What do you want to give? Oh, well, if a woman brings you in a dinner or two, give her a trade silk handkerchief, one of those shilling ones, some day. Or if they bring you baskets of fruit, give them a couple of sticks of tobacco. They’ll take payment for fruit here, in that way, at any time. You’ll need to give some things when you’re going away, to the people you’ve seen most of--a few yards of cotton, or something of that kind. White people are expected to give presents, all over the island--it needn’t be dear things, but it ought to be something.
If the lords and folk who have been round the Pacific in their yachts only heard what the natives say of them, because they didn’t know that, they’d take care to bring a case or two of cheap stuff for presents next time. ‘Not chief-like,’ is what the natives say--and I ask you yourself, it isn’t ‘chief-like,’ is it, to take all you can get, and give not a stick of niggerhead or an inch of ribbon in return?
I’d think they’d be too proud--but then, I’m not a tourist trotting round the globe, I’m only a man who works for his living.
“As for yourself, you take my advice, and say right out you don’t want the dinners, when they bring them. Yes, it’ll offend them, but you must either do that, or pay for stuff you don’t want three days out of seven, or six days, more likely, if they think you’re liberal-minded. You’ll get no end of presents when you’re going away, pretty things enough, and those will have to be paid for in presents, too. Better make it as cheap as you can, meantime.
“But those people who go travelling like princes, and load their cabins up with spears and clubs and tappa-cloths and shells the natives have given them everywhere they went--and not a farthing, or a farthing’s worth, do they let it cost them from end to end--I tell you, they’re a disgrace to England,” concluded my informant hotly.
“I am quite sure it is simply because they do not know--how should they?” I asked, trying to defend the absent globe-trotters.
“Decent feeling ought to teach them!” declared the critic of manners, who was evidently not to be pacified.
I had my dinner to cook, so I went away, and left him still revolving the iniquities of travelling milords in his memory. But I did not forget the conversation, for it seemed to me that the facts about this matter of present-giving and taking ought to be known as widely as possible. In nearly two years of island travel that followed after those days, I had full opportunity of proving the truth of the statements made by my Niué acquaintance, and every experience only served to confirm them.