The High Seat of Abundance

By Charles Brown, Jr.

FN early 1920, a century after L William Ellis, the pioneer missionary to the Society Islands, Tote his testimonial of the Bora [orans, I voyaged from Uturoa, iaiatea, the very core of the Society roup, to Bora Bora. I was the only hite passenger on the small, fore nd-aft rigged, one-masted cutter hich was homeward bound to this ir northwest outlier of the Societies, was sailing there to see whether le inhabitants would place me on high seat and feed me with an jundance of tidbits.

Under a crescent moon, lifting id falling on the high seas, the itter swept headlong through the bite, brawling reef passage. Her 10m well off to starboard, she epped along in full career up the :ep lagoon to the pier at Vaitape. e capital of Bora Bora. At mid ght, her voyage happily done, she Dored to the Island of Happiness e had brought me so far to see.

The Polynesian captain said for 5 to sleep away the night on his tter. I accepted gladly his in ;ation; I was dog-tired, rhe voyage of 28 miles had con med a day and two nights! All 5 one day, the becalmed sea was lite-hot glass. The motorless tter had simmered in the sun. .d, my tongue dry as a parrot’s, gazed longingly from under a )ad-brimmed American army hat Bora Bora, remote and lonely, its [B, heaven-aspiring escarpments i two-fold peak draped with fry cumulus clouds. Not before low sunset did a sailor’s breeze at the tiller. lardly had the captain given invitation, than the broad »uldered man on the jetty spoke “The popaa—white man —has - come to Bora Bora to be eaten mosquitoes. The extra bed at house has a mosquito-net over tepping across the gunwale, the aker gave greeting to me. “Just me Sam, like everybody here uts does,” he said, in the King’s

English. “You’ll come home with me.’”

I liked the cut of the young man’s jib. And, moreover, his gracious offer had on it the hallmark of sincerity. Sam, I’ll sure be de lighted to stay with you.”

Hereupon, the half-caste planter of Vaitape ordered three brawny crewmen to sling my duds upon their shoulders.

SAM’S habitation was one cig agrette smoke from the jetty A cottage of European build, with a red, iron roof sheltering the front verandah, it stood near the

‘On the arrival of strangers, every man endeavoured to obtain one as a friend and carry him off to his own habitation, where he is treated with the greatest kind ness by the inhabitants of the district; they place him on a high seat and feed him with an abundance of the finest food.’— Polynesian Researches.

blue lagoon, at the foot of Sam’s big coconut plantation. The verandah took my fancy; it would be just the place in the delicious coolness of evening to entertain Sam with the stories of the battles I saw in France and Belgium. Yes, I had stories to tell, stranger than fiction!

And the sight of Sam’s dry beach was always to give him and me a Bora Boran thirst. Madame Sam, her French voice tinkling melodi ously like glass bells, would laugh ingly open many a fresh bottle of beer and fill my glass and Sam’s.

On the verandah, he and I were to find the happiness of living.

And here, the first evening after my arrival, I met the villagers. In twos and threes, they straggled along, shaking my hand and greet ing me with the Tahitian word lorana.

“Hare mai tamaa. Come and eat with us,” they gave their time honoured invitations, just like their ancestors had invited Missionary Ellis to eat with them!

Some of the men came only in red and white loin-cloths, others wore a shirt and blue denims. All were barefooted. Numerous were the six-footers, erect, strapping fellows with enormous limbs and biceps that bulged beneath their skins, bronze giants of men, like the giants of olden times.

And true daughters of Mother Earth were the Polynesian women, their skins alive with the golden

glow of velvety fruit Mitpq nf

women, slender, kindly-eyed somt

whose features had been cast irZ'Z Mongolian mould. And tall comelv women with clear, sparkling £ ororwfrHn ey0 K ° f ma snificent body ?h2 P 25 t - on f’ beanng themselves with the majesty of queens. The older women wore the universal dark I™™ T Mother Hubbard fiv^JlT Whlle the y° un S ones cap tivated my eye with their gav showy print dresses. s y ’ wwl 6r woul( i 1 for Set the woman whose ageing face was wrinkled like a stained-glass window. Giving me !?- dinner invitation, she said When you come to eat, I’ll show at U whfch Sr i^ y • li 1 ? le - tree a fountain aL fulfilled -> WISheS Uttered by men But what nonsense it would have been for me to make known my wishes at her bubbling spring when an my wishes were coming true right at my open-hearted hosts’ and hostess. I could not have wished a finer table than theirs.

Madame Sam’s cuisine would have made the French chef at the Diadem Hotel on Tahiti green with envy. And each precious red drop of Sam’s gurgling wine contained the exact amount of iron required for my war-shrivelled body.

Sam and Madame Sam certainly placed me on the high seat of abundance.

HOW the good days stretched! I twisted the clock and the calendar to serve my purposes.

