A HISTORY OF FIJI 3° 5 



the ends of the waist cloth formed long streamers, those of king Tanoa 

 being so long that they trailed upon the ground. When yaqona was 

 served, all chiefs removed their turbans, excepting only the Eoko Tui 

 of Mbau who was regarded as being a human personification of a god. 



The women never wore tapa, but were clothed in the simple UJcu 

 or waist band of hibiscus bark or grasses which is still worn among 

 the mountain tribes, although along the coast the Europeans have 

 abolished both it and the malo, obliging all to wear a waist-cloth of 

 calico. In some respects they were a modest people before these changes 

 were effected, and fortunately for the natives their new rulers did not 

 oblige them to don more clothing. In other parts of the Pacific the 

 missionaries have forced the natives to wear European garments, far 

 too hot for tropical climates. Such clothes are so expensive that few 

 or none of the natives can afford to own more than one suit, and this 

 soon becomes a filthy menace to health. Tuberculosis stalks in when 

 European clothes appear, and all unprejudiced observers will agree that 

 the most diseased and immoral races now in the Pacific are those who 

 have been obliged to wear the most clothing. 



Their own clothes permitted the natives to bathe freely, but the 

 whites now demand that the natives shall don special bathing suits or 

 at least enter the water clothed in some European garments. This prac- 

 tically forces them either to abstain from their health-giving sport of 

 former times or to swim fully clothed, as they now do in Hawaii. These 

 cold wet clothes are a cause of influenza leading to tuberculosis, and 

 everywhere the natives are less cleanly as Christians than they were as 

 heathens. 



In former times the Fijians took great pride in the arrangement 

 of their hair, and a wide range of individual taste was permitted in this 

 respect, as may be seen in the illustrations given by Williams in his 

 " Fiji and the Fijians," or the colored plate published in the narrative of 

 the voyage of the Challenger. Usually they trained the hair to grow 

 into a huge thick mop standing out on all sides fully eight inches from 

 the head, and sometimes as much as 62 inches in circumference. In 

 order to effect this, the hair was saturated with oil mixed with charcoal 

 and then dyed so that blue, white, brilliant red, black or parti-colored 

 mops were in fashion. The high chiefs had barbers whose sole duty 

 was to care for the hair of their masters, and whose hands were tabu 

 from feeding themselves so that others had to provide them with food 

 and drink. Such a barber might not remove a cigarette from his 

 mouth or hold it in his hands and was thus obliged to twist a twig 

 around it in order to avoid the weed's coming in contact with his hands. 

 Curiously enough, barbers might work in their gardens, but were not 

 permitted to use their hands in eating their own vegetables. Probably 

 no savage race devoted more care to hair and beards than did the 

 Fijians. They are very rarely bald, and indeed this was considered to 



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