Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 61

“To think we were wearing bu?alo coats a few weeks ago,” Maggie Stevenson remarked. She had put on her widow’s veil for the priest’s visit and wore shoes over her bare feet, unlike her daughter-in-law, who had stopped making such concessions some time ago.
The family, along with the priest, were all sitting on the deck of the Casco, feeling the soft bulge of each wave as it lifted and lowered the boat before breaking into tinsel-bright strands on the shore.

“It doesn’t seem real,” Fanny said. “The beauty of this place—of these people—is beyond anything I ever conceived. “

“Yet there is a sadness, a kind of defeat I have sensed here and there among them,” Louis said. “Or am I imagining that?”

“No,  you are  not  imagining.  They  have  lost  much,”  the  priest  said.  “To  diseases,  to alcohol and opium—the gifts of civilization. There are many suicides. If you chip away at their  culture,  people  forget  who  they  are.” He  looked at  Louis.  “I  know  what  you are wondering. How dare I speak of such loss if I am part of the cause?”

Louis conceded the point with a nod.

“I believe we have done some good by helping to end cannibalism. As for the rest, I don’t know,” the priest said. “When I came here, the bishop said to me, ‘You are coming into a culture that is more civilized than our own.’ I have pondered that remark a great deal.”

Polite eaters of human ?esh? Suicides in paradise? None of it added up, and Louis had no real  sense  whether  the  reported facts  were  correct.  Yet  for  him,  there  were  strands  of familiarity in the stories.

“When  the  English  defeated  the  Scottish,  they  deposed  clan  chiefs  and  stripped  the people  of  their  kilts  and  bagpipes,”  he  told  Fanny  that  night  before  retiring. “They weighted down their lilting Gaelic tongues with the thumping ballast of official English.”
“How odd to feel sympathy for cannibals that their old ways have been taken away,” Fanny said. “But there it is.”

Louis shook his head.  “I wonder how it is on other islands, where there has been less contact with foreigners. Are their populations declining? Are the people of other islands as deeply depressed as the Marquesans appear to be?”

“If they have been stripped of their identities, I should think so,” Fanny mused. Louis shook his head. “I cannot help but think of the Highlanders.” “Oh, Louis, you can’t compare all the world to Scotland at every turn.” “No, I suppose not. On our island, we much preferred drawing and quartering. Though
the old Scots shared one decorating pleasure with these island peoples: displaying heads on pikes around the old homestead. Otherwise, I admit our savagery is entirely different.”