But the abundance did not diminish.

There was no escaping the abund ance. I abandoned myself to the urge of my stomach, munching and swallowing, possessed of a devil of hunger. The more I ate, the more Sam and Madame Sam smiled their joy to see me eat. These were moments of living, when I came m touch with the hospitable couple on a high level of understanding.

“Everybody is very jolly at Bora Bora,” I was told on Tahiti and Raiatea.

Two nights after my arrival, I went to see what jollification the youths and maidens of Vaitape were making on the mahora —village green. Sam, clean tuckered out from cutting copra, took a bath and went to bed early.

I sauntered past houses of bam boo thatched with shaggy pan danus-leaves, set among giant banana-plants, coconut-palms, and breadfruit-trees crystalled all over with moonlight. In one house, oval shaped and fifty or sixty feet in length, the village elders were hold ing their weekly-prayer-meeting. I thought the himene (hymn) they were singing exceptionally beautiful, with the men mingling their deep basses with the altos and light sopranos of the women, until the combination of sound was like that

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an organ. The elders called for e to come in and sing.

“I can’t sing,” I begged off. “I ive a bullfrog in my throat.”

On the greensward, by the for itten graves beneath the lovely by-red flamboyant tree, I found e amorous youths and sparkling ed maidens dancing the hivinau, round dance.

On their heads were wreaths of psterious phosphorescent flowers at pulsed and dimmed and glowed the moonlight: from their necks ngled long gold and silver ains of jasmine and frangipani >ssoms. Three striplings seated the grass were furiously blowing mboo nose-flutes, playing the most passioned music they knew. the dancers tripped round and md in a wide circle, over the lonlit crimson carpet of flam pant flowers, their voices were )ming like conch shells, eerie and itastic to hear. That was a ice!

Hare mai e ori, Popaa. Come and ice, White Man,” called the icers, opening wide their hearts me. )ancing was what exactly re ;ed me most! I leaped into the acious ring. And found myself idwiched between a beauteous nsel and a hulking pug-nosed

wench chewing mape-nuts with her front teeth! I put my hands on the soft nude shoulders of the floweret, and felt the wench clamp her spread-fingered hands over my shoulders.

“Hei! Hei! Hei!” shouted the joyous circle. Round and round the humble headstones we danced in passionate abandon, our hips and rumps wiggling and quivering, our abdomens shaking and tossing to the sounds of wild, passionate flutes.

We danced with an unrestraint that was boundlessly gustful and imag inative.

Presently they commenced sing ing a passionate-throated heathen bridal song, a mighty fortissimo con passione, wedding themselves to hilarity. I opened wide my mouth and lo! The bullfrog leaped out of my throat. I sang like a mocking bird! How happy was I—no one can conceive how happy!

“Waitai! Very good!” The high spirited wench behind be laughed raucously, and hit me a solid whack between the shoulder blades.

“Maitai!” I passed the word on to the little island princess who was mischievously tossing her curly red gold hair in my face, smacking her so hard that she cried, “Aue!”, and. clasping her arms, bent double with laughter.

“Maitai! Maitai! Maitai!” Every body was playing maitai. The

tropic night resounded with whacks, aues!, and shrieks of laughter.

Finally, we stopped to recover ourselves. Little Flower, my partner, took from her hair a white waxlike tiare Tahiti flower and put it in front of my left ear. The chief agent of flirtation, the love flower, worn before that ear, signified that I had a vahine —a woman, Little Flower!

“The hivinau is our oldest dance,” she said in her school-learned French, flashing a lyrical smile.

“They danced it in the heathen time. And my great-grandmother— she of Vaitape who was called Many Skies —danced it with the red headed hunter of whales the night he got her with child.”

Thus, without asking, I learned how Little Flower came by the reddish-gold hair streaming in lovely tresses over her neck and shoulders. And why her satiny skin was a light honey-varnished hue, and her sensual mouth was a little red jade cup brimful of kisses. And why, when she looked at me, as she did every second, the liquid depths of her eyes were luminous with the fragments of sunsets and the shine of stars. She was indeed lovely—young and ripe as a mango!

And though the word “sex-appeal” had not yet been coined, Little Flower could have written text books on “sex-appeal.” From my throat came a softly breathed

“Aue" —an exclamation of wonder, of surprise that such a creature could be. I made gallant advances to the sensuous little beauty.

After a quarter of an hour, at least, had passed, the youths and maidens, having recovered them selves, started wandering off in pairs. I took Little Flower by the hand and strolled with sweet

pastoral thoughts down to the silv beach to eat mape-nuts and talk cabbages and kings.

ONE magnificent, golden nigl Sam and I visited his go( friend Wong Foo, whose sto and bakeshop faced the villa; green. The buyer, curer, and e: porter of most of the islam

anilla, the yellow merchant-baker r as a rugged Individualist. Although am did not say what his visit was bout, I suspected it concerned his pening vanilla.

