122 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
'[Feb. 14, 1903. 
- — « — 
Forest Frills and Furbelows. 
That the women of Vaiala were gravely agitated was 
apparent on the most cursory examination of the 
events that were taking place in staid and orderly 
succession on the town green or malae. The oppor- 
tunity to give more than a cursory examination was 
afforded by the fact that the Consular premises occu- 
pied almost the whole sea-front of the Vaiala green, 
and that all public ceremonies took place as it were 
in our own backyard, or, at least, no further away 
than the great house of the town, which faced the 
Consulate from the inshore end of the green. Every- 
thing in Samoa is done in the plain sight of all, you can 
stretch one glance through half the houses of a town 
if they chance to be in line and see all that is going on 
under every roof ; no house has walls, therefore there 
can be no hiding places. Notwithstanding all this 
openness, it is not to be supposed for a moment that 
Samoa is a plain and straightforward proposition. 
Nothing of the kind, it wouldn't be Samoa if it were 
straight. It is certainly a place where the more you 
see the less you believe. That's a part of the differ- 
ence. 
Day after day the whole of Vaiala had been spread 
out in my sight in. the comprehensive view from my 
verandah, and my strolls in and out of the houses 
should have hid nothing from me. Yet, here was evi- 
dence that a great matter had been under the most 
minute discussion, and I had never had the slightest 
inkling of its existence. It may not be very flattering 
to one's powers of discernment, but it is true none 
the less. The safest theory to go on is that the Sa- 
moan is going to permit the average white person to 
know so much about Samoa as the Samoan deems ad- 
visable. Beyond that modicum the superior white per- 
son is going to obtain a very large amount of infor- 
mation about Samoa, but it is going to be principally 
all wrong. That's why the globe-trotters in their six 
hours on the beach come away with such remarkable 
impressions of Samoa, they obtain them from the old 
residents and they from the wily Samoans. They are all 
in the same story, these simple children of nature, 
they hang together most consistently in their intent 
to deceive, about the only thing in which Samoans 
can agree or be consistent. I used to hope to be able 
to sift the facts out through the young children who 
loved me dearly for a fist full of sugar or a motto 
candy. But it was no use. Apikale, aged four, a 
chunky maiden with a head like a billiard ball and an 
air of the utmost gravity, was already fully equipped 
with the art to keep from my knowledge the things she 
knew. 
The great house of Vaiala was filled with an orderly 
crowd of the housewives of the town and a woman's 
parliament was under full headway in that dignity of 
order and ceremony without which the Samoan can do 
nothing. Not a man was in sight, and it was only by 
an inference based on experience that it was possible 
to interpret the general smack of smoke and cookery 
that floated along the air from the oven yards in the 
back of the village and to divine therefrom that the 
men were cooking a feast while the women debated. 
Nor was this the only source of food. While the 
Vaiala ovens were yet smoking, a procession came 
along the beach with noise of much singing, and with 
the flash of gay clothes and freshly oiled skins. A 
young chief sojourning in a town not far distant was 
sending in the hands of his young men a slight token 
of his esteem to the women of Vaiala. The procession 
advanced upon the green, a sufficiency of floor mats 
were brought out from the nearest house and the 
young men sat in rows in the shade of the cocoanuts, 
while their leader stood almost at the edge of the sea 
and shouted his compliments along the green and to 
the women in the house beyond. Then the burden of 
food was presented with the most precise depreciation 
of each article and the most consistent belittling of the 
numbers. But the women had their spokeswoman, 
Tofi, the chief governess of the village maid, and in 
her speech of reply every taro was counted for two, 
every spindling chicken was a full grown hen, and 
the proper degree of exaggeration was practiced. 
Then the visiting young men drifted back into the rear 
of the town where, I have no doubt, they sat about 
the oven yards with the men of Vaiala and told stories 
and puffed at banana husk cigarettes until it was time 
to open the pits and take out the cooked food for the 
feast. 
