IN THE SOUTH SEAS

PART 1:  THE MARQUESAS

 CHAPTER I--AN ISLAND LANDFALL

For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some

while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to

the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to

expect.  It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I

was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a

bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health.  I

chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's schooner yacht, the Casco,

seventy-four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the

end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early

the next year at Honolulu.  Hence, lacking courage to return to my

old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a

trading schooner, the Equator, of a little over seventy tons, spent

four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert

group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89.  By that time

gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I

had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had

learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days

in fairyland; and I decided to remain.  I began to prepare these

pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer Janet

Nicoll.  If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I

have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of

my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future

house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts

of the sea.

That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's

hero is less eccentric than appears.  Few men who come to the

islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm

shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps

cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely

made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated.  No part

of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and

the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some

sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and

ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and

language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and

habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.

The first experience can never be repeated.  The first love, the

first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and

touched a virginity of sense.  On the 28th of July 1888 the moon

was an hour down by four in the morning.  In the east a radiating

centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline,

the morning bank was already building, black as ink.  We have all

read of the swiftness of the day's coming and departure in low

latitudes; it is a point on which the scientific and sentimental

tourist are at one, and has inspired some tasteful poetry.  The

period certainly varies with the season; but here is one case

exactly noted.  Although the dawn was thus preparing by four, the

sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could

distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon.

Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming.  The interval

was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary

thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that

we were then approaching.  Slowly they took shape in the

attenuating darkness.  Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit,

appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our

destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the

southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua-

pu.  These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the

pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in

the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a

world of wonders.

Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or

knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues;

and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as

thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these

problematic shores.  The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales;

it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty

modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was

crowned above by opalescent clouds.  The suffusion of vague hues

deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the

articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial

canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.  There was

no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.

Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our

haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-

mark given--a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam

and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal

figures, the gross statuary of nature.  These we were to find; for

these we craned and stared, focused glasses, and wrangled over

charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close ahead before we

found them.  To a ship approaching, like the Casco, from the north,

they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a striking

coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange, austere, and

feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane, or Adam and

Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers.

Thence we bore away along shore.  On our port beam we might hear

the explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the

prow; there was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or

beast, in all that quarter of the island.  Winged by her own

impetus and the dying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs,

opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and

flitted by again, bowing to the swell.  The trees, from our

distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have been in

Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps,

and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more

considerable than our Scottish heath.  Again the cliff yawned, but

now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to

slide into the bay of Anaho.  The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of

vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so

foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and

fringing the steep sides of mountains.  Rude and bare hills

embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the

landward by a bulk of shattered mountains.  In every crevice of

that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there like

birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the

razor edges of the summit.

Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze,

continued to creep in:  the smart creature, when once under way,

appearing motive in herself.  From close aboard arose the bleating

of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land

and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and,

presently, a house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles

of the hills, and one of these surrounded with what seemed a

garden.  These conspicuous habitations, that patch of culture, had

we but known it, were a mark of the passage of whites; and we might

have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel.  It

was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the

universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove

of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc

of reef.  For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and

neighbours of the surf.  'The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man

departs,' says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so

long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach.  The mark of

anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly

corner of the bay.  Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted;

the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged.  It was a

small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings

whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and

some part of my ship's company, were from that hour the bondslaves

of the isles of Vivien.

Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the

hamlet.  It contained two men:  one white, one brown and tattooed

across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white

European clothes:  the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native

chief, Taipi-Kikino.  'Captain, is it permitted to come on board?'

were the first words we heard among the islands.  Canoe followed

canoe till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every

stage of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a

handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and these the more

considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some

barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as something

bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and

spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity--

all talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to

trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island

curios at prices palpably absurd.  There was no word of welcome; no

show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr.

Regler.  As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles,

complaint ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party,

railed upon our meanness amid jeering laughter.  Amongst other

angry pleasantries--'Here is a mighty fine ship,' said he, 'to have

no money on board!'  I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance;

even with alarm.  The ship was manifestly in their power; we had

women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that

they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of

timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else

have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual

instigators and accomplices of native outrage?  When he reads this

confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.

Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was

filled from end to end with Marquesans:  three brown-skinned

generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me

in silence with embarrassing eyes.  The eyes of all Polynesians are

large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and

some Italians.  A kind of despair came over me, to sit there

helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a

corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd:  and a kind of rage to

think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like

furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien

planet.

To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to

cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify

his diet.  But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman

empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose

laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and

preventing.  I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had

never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never

been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.  By the same step I

had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred

languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and

my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images.  Methought,

in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I

returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I

should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text.  Nay,

and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged;

perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent

friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the

rest, for a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an

ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a rush, and the ship's

company butchered for the table.

There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor

anything more groundless.  In my experience of the islands, I had

never again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-

day, I should be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised.  The

majority of Polynesians are easy folk to get in touch with, frank,

fond of notice, greedy of the least affection, like amiable,

fawning dogs; and even with the Marquesans, so recently and so

imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered barbarism, all were to

become our intimates, and one, at least, was to mourn sincerely our

departure.

CHAPTER II--MAKING FRIENDS

The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-

estimated.  The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though

hard to speak with elegance.  And they are extremely similar, so

that a person who has a tincture of one or two may risk, not

without hope, an attempt upon the others.

And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters

abound.  Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the

bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and

hamlet; and even where these are unserviceable, the natives

themselves have often scraped up a little English, and in the

French zone (though far less commonly) a little French-English, or

an efficient pidgin, what is called to the westward 'Beach-la-Mar,'

comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now taught, besides, in the

schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of British ships, and

the nearness of the States on the one hand and the colonies on the

other, it may be called, and will almost certainly become, the

tongue of the Pacific.  I will instance a few examples.  I met in

Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he

had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one

word of German.  I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in

Rapa-iti that while the children had the utmost difficulty or

reluctance to learn French, they picked up English on the wayside,

and as if by accident.  On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in

the Carolines, my friend Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the

lads playing cricket on the beach and talking English; and it was

in English that the crew of the Janet Nicoll, a set of black boys

from different Melanesian islands, communicated with other natives

throughout the cruise, transmitted orders, and sometimes jested

together on the fore-hatch.  But what struck me perhaps most of all

was a word I heard on the verandah of the Tribunal at Noumea.  A

case had just been heard--a trial for infanticide against an ape-

like native woman; and the audience were smoking cigarettes as they

awaited the verdict.  An anxious, amiable French lady, not far from

tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared she would engage the

prisoner to be her children's nurse.  The bystanders exclaimed at

the proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke no

language.  'Mais, vous savez,' objected the fair sentimentalist;

'ils apprennent si vite l'anglais!'

But to be able to speak to people is not all.  And in the first

stage of my relations with natives I was helped by two things.  To

begin with, I was the show-man of the Casco.  She, her fine lines,

tall spars, and snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon,

and the white, the gilt, and the repeating mirrors of the tiny

cabin, brought us a hundred visitors.  The men fathomed out her

dimensions with their arms, as their fathers fathomed out the ships

of Cook; the women declared the cabins more lovely than a church;

bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in the chairs and

contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I have seen

one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and delight,

rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions.  Biscuit, jam,

and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the

photograph album went the round.  This sober gallery, their

everyday costumes and physiognomies, had become transformed, in

three weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign;

alien faces, barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered,

in the swerving cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise.  Her

Majesty was often recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss

her photograph; Captain Speedy--in an Abyssinian war-dress,

supposed to be the uniform of the British army--met with much

acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew Lang were admired in the

Marquesas.  There is the place for him to go when he shall be weary

of Middlesex and Homer.

It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth

some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands.

Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same

convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day.  In

both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the

chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of

regarding money as the means and object of existence.  The

commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war

abroad and patriarchal communism at home.  In one the cherished

practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume,

proscribed.  In each a main luxury cut off:  beef, driven under

cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving

Highlander; long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-

eating Kanaka.  The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and

resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs,

reminded me continually of the days of Lovat and Struan.

Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a touchy punctilio,

are common to both races:  common to both tongues the trick of

dropping medial consonants.  Here is a table of two widespread

Polynesian words:-

              House.   Love.

Tahitian      FARE     AROHA

New Zealand   WHARE

Samoan        FALE     TALOFA

Manihiki      FALE     ALOHA

Hawaiian      HALE     ALOHA

Marquesan     HA'E     KAOHA

The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan

instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots.

Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called

catch, written with an apostrophe, and often or always the

gravestone of a perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to

this day.  When a Scot pronounces water, better, or bottle--wa'er,

be'er, or bo'le--the sound is precisely that of the catch; and I

think we may go beyond, and say, that if such a population could be

isolated, and this mispronunciation should become the rule, it

might prove the first stage of transition from t to k, which is the

disease of Polynesian languages.  The tendency of the Marquesans,

however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very

common letter l, a war of mere extermination.  A hiatus is

agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon

grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will

you find such names as Haaii and Paaaeua, when each individual

vowel must be separately uttered.

These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of

my own folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not

only inclined me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but

continually modified my judgment.  A polite Englishman comes to-day

to the Marquesans and is amazed to find the men tattooed; polite

Italians came not long ago to England and found our fathers stained

with woad; and when I paid the return visit as a little boy, I was

highly diverted with the backwardness of Italy:  so insecure, so

much a matter of the day and hour, is the pre-eminence of race.  It

was so that I hit upon a means of communication which I recommend

to travellers.  When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of

superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and

fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism:

Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's head, the second-sight, the

Water Kelpie,--each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the

black bull's head of Stirling procured me the legend of Rahero; and

what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts,

enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the Tevas

of Tahiti.  The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship

grew warmer, and his lips were opened.  It is this sense of kinship

that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content

himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown.  And the

presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk

in clouds of darkness.

The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the

west of the beach and the spring of the impending mountains.  A

grove of palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as

for a triumph) with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour.

A road runs from end to end of the covert among beds of flowers,

the milliner's shop of the community; and here and there, in the

grateful twilight, in an air filled with a diversity of scents, and

still within hearing of the surf upon the reef, the native houses

stand in scattered neighbourhood.  The same word, as we have seen,

represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a shade of

difference, the abode of man.  But although the word be the same,

the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among

the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most

commodiously lodged.  The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses

of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the

polite Samoan--none of these can be compared with the Marquesan

paepae-hae, or dwelling platform.  The paepae is an oblong terrace

built without cement or black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty

feet in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and

accessible by a broad stair.  Along the back of this, and coming to

about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a

covered gallery:  the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in

its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming,

some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one

of White's sewing-machines the only marks of civilization.  On the

outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a

shed; at the other there is perhaps a pen for pigs; the remainder

is the evening lounge and al fresco banquet-hall of the

inhabitants.  To some houses water is brought down the mountains in

bamboo pipes, perforated for the sake of sweetness.  With the

Highland comparison in my mind, I was struck to remember the

sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I have sat and been

entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands.  Two things, I

suppose, explain the contrast.  In Scotland wood is rare, and with

materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is

excluded.  And in Scotland it is cold.  Shelter and a hearth are

needs so pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day

after a bare bellyful, and at night when he saith, 'Aha, it is

warm!' he has not appetite for more.  Or if for something else,

then something higher; a fine school of poetry and song arose in

these rough shelters, and an air like 'Lochaber no more' is an

evidence of refinement more convincing, as well as more

imperishable, than a palace.

To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and

dependants resort.  In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes,

and the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps

the lamp glints already between the pillars and the house, you

shall behold them silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and

children; and the dogs and pigs frisk together up the terrace

stairway, switching rival tails.  The strangers from the ship were

soon equally welcome:  welcome to dip their fingers in the wooden

dish, to drink cocoanuts, to share the circulating pipe, and to

hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of the French, the

Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San Francisco and New

Yo'ko.  In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any tourist, I

have met the same plain and dignified hospitality.

I have mentioned two facts--the distasteful behaviour of our

earliest visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon

the cushions--which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan

manners.  The great majority of Polynesians are excellently

mannered; but the Marquesan stands apart, annoying and attractive,

wild, shy, and refined.  If you make him a present he affects to

forget it, and it must be offered him again at his going:  a pretty

formality I have found nowhere else.  A hint will get rid of any

one or any number; they are so fiercely proud and modest; while

many of the more lovable but blunter islanders crowd upon a

stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies.  A slight or an

insult the Marquesan seems never to forget.  I was one day talking

by the wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes

suddenly to flash and his stature to swell.  A white horseman was

coming down the mountain, and as he passed, and while he paused to

exchange salutations with myself, Hoka was still staring and

ruffling like a gamecock.  It was a Corsican who had years before

called him cochon sauvage--cocon chauvage, as Hoka mispronounced

it.  With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be

supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into

offences.  Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding

silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality.

When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly

explained the nature of my offence:  I had asked him to sell cocoa-

nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things that a

gentleman should give, not sell; or at least that he should not

sell to any friend.  On another occasion I gave my boat's crew a

luncheon of chocolate and biscuits.  I had sinned, I could never

learn how, against some point of observance; and though I was drily

thanked, my offerings were left upon the beach.  But our worst

mistake was a slight we put on Toma, Hoka's adoptive father, and in

his own eyes the rightful chief of Anaho.  In the first place, we

did not call upon him, as perhaps we should, in his fine new

European house, the only one in the hamlet.  In the second, when we

came ashore upon a visit to his rival, Taipi-Kikino, it was Toma

whom we saw standing at the head of the beach, a magnificent figure

of a man, magnificently tattooed; and it was of Toma that we asked

our question:  'Where is the chief?'  'What chief?' cried Toma, and

turned his back on the blasphemers.  Nor did he forgive us.  Hoka

came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of all the

countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the Casco.

The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute.  The

flying city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James's Park

affords but a pale figure of the Casco anchored before Anaho; for

the Londoner has still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan

passes to his grave through an unbroken uniformity of days.

On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a

valedictory party came on board:  nine of our particular friends

equipped with gifts and dressed as for a festival.  Hoka, the chief

dancer and singer, the greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the

handsomest young fellows in the world-sullen, showy, dramatic,

light as a feather and strong as an ox--it would have been hard, on

that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there stooped and silent,

his face heavy and grey.  It was strange to see the lad so much

affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of the

curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so

gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the

half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:

strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan,

the last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all

been given to us by their possessors--their chief merchandise, for

which they had sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers,

which they pressed on us for nothing as soon as we were friends.

The last visit was not long protracted.  One after another they

shook hands and got down into their canoe; when Hoka turned his

back immediately upon the ship, so that we saw his face no more.

Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and facing us with

gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis dipped the

ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats.  This was the

farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and

though the Casco remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not

one returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided

appearing on the beach.  This reserve and dignity is the finest

trait of the Marquesan.

CHAPTER III--THE MAROON

Of the beauties of Anaho books might be written.  I remember waking

about three, to find the air temperate and scented.  The long swell

brimmed into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside.

Gently, deeply, and silently the Casco rolled; only at times a

block piped like a bird.  Oceanward, the heaven was bright with

stars and the sea with their reflections.  If I looked to that

side, I might have sung with the Hawaiian poet:

Ua maomao ka lani, ua kahaea luna,

Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku.

(The heavens were fair, they stretched above,

Many were the eyes of the stars.)

And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the

mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped

ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that

when the day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern,

and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien

speech that should next greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka.

And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts.  I have

watched the morning break in many quarters of the world; it has

been certainly one of the chief joys of my existence, and the dawn

that I saw with most emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho.  The

mountains abruptly overhang the port with every variety of surface

and of inclination, lawn, and cliff, and forest.  Not one of these

but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and

of the rose.  The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter

hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom

appeared on the more dark.  The light itself was the ordinary light

of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels,

pencilled out the least detail of drawing.  Meanwhile, around the

hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red

coals of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the

awakening business of the day; along the beach men and women, lads

and lasses, were returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and

blue and green, such as we delighted to see in the coloured little

pictures of our childhood; and presently the sun had cleared the

eastern hill, and the glow of the day was over all.