When we entered the store-shanty, fang Foo, perched up on the mnter, was singing in a high nasal ?ang, “Tsi-tsi-tsi-glug-glug-tsi!”, scompanying himself on a one ring fiddle.

The wizened old Chinaman, clad ily in blue denims, was profuse ith his bows and loranas. He ated us at the big social table ;ar the brass coffee urn and rows white bowls. Great was my sur ise when he set before us three inking glasses and a large bottle i the label of which snarled a linese tiger. When Wong brought e stack of little, thin-as-cardboard ava pies, I looked questioningly Sam. But his mind was pre mpied. ‘This ‘Tiger Teeth Gin’ arrived sterday,” Wong informed Sam in stardised Tahitian. “It’s bite is •ocious.” He filled the glasses.

Afang toasted me, with Sam in preting. “May you have all men ■ friends to place you on the ;h seat of abundance.” fa which I responded that Wong’s mtiful sentiment would forever ;upy a niche in my memory. I »posed for him a long and healthy and “lots of pretty girls to s”! •hortly, Sam and Wong put their ids together and started com ning in tense whispers. The y time they looked at me was m Wong unleashed a second, bite “Tiger Teeth.” Much was there their actions that puzzled my ildered brain. ot until I had eaten my sixth did Sam deign to regard me. relief was considerable when spoke. “I know how bored stiff are by what you don’t under let. When you’re bored stiff, 'e’s nothing like stretching your . I’ll meet you at the candlenut — where you and Little Flower t last night’s rendezvous that ve been so secretive about all otwithstanding Sam’s little dig ne, I could have somersaulted i delight. I thanked Wong for pies and two bites of “Tiger th,” and wished him pleasant ims; then, I hurried out into the iant night. A soft breeze was fing down from the heights, m with the fragrance of jasmine frangipani; it was like a kiss sr the starlight. The reef was >ing the deep undertones of the TROLLED along the road. In the bam b o o-walled, palm thatched houses beneath the nut- and breadfruit-trees shin like frosted glass and silver, natives were singing fish songs canoe songs with swinging uses, clapping their hands

rhythmically. “Come and sing with us. White Man,” they called. Two sparklmg-eyed, flower-adorned girls walking hand in hand, made as pretty a picture as I could wish to see.

Suddenly, I felt drowsy. Why walk to the candlenut-tree when Little Flower was not there? I would wait where I was for Sam?

At the right of me, a foot back from the road, in a luxuriant garden, was the imposing of the vanilla king of Bora Bora The spacious verandah was full of wicker chairs and tables, and, on each side of the double doorway in which scented breezes were stir ring the white lace curtains, burned a ghost-lamp. Below the stairs was

a lnc u , wished* f i a r Wn ' L Could not have no nw* r „ J te ? mattress - in time ’ 1 was dozin £ on it. nd dut a few minutes had passed when, between half-shuttered lids. f th u e 9 ld ci nnamon-brown P^ to g at bendmg solicitously over Sinr.cS gen -V, y raised my head and slipped a pillow beneath it; then St an oversized lamp at the edge of the verandah. As long as the^ieht focused on me, he Sew for a ow tainty, no long-toothed ghost wonid molest the White Man!

Txrvio* ven frable patriarch of laulT* h £ d d ? n u e was not

InywheVrfiTnmy"?™^^!

rorld. Not if I lived as long as he ’horn the missionaries say lived ine hundred sixty and nine years ould I forget the fineness of con deration and spontaneous out- During of heart of that brown man I Bora Bora for the white man om over the seas.

JIHAKE a leg!” shouted Sam, J poking my ribs with his toe.

“‘You’d lie here till coconut ees dropped pineapples, if I’d let iu. Rise and shine!”

I woke with a start. The moon id fallen to midnight. Sam was rapping the pillow in the quilt to turn to the owner.

“You and Wong got your heads art at last?” I arose.

“Yes; and our talk wasn’t about 7 vanilla, as I let you think.” Sam imaced like a wooden idol; then, ing a fellow who never could ep anything to himself long, he id, “Wong’s agreed to furnish ir muscovy ducks, three suckling js, six of his fattest coconut-fed >sters, nine kilos of rice, fifty ava pies, and one five-gallon nijohn of red wine. And he’ll What’s all that chow for, Sam?” vas damn curious. ‘That’s for the farewell dinner idame Sam and I will give you ; night before you kiss the soil Bora Bora good-bye, next week, d Wong’ll be at the dinner. He’ll ng his fiddle and sing the song

that begins, ‘Tsing, Tsang, Tsungr And he’s also going to bring six cartons of cigarettes and a dozen bottles of ‘Tiger Teeth.’ ”

“And I’m inviting Little Flower ”

I said, putting her name down on the guest-list. “She likes Wone’s pie-crust.’