Fijian national ceremonies took place in the afternoon, the principal being the solemn presentation by the chiefs and headmen of "tahua" (the whale's tooth) in token of fealty. This was celebrated, immediately after heavy rain, on a meadow crowded with aborigines. The actors were half a hundred well-fed, semi-naked Fijians, clad in nothing but sooty face-paint, white cloth bustles, and loin-robes of green, pink, and white fibre-ribbons. The general effect produced was that of an animated contingent of frilled ham-bones that waved, leapt, swayed and chanted, sometimes upright, sometimes squatting upon the sodden turf, a scene of almost disconcerting gaiety. The whale teeth were handed to the Prince by a white-robed hereditary courtier, and were the size and shape of yellow cucumbers, strung together with coloured thread. The acceptance produced a chorus of deep resonant grunts of "Daweha"--"It is taken." There followed the no less solemn ceremony of preparing and drinking the "Kava," the produce of the Yaqona root, to cement the bonds of friendship. The emptying of the last coco-nut cup of this sharp-flavoured, cloudy liquid was greeted with loud cries of "Mada"--"It is dry."
The yaqona root, from a twig or two of which the kava drink was brewed, might have been an enormous ash-tree stool, with partly-grown ground-shoots, uprooted from an English copse. The stripping of the bark, the pounding it with stones, the macerating it with water in a big carved wooden bowl, and its presentation to the Prince and other guests in coco-nut shells, was performed with solemn chanting. The ceremony included the stretching of a coco-nut fibre string, strung at intervals of a few feet with cowrie-shells, in token of Royal authority, between the Prince's chair and the men preparing the kava. To cross this string, in days gone by, while the proceedings were in progress, would have involved nothing less than to be clubbed to death. Those were doubtless days when such functions were less chronicled and more respected.
Timed clapping, which sounded like the thuds of successive buckets of water thrown from an upper window upon the pavement, completed the first part of the performance. A "meke"--dance--by three hundred gorgeously caparisoned Fijian warriors, wielding each an ancient battle-axe, which followed, was a marvel of well-timed movement. The muddy ground shook as the men stamped in unison, their bodies swaying in perfect rhythm as they acted the spirited paddling of canoes, the hauling at ropes, the pointing at the enemy, the leaping from the boat to the attack, and, after the fight was over, the sad breaking of the waves upon the shore. Their deep "Dua-ho," or grunt of welcome to the Prince, might have been the roll of many drums.