Tonga sat on the verandah with me and watched 
the procedure with no show of interest, at any rate 
she volunteered no word of explanation of what was 
taking place, and I did not ask her, for it was plain 
that for some reason or other she was in one of her 
most aggressively civilized moods when all things Sa- 
moan were measured up alongside her civilization on 
the Midway in Barnum's circus, and quite naturally 
.suffered by the comparison. When that mood was on 
her she was about as tractable as a wet hen, and it 
was never safe to stir her up. She sat sewing with her 
back against one of the outer verandah posts, and 
ostentatiously turned upon the green and the great 
house and all the ceremonies. I might have gone by 
myself to the great house and have been sure of a 
courteous welcome, but I feared to go without Tonga 
lest I make a break in some one of those niceties of 
island etiquette in which the Samoan never makes 
allowance for the unfamiliarity of the white person 
and never forgets to recall as an insult what was no 
more than a blunder. 
But Tonga was soon forced out of her civilized 
mood, and I myself was advised of the purpose of the 
meeting, and to a certain extent included therein, the 
inclusion being based on the geographical position of 
my verandah, which put me in the most public spot of 
the' Vaiala town green, but at the same time it was due 
in a far greater degree to an expectation of favors to 
come in the shape of corned beef and hard tack and 
5UCh Other dainties. Tanoa emerged froTO bis retire- 
ment in the cook house, passed us on the verandah 
with his unfailing reverence of a crouching posture 
and the word "tulou," went into the office and began 
to pitch out floor mats in a stream. When he had col- 
lected as many as he thought necessary, he made of 
them a platform at some little distance from us, but 
on the same'shady side of the verandah. This done he 
returned to the office, only to reappear with the rod 
and fly-flapper of ofiice, and then proclaimed in his 
best manner that the ladies Salatemu and Fa'afili would 
wait upon me to declare the result of the meeting. 
From the fact that Tanoa did all this without any 
prompting I knew that it must be all right. He was 
born to the tulafale rank and had been trained in the 
intricacies of making speeches, and by nature he was 
so literal tha't there was not even a spark of genius 
sufficient to lead him into a mistake. When Tanoa 
had made his announcement he passed the rod and 
the fly-flapper over to Tonga and dropped out of the 
incident, for it was clearly an affair of women. With 
no very good grace she took the emblems of oflice and 
prepared to play her part. 
In front of the great house Tofi stood forth with . 
rod and the inevitable fly-flapper and proclaimed the 
tabu of silence on the town because Salatemu and 
Fa'afili were about to set forth on their call on me. 
All this is most formal, but no one can begin to under- 
stand Samoa until he recognizes how completely en- 
wrapped in formal etiquette and ceremony is every 
slightest detail of life. 
Salatemu was an old friend, wife of the chief of 
Vaiala, Le Patu, just at that time; therefore Talolo's 
mother of the current series. Fa'afili was a new- 
comer from somewhere up the coast. It turned out 
that she also was one of Talolo's mothers, and that 
was sufficient to establish her place in Vaiala. This 
question of who was Talolo's mother always proved 
too much for me. Here was Salatemu, who was Patu's 
wife and Talolo's mother. He was Fa'afili, who was 
Talolo's mother, yet never had been Patu's wife. There 
were others who had been Patu's wives without being 
Talolo's mother. Talolo himself would never formu- 
late a general theory, but he was able to certify of 
any given woman whether she had yet been his 
mother. 
All such considerations were dismissed by the ar- 
rival of the reporting party. Tofi proclaimed the full 
names and titles of the two whom she escorted and 
saw them seated on the pile of mats. It was now 
Tonga's turn to do a tulafale stunt, and she made 
her little speech of welcome, in which she took occa- 
sion to say how the coming of the party was like the 
sun shining after a rain and a few such spontaneous 
tributes. Then Tofi took up the line of talk. She al- 
lowed that they were most disgracefully poor, and 
that there was almost a famine in Vaiala just then, 
but they had struggled to get together just a few 
things to eat, which they were now fetching over to 
me, not that they supposed that I would touch such 
stuff, but I could feed it to any no-account person who 
might chance that way. This served to introduce the 
section of underdone pork that I was supposed to be 
entitled to enjoy together with taro and chickens, and 
a by no means shabby supply of food. Tonga in turn 
replied with a supply of ration beef and salmon, and 
the preliminaries of this social call were thus disposed 
of. 