The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part,

ceased before it had begun.  Twice in the day there was a certain

stir of shepherding along the seaward hills.  At times a canoe went

out to fish.  At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in

the cotton patch.  At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of

a house, ringing the changes on its three notes, with an effect

like Que le jour me dure, repeated endlessly.  Or at times, across

a corner of the bay, two natives might communicate in the Marquesan

manner with conventional whistlings.  All else was sleep and

silence.  The surf broke and shone around the shores; a species of

black crane fished in the broken water; the black pigs were

continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might never

have awaked, or they might all be dead.

My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in

a cove under a lianaed cliff.  The beach was lined with palms and a

tree called the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in

growth, and bearing a flower like a great yellow poppy with a

maroon heart.  In places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach

would be all submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as

to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean

plays with wreck and wrack and bottles.  As the reflux drew down,

marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet; which I

would grasp at, miss, or seize:  now to find them what they

promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady's

finger; now to catch only maya of coloured sand, pounded fragments

and pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and

homely as the flints upon a garden path.  I have toiled at this

childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my

incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed.

Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be

fluting in the thickets overhead.

A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in

the bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the

sea.  The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very

bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness.  In

front it stood open on the blue bay and the Casco lying there under

her awning and her cheerful colours.  Overhead was a thatch of

puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as

I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords.

For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the

mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of

almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness.

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove, with Mrs.

Stevenson and the ship's cook.  Except for the Casco lying outside,

and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the

world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-

still, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing.  On

a sudden, the trade-wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck

and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in

two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and

watching us, you would have said, without a wink.  The next moment

the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone.  This discovery of human

presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed

ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the

thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised,

struck us with a chill.  Talk languished on the beach.  As for the

cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot

on shore, and twice, when the Casco appeared to be driving on the

rocks, it was amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was

persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach.  It was more than a year

later, in the Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself.

The natives were drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law;

and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless

more troubled than ourselves.

At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man

of the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin.  He was a native of Oahu, in

the Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the

American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his

English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent

life.  For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to

Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals.  The motive

for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were

thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New

Bedford owners.  And the act itself was simply murder.  Tari's life

must have hung in the beginning by a hair.  In the grief and terror

of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which

he was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to

him and ordained him to be spared.  He escaped at least alive,

married in the island, and when I knew him was a widower with a

married son and a granddaughter.  But the thought of Oahu haunted

him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking

back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and dance; and in his

dreams I daresay he revisits it with joy.  I wonder what he would

think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town

of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and

the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and

outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown

faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land

sold, for planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or

perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the

surf and the cliffs on Molokai?  So simply, even in South Sea

Islands, and so sadly, the changes come.

Tari was poor, and poorly lodged.  His house was a wooden frame,

run up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari

was the shepherd of the promontory sheep.  I can give a perfect

inventory of its contents:  three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron

saucepan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles,

probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few

mats were thrown across the open rafters.  Upon my first meeting

with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island

friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den

'to see my house'--the only entertainment that he had to offer.  He

liked the 'Amelican,' he said, and the 'Inglisman,' but the

'Flessman' was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that

if he had thought us 'Fless,' we should have had none of his nuts,

and never a sight of his house.  His distaste for the French I can

partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-

Saxon.  The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later one

of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second.  We

were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's

generosity, which he could ill afford, and, by a natural enough but

quite unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig.  Had Tari been a

Marquesan we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the

most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a

hundred times more painful.  Scarce had the canoe with the nine

villagers put off from their farewell before the Casco was boarded

from the other side.  It was Tari; coming thus late because he had

no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming

thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a

stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company.  The rest of my

family basely fled from the encounter.  I must receive our injured

friend alone; and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour,

for he was loath to tear himself away.  'You go 'way.  I see you no

more--no, sir!' he lamented; and then looking about him with rueful

admiration, 'This goodee ship--no, sir!--goodee ship!' he would

exclaim:  the 'no, sir,' thrown out sharply through the nose upon a

rising inflection, an echo from New Bedford and the fallacious

whaler.  From these expressions of grief and praise, he would

return continually to the case of the rejected pig.  'I like give

present all 'e same you,' he complained; 'only got pig:  you no

take him!'  He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had

only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it.  I have rarely been

more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so

poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to

appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so

innocently dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech

is vain.

Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of

sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most

Anaho women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a

mite of a creature at the breast.  I went up the den one day when

Tari was from home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and

madame suckling mademoiselle.  When I had sat down with them on the

floor, the girl began to question me about England; which I tried

to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another

to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was able, and by

word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the

perpetual toil.  'Pas de cocotiers? pas do popoi?' she asked.  I

told her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate

performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary

fire, to make sure she understood.  But she understood right well;

remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely

reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.  I am sure it

roused her pity, for it struck in her another thought always

uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling

sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the

decease of her own people.  'Ici pas de Kanaques,' said she; and

taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both

her hands.  'Tenez--a little baby like this; then dead.  All the

Kanaques die.  Then no more.'  The smile, and this instancing by

the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me

strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.  Meanwhile the

husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled

to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had

just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw

their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day

already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more

of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary

works and no more readers.

CHAPTER IV--DEATH

The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the

Marquesan.  It would be strange if it were otherwise.  The race is

perhaps the handsomest extant.  Six feet is about the middle height

of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in

action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and

duller, are still comely animals.  To judge by the eye, there is no

race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands.  When

Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the

inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the

same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual

natives.  Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman

Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar.  There are but

two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both

Americans:  Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the

christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must

have been neglected:  'He shall be able to see,' 'He shall be able

to tell,' 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly

godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear,' exclaimed the last.

The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when

the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth.  Six months

later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread

like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two

survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude.

A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the

tragic residue of Britain.  When I first heard this story the date

staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible.  Early in

the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first

case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and

by the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul

survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling.

And depopulation works both ways, the doors of death being set wide

open, and the door of birth almost closed.  Thus, in the half-year

ending July 1888 there were twelve deaths and but one birth in the

district of the Hatiheu.  Seven or eight more deaths were to be

looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel, the observant

gendarme, knew of but one likely birth.  At this rate it is no

matter of surprise if the population in that part should have

declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four

hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the

estimated figures.  And the rate of decline must have even

accelerated towards the end.

A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from

Anaho to Hatiheu on the adjacent bay.  The road is good travelling,

but cruelly steep.  We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted

house which stands highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily

down upon its roof; the Casco well out in the bay, and rolling for

a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's

isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon.  Over

the summit, where the wind blew really chill, and whistled in the

reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of the pandanus, we

stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale and bay of

Hatiheu.  A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides.  On the

fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to

seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one

practicable breach of the blue bay.  The interior of this vessel is

crowded with lovely and valuable trees,--orange, breadfruit, mummy-

apple, cocoa, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the

banana.  Four perennial streams water and keep it green; and along

the dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the road, for a

considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley.  The

song of the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a

strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like

growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the

black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of the

native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed.

The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more

melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes.  When a native habitation is

deserted, the superstructure--pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable

tropical timber--speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the

wind.  Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin,

cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern

appearance of antiquity.  We must have passed from six to eight of

these now houseless platforms.  On the main road of the island,

where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr. Osbourne tells me they

are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads have been made

long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their desertion, and

must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through the bush,

the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these

survivals:  the gravestones of whole families.  Such ruins are tapu

in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have

become outposts of the kingdom of the grave.  It might appear a

natural and pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the

rearguard of perished thousands, that their feet should leave

untrod these hearthstones of their fathers.  I believe, in fact,

the custom rests on different and more grim conceptions.  But the

house, the grave, and even the body of the dead, have been always

particularly honoured by Marquesans.  Until recently the corpse was

sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and sunned, until, by

gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy.

Offerings are still laid upon the grave.  In Traitor's Bay, Mr.

Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son's.  And

the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly

ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient

in the native hatred for the French.

