of a land of
despotism. An elaborate courtliness marks the race alone among
Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;
commoners my-lord each other when they meet--and urchins as they play
marbles. And for the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart.
The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife, a