When it was possible to get right down to the mat- 
ter it was made to appear that Vaiala had decided to 
marry its Tama'ita'i Samalaulu to a young chief from 
Manu'a, the impelling circumstance in the romance be- 
ing that the chief in question had offered to make 
presents of fine mats and other gear on such a scale 
of insular magnificence that no prudent town but would 
snap at such a match. In this case it happened that 
Samalaulu skipped out of town before the date set 
for the marriage, eloped with herself, in fact, and 
Vaiala had to hustle to find another Samalaulu in time 
for the wedding. The groom seemed perfectly satis- 
fied with the substitution, and courted one girl and 
married the other without a word of complaint. But 
all this is long ahead of this stage of the story. The 
present meeting had been called to figure on what was 
to be done to make the wedding a success. When it 
came to a show of fine mats Vaiala was able to make 
as good an appearance as any community, owing to its 
comparative immunity from the ravages of war. There 
were pigs enough to provide a slight collation to those 
who would come to the wedding, and there would be 
no difficulty about side dishes so long as the bush was 
full of taro and breadfruit, and the sea swarmed with 
fish, to be had for the mere scooping up. 
After all the preamble Fa'afili began to get around 
to the real object of the call. "Therefore," she con- 
tinued, and she was a remarkably good speaker, too, 
among a race born to oratory, "the conclusion of the 
fono is that at the wedding there shall be for all only 
the best attire and paths of new tapa cloth to walk 
upon. But Vailala and the whole Vaimaunga is very 
poor, we are as the wind and as nothing at all, and 
thus we come to thee in our deep distress because thou 
art very loving to us. The meeting of the women has 
reasoned upon all our needs, and the conclusion of the 
meeting is that to make us all new dresses we must 
borrow thy hatchet." 
To reflect that I had sometimes seen clothes that 
looked that way was not a sufficient elucidation of the 
request of the women's parliament of Vaiala that they 
might borrow my hatchet to help them to make new 
clothes. For explanation, an appeal had to be made 
to Tonga. 
"These two women," she said, with a fine disregard 
of logical sequence, "these two women my 'lashe,' be- 
long same family and me, therefore I think so they 
fool women and the unwise. Just like the heathen they 
don't make 'faloka' on the sewing machine for the 
wedding of Samalaulu. But they borrow hatchet and 
they borrow ax, and they take a big knife here and 
thev take a little knife there, only the headchopping 
knife they don't take, I think so they fraid the 'mana,' 
that's Samoan thing same like 'hoodoo' in America, 
and then they go into the bush and they chop down 
trees to make siapo for clothe them with it. But 
wherefore are they not Ukg the heathen, th^se two 
women, for they never went to Chicago and they 
never went to the circus?" 
While it was true that Vaiala did not steal, partly 
owing to the strict tabu whereby my premises were 
made "sa," yet Vaiala was not inclined to be prompt 
in returning a borrowed article. It was in a measure 
due to this circumstance that I would lend no article 
unless I myself went with it, an additional advantage 
being that in this way I was able to find my way nat- 
urally into a large amount of the domestic economy of 
my neighbors, which would otherwise have escaped me. 
Greatly to Tonga's distress I agreed to the proposal of 
the women that my hatchet be borrowed on the condi- 
tion that I be borrowed with it. Tonga, I fully be- 
lieve, thought that I was on the brink of a plunge 
into barbarism despite my unlimited opportunities to 
acquire civilization through Barnum's circus, where, in 
fact, she had first met me. I mean, of course, that she 
was a part of the show and that I was one of the 
great public. 
It was now my turn to make a procession to the 
great house of Vaiala under the escort of my visitors 
and with Tonga to make my speeches. While this was 
essentially a feminine affair, I found it impossible to 
restrict my procession. From some lurking place 
Talolo was found at the gate of the compound pre- 
pared to exercise his prerogative of carrying my para- 
sol. Both his mothers tried to shoo him off, but he 
knew what his rights were and nothing could detach 
him from his position. Tanoa, also, who always did 
just what was right, Tanoa attached himself to the 
hatchet. He gave me a collection of resounding words 
for hatchet, all of such exalted rank that there were 
only two or three in all Samoa who were entitled to 
use them with me, for in Samoa there is rank and 
precedence even in the vocabulary. On matters of such 
grave importance my faithful, stupid, devoted Tanoa 
simply would not permit me to break through the 
proprieties of etiquette. In some way perfectly plain 
to himself and acknowledged by Salatemu and Fa'afili 
my hatchet had a rank so high that it called for one 
of at least tulafale rank to bear it. And it wasn't much 
of a chopper at that. 
