Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/36

26 gation of native Fijian traditions, he had come to the conclusion, shared by Mr. Fison and other authorities, that Fijian mythology was legendary history, that the gods had been men, that the people lacked the imagination to construct an original mythology of their own. But as time elapsed, and the composers of the heroic sagas used the poet's right of license, the story became overlaid with extravagant myth; and in that sense, and the difficulty of fixing a date to the poems, they were of little, if any, historic value.

Two curious qualities they had. Contemporary events were embalmed with extraordinary ease in poems that bore all the marks of antiquity, and, once embalmed, they were remarkably tenacious of life. Thus in one heroic saga Napoleon is represented as having been born of a Tongan father, by an American lady who visited Tonga in a ship. After twenty years or so, Wellington smote the French with great slaughter, and their High Priest, becoming inspired, told them to search for the son of a red father, who would deliver them. A deputation of French chiefs sought this deliverer for many months, and at last found him in America. After an Odyssey of doughty deeds, he led their armies against Wellington, beat him, hunted him from land to land, caught him at last and shut him up in a desert island, where he died.

On the other hand, the traditional sages once composed are extraordinarily tenacious. While he was editing Na Mata, the official native newspaper in Fiji, he invited from the natives contributions of traditional poetry. Among those so collected was one taken down from the lips of a very old woman about the death of a Rewa chief called Koroitamana (circa 1835). He sent this poem to press, and a few days afterwards came across the same poem in Mr. Waterhouse's King and People of Fiji published some thirty years before. Here then was an opportunity of testing the accuracy of tradition. He got a proof from the printing office and compared the two versions, and in a poem of some ninety lines found only two deviations, and these the mere substitution of synonyms.