darkest superstitions of the Fijians. We shall adapt from Lord George Campbell
a more pleasing picture, in which the past mingles with the present, and the old
and the new are not unhappily blended.
The chronicler of the cruise of the “Challenger” was witness of a native dance or
“maki-maki,” given at Kandavu in honour of the English officers. When he
landed the first “set” had already begun, and torches, consisting of bundles of
palm branches tied together, threw a lurid light over the savage scene. On a strip
of grass in front of the huts were gathered the dancers, and close around grouped
picturesquely on the top of great piles of cocoa-nuts, or squatting on the ground,
were the natives of Kandavu and the neighbouring villages, officiating as critics,
but prepared in their turn to take part in the wild revelry.
“Glorious Rembrandt effects, as the torches’ flames leapt and fell in the still
night air, bathing with ruddy glow that strange scene around,—the semi-nude
dusky natives chattering, laughing, glistening eyes and white gleaming teeth, on
the reed-built huts, on the foliage above, and flushing redly up the white trunks
of the cocoa-palms. Round a standing group of tawny-hued boys and girls who
formed the band, some two dozen men, dressed in fantastic manner, their faces
blackened, and skins shiny with cocoa-nut oil, were dancing. Wound round their
waists they wore great rolls of tappa, or white cloth, falling nearly to the knees,
and over these, belts fringed with long narrow streamers of brightly coloured
stuff—red, yellow, and white, surging and rustling with every movement; on
their heads turbans of finely-beaten tappa, transparent and gauzy, piled high in a
peak; gaiters of long black seaweed or grass, strung with white beads; anklets
and armlets of large bone rings, or of beads worked in patterns; tortoiseshell
bracelets and bead necklaces, from which hung in front one great curled boar’s
tusk. Some are dressed better than others, but all in the same wild style. Moving
slowly in a circle round and round the band, whose clapping and rollicking strain
they accompanied by a loud droning kind of chant, at the end of each stave
chiming in with the band with a simultaneous shout, a sudden swaying of the
body, a loud hollow clap of the hands, once or twice repeated, and a heavy
stamp, stamp of the feet; a moment’s halt and silence, broken plaintively by one
of the singers, quickly taken up by the remainder to a clapping, rattling, and
vowely measure, and again the dancers circle slowly round, swinging their arms
and bodies, clapping, shouting, and droning in faultless time together.”
The first dances were dances of peace; pantomimic representations of the chief
pursuits of a Fijian’s life, as, for instance, fishermen hauling in their lines, or the
tillers of the field planting tare and gathering in their crops.