With these additions to my company, we crossed the 
green and took our places in the meeting. Tanoa and 
Talolo sat in the shade of the spreading mango outside 
with their backs up against the tombstone of some 
long departed chief, Talolo clinging fast to my parasol, 
Tanoa industriously rubbing the hatchet on the con- 
crete monument of the chief in a laudable effort to re- 
move some of the marks of its use in the cook-house. 
There is one excellent trait about the Samoans. 
They may be lazy in the extreme, but they are not 
dilatory. In this particular instance they had post- 
poned holding' this meeting until almost the last mo- 
ment, but when they had at last settled what they were 
going to do they were going to set about it at once. 
As soon as I had told them that I would accompany 
their party with the hatchet, it was with difficulty that 
I secured a postponement long enough to change into 
my bush clothes, for all assured me that this pcrfornv 
ance would be no mere stroll along the beach. The 
Samoan jungle had by this time no terrors for me, 
and there was nothing to deter me from plunging 
once more into its recesses to see women chop down 
dresses and go shopping with a hatchet. 
There is only one need of the South Sea islander, 
which it is beyond the scope of the cocoanut to sup- 
pl}^ It will feed him, it will house him, it will carry 
him over the sea, it produces nothing that goes to 
waste in the simple economy of those who dwell be- 
neath its clattering feathers, but it affords nothing 
out of which one may make comfortable or pleasing 
clothing. This need is supplied by several trees which 
have a layer of bast between the bark and heart wood 
of their trunks. Of such there are two in particular, 
the fau, or hibiscus, and the tutunga, or Broussonetia 
papyrifera. In Samoa, where both trees abound, the 
hibiscus is used only for the making of string, and the 
tutunga is distinctively the cloth tree. 
We had a swampy way to go from the moment we 
left the town and the beach behind us. At the eastern 
end of Apia the coastal plain, on which are the houses 
of Samoans and foreigners, is undoubtedly formed by 
the rivers, which there come down to the sea, and it 
is so imperfectly formed that everywhere back from 
the immediate beach is swamp and backwater, with 
every here and there a sluice or creek. But when this 
is once passed and one gets on the slope of the hills, 
the going is better because dryer. It is on the first 
slopes of the hills that the tutunga finds its best 
growth. 
Under conditions where the Broussonetia finds good 
soil and an abundance of light and air with plenty of 
room, the tree grows tall and branches over an ex- 
tended space. But those are ideal conditions which 
never can exist in the theater of the fierce vegetable 
duels in the island forests. Every tree must battle for 
light and air, room is something that none has, the 
lianas tie and choke all weak growth, and that which 
comes out of the contest Avith the right to live is some- 
thing far different from what it was in the germ within 
the seed. But the islanders have been quick to observe 
that in the case of the Broussonetia the worse off it 
was as a tree the better it was for their uses. That 
is to say, while the tree growing to its full extent will 
give them a bark that can be converted into so-called 
cloth, still just in proportion as the tree is forced to 
grow spindling so much the better is the bark. It re- 
sults, then, that the islanders make it a practice to cut 
down all the large Broussonetias they can discover in 
the bush in order to force a second growth of saplings. 
There is no risk of failure in such a crop. The active 
roots will start new shoots from every foot that was 
shaded by the parent tree, and all the art of the for- 
ester is to thin out the saplings as they grow in order 
to establish a thicket of hardy poles. 
In an imperfect sense such a cluster of second growth 
tutunga may be classed as a plantation, but the way 
to all those which we visited was that of the roughest 
kind of bush work. The women knew where their 
trees were and they knew how to get there, but not 
they nor anybody could make the way easy. There 
was no danger of being lost, for few Samoans can go 