The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his

race.  The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises

with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of

mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension

that he greets the reality with relief.  He does not even seek to

support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his

fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge

in the grave.  Hanging is now the fashion.  I heard of three who

had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first

half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other

parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will continue popular in

the Marquesas.  Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old

form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the

native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for

those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such

remarkable importance.  The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs

killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house;

and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of

achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like Caesar's)

adjusted for the final act.  Praise not any man till he is dead,

said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners,

might be the Marquesan parody.  The coffin, though of late

introduction, strangely engages their attention.  It is to the

mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy.  For

ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the

other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the

woman's soul is at rest.  I was told a droll instance of the force

of this preoccupation.  The Polynesians are subject to a disease

seemingly rather of the will than of the body.  I was told the

Tahitians have a word for it, erimatua, but cannot find it in my

dictionary.  A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to

succumb to this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their

houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two

days has seen them cured.  But this other remedy is more original:

a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement--perhaps I should rather

say this acquiescence--has been known, at the fulfilment of his

crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his

coffin--to revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be

restored for years to his occupations--carving tikis (idols), let

us say, or braiding old men's beards.  From all this it may be

conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally.

I heard one example, grim and picturesque.  In the time of the

small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had

no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived

in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the

passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for

himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.

This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar

to the Marquesan.  What is peculiar is the widespread depression

and acceptance of the national end.  Pleasures are neglected, the

dance languishes, the songs are forgotten.  It is true that some,

and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if

there were spirit to support or to revive them.  At the last feast

of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the

inanimate performance of the dancers.  When the people sang for us

in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.

They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the

old that knew the songs.  The whole body of Marquesan poetry and

music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited

generation.  The full import is apparent only to one acquainted

with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh

song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for

instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve

keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song

following another without pause.  In like manner, the Marquesan,

never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production.

The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with

the death-rate of the islanders.  'The coral waxes, the palm grows,

and man departs,' says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands.  And

surely this is nature.  Fond as it may appear, we labour and

refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid

eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one

is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt

whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue.  It

is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse

the Marquesan from his lethargy.  Over all the landward shore of

Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to

pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the

trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was

near full.  So long as the circus was there, so long as the Casco

was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his

visit; and to this end every woman must have a new dress, and every

man a shirt and trousers.  Never before, in Mr. Regler's

experience, had they displayed so much activity.

In their despondency there is an element of dread.  The fear of

ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the

Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan.  Poor Taipi, the chief of

Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night.  He

borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the

adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the Cascos by the

hand as for a final separation.  Certain presences, called

Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal roadside; I was

told by one they were like so much mist, and as the traveller

walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another described them

as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from none could

I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or wherefore

they were dreaded.  We may be sure at least they represent the

dead; for the dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-

pervasive.  'When a native says that he is a man,' writes Dr.

Codrington, 'he means that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he

is a man and not a beast.  The intelligent agents of this world are

to his mind the men who are alive, and the ghosts the men who are

dead.'  Dr. Codrington speaks of Melanesia; from what I have

learned his words are equally true of the Polynesian.  And yet

more.  Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful suspicion rests

generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest cannibals

of all, are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs.  I

hazard the guess that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the

dead, continuing their life's business of the cannibal ambuscade,

and lying everywhere unseen, and eager to devour the living.

Another superstition I picked up through the troubled medium of

Tari Coffin's English.  The dead, he told me, came and danced by

night around the paepae of their former family; the family were

thereupon overcome by some emotion (but whether of pious sorrow or

of fear I could not gather), and must 'make a feast,' of which

fish, pig, and popoi were indispensable ingredients.  So far this

is clear enough.  But here Tari went on to instance the new house

of Toma and the house-warming feast which was just then in

preparation as instances in point.  Dare we indeed string them

together, and add the case of the deserted ruin, as though the dead

continually besieged the paepaes of the living:  were kept at

arm's-length, even from the first foundation, only by propitiatory

feasts, and, so soon as the fire of life went out upon the hearth,

swarmed back into possession of their ancient seat?

I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions.  On the cannibal

ghost I shall return elsewhere with certainty.  And it is enough,

for the present purpose, to remark that the men of the Marquesas,

from whatever reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts.

Conceive how this must tell upon the nerves in islands where the

number of the dead already so far exceeds that of the living, and

the dead multiply and the living dwindle at so swift a rate.

Conceive how the remnant huddles about the embers of the fire of

life; even as old Red Indians, deserted on the march and in the

snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame expiring, and the

night around populous with wolves.

CHAPTER V--DEPOPULATION

Over the whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to

another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when

the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the

improvident Polynesian trembled for the future.  We may accept some

of the ideas of Mr. Darwin's theory of coral islands, and suppose a

rise of the sea, or the subsidence of some former continental area,

to have driven into the tops of the mountains multitudes of

refugees.  Or we may suppose, more soberly, a people of sea-rovers,

emigrants from a crowded country, to strike upon and settle island

after island, and as time went on to multiply exceedingly in their

new seats.  In either case the end must be the same; soon or late

it must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and that

famine is at hand.  The Polynesians met this emergent danger with

various expedients of activity and prevention.  A way was found to

preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty

feet in depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am

told, in the Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for

the teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with

famine and cannibalism.  Among the Hawaiians--a hardier people, in

a more exacting climate--agriculture was carried far; the land was

irrigated with canals; and the fish-ponds of Molokai prove the

number and diligence of the old inhabitants.  Meanwhile, over all

the island world, abortion and infanticide prevailed.  On coral

atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were

enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment.  On Vaitupu, in the

Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau,

but one.  On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is

related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared.

This is characteristic.  For no people in the world are so fond or

so long-suffering with children--children make the mirth and the

adornment of their homes, serving them for playthings and for

picture-galleries.  'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of

them.'  The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and

the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together

undistinguished.  The spoiling, and I may almost say the

deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the

eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of

observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous

Archipelago.  I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with

embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat

would be the better for a beating.  It is a daily matter in some

eastern islands to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and

the mother, so far from punishing, scarce ventures to resist.  In

some, when his child was born, a chief was superseded and resigned

his name; as though, like a drone, he had then fulfilled the

occasion of his being.  And in some the lightest words of children

had the weight of oracles.  Only the other day, in the Marquesas,

if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger, I am assured the

stranger would be slain.  And I shall have to tell in another place

an instance of the opposite:  how a child in Manihiki having taken

a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted the

situation and loaded me with gifts.

With such sentiments the necessity for child-destruction would not

fail to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling

in the Tahitian brotherhood of Oro.  At a certain date a new god

was added to the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished

and made popular.  Oro was his name, and he may be compared with

the Bacchus of the ancients.  His zealots sailed from bay to bay,

and from island to island; they were everywhere received with

feasting; wore fine clothes; sang, danced, acted; gave exhibitions

of dexterity and strength; and were the artists, the acrobats, the

bards, and the harlots of the group.  Their life was public and

epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the highest in the land

aspired to join the brotherhood.  If a couple stood next in line to

a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of policy, to

spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a mother

in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of

conception.  A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists,

its members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden

to leave offspring--I do not know how it may appear to others, but

to me the design seems obvious.  Famine menacing the islands, and

the needful remedy repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind

by these trappings of mystery, pleasure, and parade.  This is the

more probable, and the secret, serious purpose of the institution

appears the more plainly, if it be true that, after a certain

period of life, the obligation of the votary was changed; at first,

bound to be profligate:  afterwards, expected to be chaste.

Here, then, we have one side of the case.  Man-eating among kindly

men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most

idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan

salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early

voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the

universal tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of

former crowding and alarm.  And to-day we are face to face with the

reverse.  To-day in the Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii,

in Mangareva, in Easter Island, we find the same race perishing

like flies.  Why this change?  Or, grant that the coming of the

whites, the change of habits, and the introduction of new maladies

and vices, fully explain the depopulation, why is that depopulation

not universal?  The population of Tahiti, after a period of

alarming decrease, has again become stationary.  I hear of a

similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a

slight increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as

healthy and at least as fruitful as before the change.  Grant that

the Tahitians, the Maoris, and the Paumotuans have become inured to

the new conditions; and what are we to make of the Samoans, who

have never suffered?

