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 Governments 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 natives 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[1]
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 clothing. 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 neighbors. 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
- ↑ "James Chalmers, His Autobiography and Letters," pp. 255-256, by Richard Lovett, London, 1902.
