# Myths and Legends of Our New Possessions and Protectorate/Introduction

Layout 2
Introduction
OUR new territories have many legends, for among unbookish people tradition takes the place of history, and myth of knowledge. Yet Spain, by rooting out everything that disagreed with her religion, has obliterated much of the aboriginal lore of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. It was hardly to be expected that their myths should survive exterminated races. A contrast to the recent Spanish possessions is offered by Hawaii, a little kingdom in which the preservation of hero tales and symbolic narratives has been an honorable employment for a class not unlike that of the ancient bards of European countries, and of our new subjects—our brothers, let us rather say—the Hawaiians are the only ones who have formulated these ancient stories. The book ascribed to King Kalakaua is especially rich in the folk-lore of the islands.
When one begins to collate legends a sure surprise awaits him at an early stage in his researches. It is the discovery of beliefs that are strikingly similar, one to another, in spite of the seeming dissociation of the tribes among whom they are found. We place the ark on Ararat, but there are ​Ararats in the Sierras, in Alaska, in Hawaii, in the Philippines. It sets us a-thinking when we find Noah in a Hawaiian myth, and there called Nuu; when we learn of the white god of Mexico who is to return and free his people, for which reason houses in the southwest are still built with doors opening toward the sunrise, that the faithful may see him early when he advances out of the East, to which he went so long ago. We have forgotten all we never knew about the people who first recounted the deluge legend, but everywhere we hear, among primitive tribes, of floods that covered the globe, of a chosen one who survived the cataclysm and repeopled the earth, restoring to it, also, the serpents, birds, and quadrupeds that he had saved from the waters. How much more dramatic and portentous are these records than the possible beginning of the story in some local freshet!
Eden is in both hemispheres. Sodom has been destroyed on both continents. Helen is not alone of Troy, but of Molokai and California. Coming to a later time, we find our dear old Rip Van Winkle to be only the phantom of an earlier personage, The man who fell asleep among the hills and awoke to find himself and the world grown old is at home in Germany and the Orient and on our Western plains, quite as well as in the mountains of our Hudson; yet we refuse to yield his place to any prototype, and insist that Rip shall inhabit our Catskills.
Primitive people are like the Greeks in their faith ​in nature spirits. For the red man, or the yellow man, the dryad haunts the wood as surely as she haunted the groves of Tempé; for him the skies roar the wrath of gods, as they did when Jove hurled his bolts and Vulcan beat with his hammer, or as Thor, the Thunderer, wrought in a later theogony; for him the voice of the stream at the fall of night tells secrets of the past and speaks hope for the future, as it did when the voice came from the lips of a nymph in Hellas; for him sirens sing in the sea and Undine smiles from the mist of the cascade; for him the sun is still Apollo, the swift, the beautiful, the life-supporting, the life-taking; for him the moon still walks the night, watching, defending, loving. In brief, the difference between the Sioux, or the Tagalog, and the Greek is one of external civilization. In both we find the same tendency to soften facts into symbols, to personate and typify. The natural language of the savage is poetry. The thought of a people that aspires to see beyond the shell of things is poetic. Let us refrain from destroying or deriding ideals that are better than nine in ten of our commonplaces. It cannot hurt us to live in a fairy age a little longer,—to keep away from the screech of trains, the jar of factories, the bawling of hucksters, the agonizings of mendacious journals, for a few still precious years. It is better worth our while to learn how the wolves drew Passaconaway on his throne of furs across the frozen wastes, how from the summit of Mount Washington his sledge arose flaming ​up to heaven, shining, star-like, till it vanished in the deeps, than to laboriously inform ourselves concerning the House vote on a tariff amendment or the dates on which the Prussians and Austrians fell afoul of one another in a war that never concerned us. It is as fine, as ethical, as the translation of Moses.
Are these likenesses in legend due to a paucity of plots and combinations, such as limit the makers of plays and novels to a dozen or fifteen outlines? It may be. Yet, even in detail, some of these stories are oddly alike. Indeed, there are certain tales from which there is no escape. Wherever you go you find a bottomless pond, a haunted house, a lovers' leap. Probably there are a hundred of these leaps in this one country of ours, though of one of them the only story is that of a man who tumbled over and lost his jack-knife. Until we know what sort of vine it was on which Jack the Giant Killer climbed to the skies, and what gave the cerulean tint to Bluebeard's whiskers, we shall ask in vain why lovers should take so difficult a leave of us as was required in scaling these crags, using teeth and nails in the ascent, usually with the family of the adored one clambering after and trying to dissuade them, this as a preliminary. One would think it would be easy for the leaper to let go before he reached the top, and save work, even if he had no consideration for his elders who are toiling and perspiring behind him. But no: he always keeps on to the summit, or she docs, or both do, and sing a death-song or make a ​few remarks respecting the brevity of life and the hardness of parents; then, just as the stern father calls from below that he will not oppose their union any longer if he, or she, or they will return and be forgiven, or spanked, they step over the brink and alight on his face, to his great annoyance. There are, however, too many tales of lovers' leaps that have the sound and meaning of truth to be disregarded. At least once in this year of grace 1899 we have the enactment of their tragedy. One ridicules only such as are invented by hotel proprietors to fit some cliff near their hostelry, or by wandering penmen who seek to heighten the interest of a tale or history that is otherwise bare of it. To thousands the mere sight of a precipice hints at the fearfulness of a fall from its brink, and out of the stimulus which the fancy thus receives the tale of the lover's leap may be evolved.
Another incident has come to notice in several parts of the world. It is the adventure in a cave that has its entrance under water. This cave is a hiding-place for lovers, or a place of concealment for captured or runaway maidens, or a resort of conspirators who are keeping out of sight of the authorities. Caves of this kind appear in the legends of many lands, and in this volume one such legend relates to Porto Rico, another to Hayti, and two to Hawaii. Except in the symbolic tale of "The Lady of the Twilight," they sound like stories that commemorate events, rather than disguises for natural phenomena, ​and the events are possible. Let us believe they are, at any rate, if thereby we enrich imagination with a moment of romance; and let us be thankful to the barbarian that he has not reduced his life to the gray, unsoftened state of the oracle who, from his throne on the cracker-barrel in the corner grocery, proclaims against the wickedness of plays and novels because they are not true. As if moral truth and truth of character were not of more account than truth of fact! Religion, which has been a force for the moral lift of the race, is in all nations a traditionary, not a historical or scientific, inheritance, and so with half our laws and all our customs. Why all this to-do to prove that Pocahontas did not save John Smith? that William Tell never existed? He did exist, in the spirit of the Swiss; he exists to-day in every land of woods and mountains; and, blessings on him! he always will exist, though conventions of spectacled doubters pass resolutions advising him that he mustn't. Indeed, though we have seen interesting denials of William Tell, most of us as willingly believe in him at this moment as ever we did in our lives. The race clings to its legends. fondly. It will not discard them so long as they stand for truths of Nature and of human nature.