Those who are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be

ready with solutions.  Thus I have heard the mortality of the

Maoris attributed to their change of residence--from fortified

hill-tops to the low, marshy vicinity of their plantations.  How

plausible!  And yet the Marquesans are dying out in the same houses

where their fathers multiplied.  Or take opium.  The Marquesas and

Hawaii are the two groups the most infected with this vice; the

population of the one is the most civilised, that of the other by

far the most barbarous, of Polynesians; and they are two of those

that perish the most rapidly.  Here is a strong case against opium.

But let us take unchastity, and we shall find the Marquesas and

Hawaii figuring again upon another count.  Thus, Samoans are the

most chaste of Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely

fertile; Marquesans are the most debauched:  we have seen how they

are perishing; Hawaiians are notoriously lax, and they begin to be

dotted among deserts.  So here is a case stronger still against

unchastity; and here also we have a correction to apply.  Whatever

the virtues of the Tahitian, neither friend nor enemy dares call

him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived the time of danger.

One last example:  syphilis has been plausibly credited with much

of the sterility.  But the Samoans are, by all accounts, as

fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is not

seriously to be argued that the Samoans have escaped syphilis.

These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any

particular cause, or even from many in a single group.  I have in

my eye an able and amiable pamphlet by the Rev. S. E. Bishop:  'Why

are the Hawaiians Dying Out?'  Any one interested in the subject

ought to read this tract, which contains real information; and yet

Mr. Bishop's views would have been changed by an acquaintance with

other groups.  Samoa is, for the moment, the main and the most

instructive exception to the rule.  The people are the most chaste

and one of the most temperate of island peoples.  They have never

been tried and depressed with any grave pestilence.  Their clothing

has scarce been tampered with; at the simple and becoming tabard of

the girls, Tartuffe, in many another island, would have cried out;

for the cool, healthy, and modest lava-lava or kilt, Tartuffe has

managed in many another island to substitute stifling and

inconvenient trousers.  Lastly, and perhaps chiefly, so far from

their amusements having been curtailed, I think they have been,

upon the whole, extended.  The Polynesian falls easily into

despondency:  bereavement, disappointment, the fear of novel

visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures, easily

incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from life.  The

melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life are

striking; and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas.  In

Samoa, on the other hand, perpetual song and dance, perpetual

games, journeys, and pleasures, make an animated and a smiling

picture of the island life.  And the Samoans are to-day the gayest

and the best entertained inhabitants of our planet.  The importance

of this can scarcely be exaggerated.  In a climate and upon a soil

where a livelihood can be had for the stooping, entertainment is a

prime necessity.  It is otherwise with us, where life presents us

with a daily problem, and there is a serious interest, and some of

the heat of conflict, in the mere continuing to be.  So, in certain

atolls, where there is no great gaiety, but man must bestir himself

with some vigour for his daily bread, public health and the

population are maintained; but in the lotos islands, with the decay

of pleasures, life itself decays.  It is from this point of view

that we may instance, among other causes of depression, the decay

of war.  We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary

business of war on the great scale, trailing epidemics and leaving

pestilential corpses in its train, that we have almost forgotten

its original, the most healthful, if not the most humane, of all

field sports--hedge-warfare.  From this, as well as from the rest

of his amusements and interests, the islander, upon a hundred

islands, has been recently cut off.  And to this, as well as to so

many others, the Samoan still makes good a special title.

Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:- Where there

have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or

hurtful, there the race survives.  Where there have been most,

important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes.

Each change, however small, augments the sum of new conditions to

which the race has to become inured.  There may seem, a priori, no

comparison between the change from 'sour toddy' to bad gin, and

that from the island kilt to a pair of European trousers.  Yet I am

far from persuaded that the one is any more hurtful than the other;

and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of pin-pricks.  We are

here face to face with one of the difficulties of the missionary.

In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent authority; the

king becomes his mairedupalais; he can proscribe, he can command;

and the temptation is ever towards too much.  Thus (by all

accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own

knowledge) the Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more

or less degree unliveable to their converts.  And the mild,

uncomplaining creatures (like children in a prison) yawn and await

death.  It is easy to blame the missionary.  But it is his business

to make changes.  It is surely his business, for example, to

prevent war; and yet I have instanced war itself as one of the

elements of health.  On the other hand, it were, perhaps, easy for

the missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard every change

as an affair of weight.  I take the average missionary; I am sure I

do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate

to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago.

Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands) that

change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment.

There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet

criticism.  I have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during

fevers, mistaken treatment of children, native doctoring, or

abortion--all causes frequently adduced.  And I have said nothing

of them because they are conditions common to both epochs, and even

more efficient in the past than in the present.  Was it not the

same with unchastity, it may be asked?  Was not the Polynesian

always unchaste?  Doubtless he was so always:  doubtless he is more

so since the coming of his remarkably chaste visitors from Europe.

Take the Hawaiian account of Cook:  I have no doubt it is entirely

fair.  Take Krusenstern's candid, almost innocent, description of a

Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider the disgraceful

history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war of lust)

the American missionaries were once shelled by an English

adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an

American warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the

Marquesas, and carry off a complement of women for the cruise;

consider, besides, how the whites were at first regarded in the

light of demi-gods, as appears plainly in the reception of Cook

upon Hawaii; and again, in the story of the discovery of Tutuila,

when the really decent women of Samoa prostituted themselves in

public to the French; and bear in mind how it was the custom of the

adventurers, and we may almost say the business of the

missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus.

Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a

virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result,

even in the most degraded islands, has been further degradation.

Mr. Lawes, the missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of

female chastity had declined there since the coming of the whites.

In heathen time, if a girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or

brother would dash the infant down the cliffs; and to-day the

scandal would be small.  Or take the Marquesas.  Stanislao

Moanatini told me that in his own recollection, the young were

strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to look upon

one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it) like

dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and

Ua-pu escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a

fortnight in promiscuous liberty.  Readers of travels may perhaps

exclaim at my authority, and declare themselves better informed.  I

should prefer the statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao

(even if it stood alone, which it is far from doing) to the report

of the most honest traveller.  A ship of war comes to a haven,

anchors, lands a party, receives and returns a visit, and the

captain writes a chapter on the manners of the island.  It is not

considered what class is mostly seen.  Yet we should not be pleased

if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge England by the ladies who

parade Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen who share with them

their hire.  Stanislao's opinion of a decay of virtue even in these

unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his very

example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced

by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii.  And so far as Marquesans are concerned,

we might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners.  I do

not think that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied

with such as now obtain; I am sure they would have been never at

the pains to count paternal kinship.  It is not possible to give

details; suffice it that their manners appear to be imitated from

the dreams of ignorant and vicious children, and their debauches

persevered in until energy, reason, and almost life itself are in

abeyance.

CHAPTER VI--CHIEFS AND TAPUS

We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the

chief called Taipi-Kikino.  An elegant guest at table, skilled in

the use of knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun

and started for the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable,

always ingratiating and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he

found his cheerfulness.  He had enough to sober him, I thought, in

his official budget.  His expenses--for he was always seen attired

in virgin white--must have by far exceeded his income of six

dollars in the year, or say two shillings a month.  And he was

himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest in the

village.  It was currently supposed that his elder brother,

Kauanui, must have helped him out.  But how comes it that the elder

brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy

commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in

Anaho?  That the one should be wealthy, and the other almost

indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for

comparatively few children are brought up in the house or succeed

to the estates of their natural begetters.  That the one should be

chief instead of the other must be explained (in a very Irish

fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at all.

Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been

deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed.  We have seen, in the

same house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such

extruded island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life

and death, now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours.  So when

the French overthrew hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the

Marquesas freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with

a vote for a conseiller-general at Tahiti, they probably conceived

themselves upon the path to popularity; and so far from that, they

were revolting public sentiment.  The deposition of the chiefs was

perhaps sometimes needful; the appointment of others may have been

needful also; it was at least a delicate business.  The Government

of George II. exiled many Highland magnates.  It never occurred to

them to manufacture substitutes; and if the French have been more

bold, we have yet to see with what success.

