A HISTORY OF FIJI 533 



Their scantiness of attire serves but to reveal the beauty of their 

 forms. Indeed, we must recall the fact that even in cannibal days the 

 Fijians would never expose the entire body, for such immodesty would 

 have merited death at the hands of the chief, and in 1837 the natives 

 of Levuka sent off a deputation to protest to Captain Dumont d'Urville 

 against the indecency of his sailors in entering the ocean stripped of 

 clothing. Dress has little or nothing 'to do with morality; indeed, 

 among savage people the more clothing they are forced to assume the 

 lower do their morals decline. Dressed in his simple waist-cloth, the 

 Fijian is ready at any moment to seek the deep pools of some cool 

 mountain stream in which to bathe. As civilization introduces clothing, 

 so does this practice of swimming decline, and the once cleanly native 

 becomes the prey of filth-diseases. Fortunately, the British Govern- 

 ments of Papua and Fiji have not insisted upon the hat, shirt and 

 trousers for the men, or the ugly "mother hubbards" for the women, 

 which the missionaries have forced upon the niatives of nearly all other 

 groups in the Pacific, to the detriment of both health and morals. 



As James Chalmers, the great missionary to Papua, wrote in 1885^ 



Syphilis and strong drink have received the blame for the deterioration 

 and extinction of native races, but I think the introduction of clothing has done 

 much in this direction. To swathe their limbs in European clothing spoils 

 them, deteriorates them, and I fear hurries them to premature death. Put 

 excessive clothing with syphilis and strong drink and I think we shall be 

 nearer the truth. Ketain native customs as much as possible — only those which 

 are very objectionable should be forbidden — and leave it to the influence of 

 education to raise them to purer and more civilized customs. 



The Polynesians of Samoa, Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand had 

 a lyric history sung by priests and sagas which told of days when the 

 ancestors of their chiefs were gods, but the Melanesian race has little 

 of this mythology, and there is no "history" in Fiji, where, according 

 to Wilkes, all are said to have descended from a single pair, whom the 

 gods made black and wicked and to whom they gave but little clothing. 

 Then the gods made the brown-skinned Tongans who behaved better 

 and to whom they gave more clothing, and, last of all, the white men 

 were created, and these were well behaved and were given much cloth- 

 ing. There are apparently no myths of ancient migrations, and the 

 people are said always to have lived in Fiji. 



There is no history of the group as a whole, for war was the one chief 

 object of Fiji, and each little district was forever suspicious of its neigh- 

 bors. Indeed, to such a degree did the Fijians carry their zest for war 

 that two men would walk abreast, never one behind the other, for the 

 temptation of the man behind to club his companion might at any 

 moment become irresistible. It was death to pass behind a chief or to 



1 ' ' James Chalmers, His Autobiography and Letters, ' ' pp. 255-256, by 

 Kiehard Lovett, London, 1902. 



