Behind the pier rises a little pathway cut in the face of the rock, and leading up to the main street of the capital. Once up the path, we are fairly arrived in Savage Island.
It is not a place known to the globe-trotting tourist, as yet. Much of the Pacific has been “discovered” by the tripper element of recent years, but Niué is still almost inviolate. Once here, if one seeks the true spirit of the South Seas, one still may find it.
Travellers go in scores by every steamer to Samoa, to Fiji, to Honolulu, which are on the beaten track of “round-the-world.” They drive up to Stevenson’s villa, they make excursions to Nuuanu Pali, they see a sugar plantation here, and a kava drinking there, and a native dance, specially composed to suit tourists’ tastes, somewhere else. They stay a week in a fine modern hotel, drink green cocoanuts (and other things that are stronger), take photographs of island girls wearing imported Parisian or Sydney costumes, and think they have seen the life of the islands. Never was there a greater mistake. The sweet South Seas do not so easily yield up their secret and their charm. The spell that for three hundred years has drawn the wandering hearts of the world across the ocean ploughed by the keels of Drake and Hawkins and Cook, of Dampier, Bougainville, and Bligh, will not unfold itself save to him who will pay the price. And the price to-day is the same in kind, though not in degree, as that paid by those old explorers and adventurers--hard travel, scanty food, loneliness, loss of money and time, forgetting the cities and civilisation. To know the heart of the South Seas, all these things must be encountered willingly, with a love of the very hardship they may bring, strong as the seabird’s love of the tossing waters and thunderwaking storm.
The typical British tourist--yes, even he--hears from far off, at times, the mysterious call of the island world, and tells himself that he will listen to it a little nearer, and enjoy the siren song sung to so many long before him. Hence his visits to the great Pacific ports that can be reached by liner; hence, in most cases, his gradually acquired conviction that the islands are, after all, very much like any other place in the tropics--beautiful, interesting, but---- Well, writer fellows always exaggerate: every one knows that.