Our chief at Anaho was always called, he always called himself,

Taipi-Kikino; and yet that was not his name, but only the wand of

his false position.  As soon as he was appointed chief, his name--

which signified, if I remember exactly, PRINCE BORN AMONG FLOWERS--

fell in abeyance, and he was dubbed instead by the expressive

byword, Taipi-Kikino--HIGHWATER MAN-OF-NO-ACCOUNT--or, Englishing

more boldly, BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK--a witty and a wicked cut.  A

nickname in Polynesia destroys almost the memory of the original

name.  To-day, if we were Polynesians, Gladstone would be no more

heard of.  We should speak of and address our Nestor as the Grand

Old Man, and it is so that himself would sign his correspondence.

Not the prevalence, then, but the significancy of the nickname is

to be noted here.  The new authority began with small prestige.

Taipi has now been some time in office; from all I saw he seemed a

person very fit.  He is not the least unpopular, and yet his power

is nothing.  He is a chief to the French, and goes to breakfast

with the Resident; but for any practical end of chieftaincy a rag

doll were equally efficient.

We had been but three days in Anaho when we received the visit of

the chief of Hatiheu, a man of weight and fame, late leader of a

war upon the French, late prisoner in Tahiti, and the last eater of

long-pig in Nuka-hiva.  Not many years have elapsed since he was

seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man's arm across his

shoulder.  'So does Kooamua to his enemies!' he roared to the

passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh.  And now behold

this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French,

paying us a morning visit in European clothes.  He was the man of

the most character we had yet seen:  his manners genial and

decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and

with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone's--only for the

brownness of the skin, and the high-chief's tattooing, all one side

and much of the other being of an even blue.  Further acquaintance

increased our opinion of his sense.  He viewed the Casco in a

manner then quite new to us, examining her lines and the running of

the gear; to a piece of knitting on which one of the party was

engaged, he must have devoted ten minutes' patient study; nor did

he desist before he had divined the principles; and he was

interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he learned to

work.  When he departed he carried away with him a list of his

family, with his own name printed by his own hand at the bottom.  I

should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little

of a humbug.  He told us, for instance, that he was a person of

exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate:  the

commons might be sots, but the chief could not stoop so low.  And

not many days after he was to be observed in a state of smiling and

lop-sided imbecility, the Casco ribbon upside down on his

dishonoured hat.

But his business that morning in Anaho is what concerns us here.

The devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon the reef; it was

judged fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for

that end, in Polynesia, a tapu (vulgarly spelt 'taboo') has to be

declared, and who was to declare it?  Taipi might; he ought; it was

a chief part of his duty; but would any one regard the inhibition

of a Beggar on Horse-back?  He might plant palm branches:  it did

not in the least follow that the spot was sacred.  He might recite

the spell:  it was shrewdly supposed the spirits would not hearken.

And so the old, legitimate cannibal must ride over the mountains to

do it for him; and the respectable official in white clothes could

but look on and envy.  At about the same time, though in a

different manner, Kooamua established a forest law.  It was

observed the cocoa-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green

nuts impoverishes and at last endangers the tree.  Now Kooamua

could tapu the reef, which was public property, but he could not

tapu other people's palms; and the expedient adopted was

interesting.  He tapu'd his own trees, and his example was imitated

over all Hatiheu and Anaho.  I fear Taipi might have tapu'd all

that he possessed and found none to follow him.  So much for the

esteem in which the dignity of an appointed chief is held by

others; a single circumstance will show what he thinks of it

himself.  I never met one, but he took an early opportunity to

explain his situation.  True, he was only an appointed chief when I

beheld him; but somewhere else, perhaps upon some other isle, he

was a chieftain by descent:  upon which ground, he asked me (so to

say it) to excuse his mushroom honours.

It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for

thoroughly sensible ends.  With surprise, I say, because the nature

of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe.  It is taken

usually in the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such

as that which to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking,

or yesterday prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on

Sunday.  The error is no less natural than it is unjust.  The

Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought

of ancient Rome; with them the idea of law has not been disengaged

from that of morals or propriety; so that tapu has to cover the

whole field, and implies indifferently that an act is criminal,

immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say)

'not in good form.'  Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough,

such as those which deleted words out of the language, and

particularly those which related to women.  Tapu encircled women

upon all hands.  Many things were forbidden to men; to women we may

say that few were permitted.  They must not sit on the paepae; they

must not go up to it by the stair; they must not eat pork; they

must not approach a boat; they must not cook at a fire which any

male had kindled.  The other day, after the roads were made, it was

observed the women plunged along margin through the bush, and when

they came to a bridge waded through the water:  roads and bridges

were the work of men's hands, and tapu for the foot of women.  Even

a man's saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting

lady dares to use.  Thus on the Anaho side of the island, only two

white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles;

and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one or

other.  It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of

them, to an increased reserve between the sexes.  Regard for female

chastity is the usual excuse for these disabilities that men

delight to lay upon their wives and mothers.  Here the regard is

absent; and behold the women still bound hand and foot with

meaningless proprieties!  The women themselves, who are survivors

of the old regimen, admit that in those days life was not worth

living.  And yet even then there were exceptions.  There were

female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses besides; nice customs

curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a

High Place, Father Simeon Delmar was shown a stone, and told it was

the throne of some well-descended lady.  How exactly parallel is

this with European practice, when princesses were suffered to

penetrate the strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land

in which they were denied the control of their own children.

But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful

restrictions.  We have seen it as the organ of paternal government.

It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing

to enforce them, rights of private property.  Thus a man, weary of

the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to

this day you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great-

grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn.  Or take

another case.  Anaho is known as 'the country without popoi.'  The

word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main food of

the people:  thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in

the Marquesas, of breadfruit.  And a Marquesan does not readily

conceive life possible without his favourite diet.  A few years ago

a drought killed the breadfruit trees and the bananas in the

district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the open-handed

customs of the island, a singular state of things arose.  Well-

watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho

accordingly crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, 'gave him

his name'--an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected--and from

this improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all

the world as though he had paid for them.  Hence a continued

traffic on the road.  Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and

glistening with sweat, may be seen at all hours of the day, a stick

across his bare shoulders, tripping nervously under a double

burthen of green fruits.  And on the far side of the gap a dozen

stone posts on the wayside in the shadow of a grove mark the

breathing-space of the popoi-carriers.  A little back from the

beach, and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to

find a cluster of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest.

'Why do you not take these?' I asked.  'Tapu,' said Hoka; and I

thought to myself (after the manner of dull travellers) what

children and fools these people were to toil over the mountain and

despoil innocent neighbours when the staff of life was thus growing

at their door.  I was the more in error.  In the general

destruction these surviving trees were enough only for the family

of the proprietor, and by the simple expedient of declaring a tapu

he enforced his right.

The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of

infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness.  A slow disease

follows on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the

bones of the same fish burned with the due mysteries.  The cocoa-

nut and breadfruit tapu works more swiftly.  Suppose you have eaten

tapu fruit at the evening meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy;

in the morning, swelling and a dark discoloration will have

attacked your neck, whence they spread upward to the face; and in

two days, unless the cure be interjected, you must die.  This cure

is prepared from the rubbed leaves of the tree from which the

patient stole; so that he cannot be saved without confessing to the

Tahuku the person whom he wronged.  In the experience of my

informant, almost no tapu had been put in use, except the two

described:  he had thus no opportunity to learn the nature and

operation of the others; and, as the art of making them was

jealously guarded amongst the old men, he believed the mystery

would soon die out.  I should add that he was no Marquesan, but a

Chinaman, a resident in the group from boyhood, and a reverent

believer in the spells which he described.  White men, amongst whom

Ah Fu included himself, were exempt; but he had a tale of a

Tahitian woman, who had come to the Marquesas, eaten tapu fish,

and, although uninformed of her offence and danger, had been

afflicted and cured exactly like a native.

Doubtless the belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and

fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should

be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that

they may detect a depredator by his sickness.  Or, perhaps, we

should understand the idea of the hidden tapu otherwise, as a

politic device to spread uneasiness and extort confessions:  so

that, when a man is ailing, he shall ransack his brain for any

possible offence, and send at once for any proprietor whose rights

he has invaded.  'Had you hidden a tapu?' we may conceive him

asking; and I cannot imagine the proprietor gainsaying it; and this

is perhaps the strangest feature of the system--that it should be

regarded from without with such a mental and implicit awe, and,

when examined from within, should present so many apparent

evidences of design.

We read in Dr. Campbell's Poenamo of a New Zealand girl, who was

foolishly told that she had eaten a tapu yam, and who instantly

sickened, and died in the two days of simple terror.  The period is

the same as in the Marquesas; doubtless the symptoms were so too.

How singular to consider that a superstition of such sway is

possibly a manufactured article; and that, even if it were not

originally invented, its details have plainly been arranged by the

authorities of some Polynesian Scotland Yard.  Fitly enough, the

belief is to-day--and was probably always--far from universal.

Hell at home is a strong deterrent with some; a passing thought

with others; with others, again, a theme of public mockery, not

always well assured; and so in the Marquesas with the tapu.  Mr.

Regler has seen the two extremes of scepticism and implicit fear.

In the tapu grove he found one fellow stealing breadfruit, cheerful

and impudent as a street arab; and it was only on a menace of

exposure that he showed himself the least discountenanced.  The

other case was opposed in every point.  Mr. Regler asked a native

to accompany him upon a voyage; the man went gladly enough, but

suddenly perceiving a dead tapu fish in the bottom of the boat,

leaped back with a scream; nor could the promise of a dollar

prevail upon him to advance.

The Marquesan, it will be observed, adheres to the old idea of the

local circumscription of beliefs and duties.  Not only are the

whites exempt from consequences; but their transgressions seem to

be viewed without horror.  It was Mr. Regler who had killed the

fish; yet the devout native was not shocked at Mr. Regler--only

refused to join him in his boat.  A white is a white:  the servant

(so to speak) of other and more liberal gods; and not to be blamed

if he profit by his liberty.  The Jews were perhaps the first to

interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the Jewish virus is

still strong in Christianity.  All the world must respect our

tapus, or we gnash our teeth.

CHAPTER VII--HATIHEU

The bays of Anaho and Hatiheu are divided at their roots by the

knife-edge of a single hill--the pass so often mentioned; but this

isthmus expands to the seaward in a considerable peninsula:  very

bare and grassy; haunted by sheep and, at night and morning, by the

piercing cries of the shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats;

and on its sea-front indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced

with cliffs of the colour and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack.

In one of these echoing and sunless gullies we saw, clustered like

sea-birds on a splashing ledge, shrill as sea-birds in their

salutation to the passing boat, a group of fisherwomen, stripped to

their gaudy under-clothes.  (The clash of the surf and the thin

female voices echo in my memory.)  We had that day a native crew

and steersman, Kauanui; it was our first experience of Polynesian

seamanship, which consists in hugging every point of land.  There

is no thought in this of saving time, for they will pull a long way

in to skirt a point that is embayed.  It seems that, as they can

never get their houses near enough the surf upon the one side, so

they can never get their boats near enough upon the other.  The

practice in bold water is not so dangerous as it looks--the reflex

from the rocks sending the boat off.  Near beaches with a heavy run

of sea, I continue to think it very hazardous, and find the

composure of the natives annoying to behold.  We took unmingled

pleasure, on the way out, to see so near at hand the beach and the

wonderful colours of the surf.  On the way back, when the sea had

risen and was running strong against us, the fineness of the

steersman's aim grew more embarrassing.  As we came abreast of the

sea-front, where the surf broke highest, Kauanui embraced the

occasion to light his pipe, which then made the circuit of the

boat--each man taking a whiff or two, and, ere he passed it on,

filling his lungs and cheeks with smoke.  Their faces were all

puffed out like apples as we came abreast of the cliff foot, and

the bursting surge fell back into the boat in showers.  At the next

point 'cocanetti' was the word, and the stroke borrowed my knife,

and desisted from his labours to open nuts.  These untimely

indulgences may be compared to the tot of grog served out before a

ship goes into action.

My purpose in this visit led me first to the boys' school, for

Hatiheu is the university of the north islands.  The hum of the

lesson came out to meet us.  Close by the door, where the draught

blew coolest, sat the lay brother; around him, in a packed half-

circle, some sixty high-coloured faces set with staring eyes; and

in the background of the barn-like room benches were to be seen,

and blackboards with sums on them in chalk.  The brother rose to

greet us, sensibly humble.  Thirty years he had been there, he

said, and fingered his white locks as a bashful child pulls out his

pinafore. 'Et point de resultats, monsieur, presque pas de

resultats.'  He pointed to the scholars:  'You see, sir, all the

youth of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu.  Between the ages of six and fifteen

this is all that remains; and it is but a few years since we had a

hundred and twenty from Nuka-hiva alone.  Oui, monsieur, cela se

deperit.'  Prayers, and reading and writing, prayers again and

arithmetic, and more prayers to conclude:  such appeared to be the

dreary nature of the course.  For arithmetic all island people have

a natural taste.  In Hawaii they make good progress in mathematics.

In one of the villages on Majuro, and generally in the Marshall

group, the whole population sit about the trader when he is

weighing copra, and each on his own slate takes down the figures

and computes the total.  The trader, finding them so apt,

introduced fractions, for which they had been taught no rule.  At

first they were quite gravelled but ultimately, by sheer hard

thinking, reasoned out the result, and came one after another to

assure the trader he was right.  Not many people in Europe could

have done the like.  The course at Hatiheu is therefore less

dispiriting to Polynesians than a stranger might have guessed; and

yet how bald it is at best!  I asked the brother if he did not tell

them stories, and he stared at me; if he did not teach them

history, and he said, 'O yes, they had a little Scripture history--

from the New Testament'; and repeated his lamentations over the

lack of results.  I had not the heart to put more questions; I

could but say it must be very discouraging, and resist the impulse

to add that it seemed also very natural.  He looked up--'My days

are far spent,' he said; 'heaven awaits me.'  May that heaven

forgive me, but I was angry with the old man and his simple

consolation.  For think of his opportunity!  The youth, from six to

fifteen, are taken from their homes by Government, centralised at

Hatiheu, where they are supported by a weekly tax of food; and,

with the exception of one month in every year, surrendered wholly

to the direction of the priests.  Since the escapade already

mentioned the holiday occurs at a different period for the girls

and for the boys; so that a Marquesan brother and sister meet

again, after their education is complete, a pair of strangers.  It

is a harsh law, and highly unpopular; but what a power it places in

the hands of the instructors, and how languidly and dully is that

power employed by the mission!  Too much concern to make the

natives pious, a design in which they all confess defeat, is, I

suppose, the explanation of their miserable system.  But they might

see in the girls' school at Tai-o-hae, under the brisk, housewifely

sisters, a different picture of efficiency, and a scene of

neatness, airiness, and spirited and mirthful occupation that

should shame them into cheerier methods.  The sisters themselves

lament their failure.  They complain the annual holiday undoes the

whole year's work; they complain particularly of the heartless

indifference of the girls.  Out of so many pretty and apparently

affectionate pupils whom they have taught and reared, only two have

ever returned to pay a visit of remembrance to their teachers.

These, indeed, come regularly, but the rest, so soon as their

school-days are over, disappear into the woods like captive

insects.  It is hard to imagine anything more discouraging; and yet

I do not believe these ladies need despair.  For a certain interval

they keep the girls alive and innocently busy; and if it be at all

possible to save the race, this would be the means.  No such praise

can be given to the boys' school at Hatiheu.  The day is numbered

already for them all; alike for the teacher and the scholars death

is girt; he is afoot upon the march; and in the frequent interval

they sit and yawn.  But in life there seems a thread of purpose

through the least significant; the drowsiest endeavour is not lost,

and even the school at Hatiheu may be more useful than it seems.

Hatiheu is a place of some pretensions.  The end of the bay towards

Anaho may be called the civil compound, for it boasts the house of

Kooamua, and close on the beach, under a great tree, that of the

gendarme, M. Armand Aussel, with his garden, his pictures, his

books, and his excellent table, to which strangers are made

welcome.  No more singular contrast is possible than between the

gendarmerie and the priesthood, who are besides in smouldering

opposition and full of mutual complaints.  A priest's kitchen in

the eastern islands is a depressing spot to see; and many, or most

of them, make no attempt to keep a garden, sparsely subsisting on

their rations.  But you will never dine with a gendarme without

smacking your lips; and M. Aussel's home-made sausage and the salad

from his garden are unforgotten delicacies.  Pierre Loti may like

to know that he is M. Aussel's favourite author, and that his books

are read in the fit scenery of Hatiheu bay.

The other end is all religious.  It is here that an overhanging and

tip-tilted horn, a good sea-mark for Hatiheu, bursts naked from the

verdure of the climbing forest, and breaks down shoreward in steep

taluses and cliffs.  From the edge of one of the highest, perhaps

seven hundred or a thousand feet above the beach, a Virgin looks

insignificantly down, like a poor lost doll, forgotten there by a

giant child.  This laborious symbol of the Catholics is always

strange to Protestants; we conceive with wonder that men should

think it worth while to toil so many days, and clamber so much

about the face of precipices, for an end that makes us smile; and

yet I believe it was the wise Bishop Dordillon who chose the place,

and I know that those who had a hand in the enterprise look back

with pride upon its vanquished dangers.  The boys' school is a

recent importation; it was at first in Tai-o-hae, beside the

girls'; and it was only of late, after their joint escapade, that

the width of the island was interposed between the sexes.  But

Hatiheu must have been a place of missionary importance from

before.  About midway of the beach no less than three churches

stand grouped in a patch of bananas, intermingled with some pine-

apples.  Two are of wood:  the original church, now in disuse; and

a second that, for some mysterious reason, has never been used.

The new church is of stone, with twin towers, walls flangeing into

buttresses, and sculptured front.  The design itself is good,

simple, and shapely; but the character is all in the detail, where

the architect has bloomed into the sculptor.  It is impossible to

tell in words of the angels (although they are more like winged

archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the

corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited

relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of

a protesting Lucifer.  We were never weary of viewing the imagery,

so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense--in the

sense of inventive gusto and expression--so artistic.  I know not

whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a

corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique still

bright with novelty.  The architect, a French lay brother, still

alive and well, and meditating fresh foundations, must have surely

drawn his descent from a master-builder in the age of the

cathedrals; and it was in looking on the church of Hatiheu that I

seemed to perceive the secret charm of mediaeval sculpture; that

combination of the childish courage of the amateur, attempting all

things, like the schoolboy on his slate, with the manly

perseverance of the artist who does not know when he is conquered.

I had always afterwards a strong wish to meet the architect,

Brother Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident

in Tai-o-hae (the chief port of the island), there were shown in to

us an old, worn, purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay

brother, a type of all that is most sound in France, with a broad,

clever, honest, humorous countenance, an eye very large and bright,

and a strong and healthy body inclining to obesity.  But that his

blouse was black and his face shaven clean, you might pick such a

man to-day, toiling cheerfully in his own patch of vines, from half

a dozen provinces of France; and yet he had always for me a

haunting resemblance to an old kind friend of my boyhood, whom I

name in case any of my readers should share with me that memory--

Dr. Paul, of the West Kirk.  Almost at the first word I was sure it

was my architect, and in a moment we were deep in a discussion of

Hatiheu church.  Brother Michel spoke always of his labours with a

twinkle of humour, underlying which it was possible to spy a

serious pride, and the change from one to another was often very

human and diverting.  'Et vos gargouilles moyen-age,' cried I;

'comme elles sont originates!'  'N'est-ce pas?  Elles sont bien

droles!' he said, smiling broadly; and the next moment, with a

sudden gravity:  'Cependant il y en a une qui a une patte de casse;

il faut que je voie cela.'  I asked if he had any model--a point we

much discussed.  'Non,' said he simply; 'c'est une eglise ideale.'

The relievo was his favourite performance, and very justly so.  The

angels at the door, he owned, he would like to destroy and replace.

'Ils n'ont pas de vie, ils manquent de vie.  Vous devriez voir mon

eglise a la Dominique; j'ai la une Vierge qui est vraiment

gentille.'  'Ah,' I cried, 'they told me you had said you would

never build another church, and I wrote in my journal I could not

believe it.'  'Oui, j'aimerais bien en fairs une autre,' he

confessed, and smiled at the confession.  An artist will understand

how much I was attracted by this conversation.  There is no bond so

near as a community in that unaffected interest and slightly shame-

faced pride which mark the intelligent man enamoured of an art.  He

sees the limitations of his aim, the defects of his practice; he

smiles to be so employed upon the shores of death, yet sees in his

own devotion something worthy.  Artists, if they had the same sense

of humour with the Augurs, would smile like them on meeting, but

the smile would not be scornful.

I had occasion to see much of this excellent man.  He sailed with

us from Tai-o-hae to Hiva-oa, a dead beat of ninety miles against a

heavy sea.  It was what is called a good passage, and a feather in

the Casco's cap; but among the most miserable forty hours that any

one of us had ever passed.  We were swung and tossed together all

that time like shot in a stage thunder-box.  The mate was thrown

down and had his head cut open; the captain was sick on deck; the

cook sick in the galley.  Of all our party only two sat down to

dinner.  I was one.  I own that I felt wretchedly; and I can only

say of the other, who professed to feel quite well, that she fled

at an early moment from the table.  It was in these circumstances

that we skirted the windward shore of that indescribable island of

Ua-pu; viewing with dizzy eyes the coves, the capes, the breakers,

the climbing forests, and the inaccessible stone needles that

surmount the mountains.  The place persists, in a dark corner of

our memories, like a piece of the scenery of nightmares.  The end

of this distressful passage, where we were to land our passengers,

was in a similar vein of roughness.  The surf ran high on the beach

at Taahauku; the boat broached-to and capsized; and all hands were

submerged.  Only the brother himself, who was well used to the

experience, skipped ashore, by some miracle of agility, with scarce

a sprinkling.  Thenceforward, during our stay at Hiva-oa, he was

our cicerone and patron; introducing us, taking us excursions,

serving us in every way, and making himself daily more beloved.

Michel Blanc had been a carpenter by trade; had made money and

retired, supposing his active days quite over; and it was only when

he found idleness dangerous that he placed his capital and

acquirements at the service of the mission.  He became their

carpenter, mason, architect, and engineer; added sculpture to his

accomplishments, and was famous for his skill in gardening.  He

wore an enviable air of having found a port from life's contentions

and lying there strongly anchored; went about his business with a

jolly simplicity; complained of no lack of results--perhaps shyly

thinking his own statuary result enough; and was altogether a

pattern of the missionary layman.

CHAPTER VIII--THE PORT OF ENTRY

The port--the mart, the civil and religious capital of these rude

islands--is called Tai-o-hae, and lies strung along the beach of a

precipitous green bay in Nuka-hiva.  It was midwinter when we came

thither, and the weather was sultry, boisterous, and inconstant.

Now the wind blew squally from the land down gaps of splintered

precipice; now, between the sentinel islets of the entry, it came

in gusts from seaward.  Heavy and dark clouds impended on the

summits; the rain roared and ceased; the scuppers of the mountain

gushed; and the next day we would see the sides of the amphitheatre

bearded with white falls.  Along the beach the town shows a thin

file of houses, mostly white, and all ensconced in the foliage of

an avenue of green puraos; a pier gives access from the sea across

the belt of breakers; to the eastward there stands, on a projecting

bushy hill, the old fort which is now the calaboose, or prison;

eastward still, alone in a garden, the Residency flies the colours

of France.  Just off Calaboose Hill, the tiny Government schooner

rides almost permanently at anchor, marks eight bells in the

morning (there or thereabout) with the unfurling of her flag, and

salutes the setting sun with the report of a musket.

Here dwell together, and share the comforts of a club (which may be

enumerated as a billiard-board, absinthe, a map of the world on

Mercator's projection, and one of the most agreeable verandahs in

the tropics), a handful of whites of varying nationality, mostly

French officials, German and Scottish merchant clerks, and the

agents of the opium monopoly.  There are besides three tavern-

keepers, the shrewd Scot who runs the cotton gin-mill, two white

ladies, and a sprinkling of people 'on the beach'--a South Sea

expression for which there is no exact equivalent.  It is a

pleasant society, and a hospitable.  But one man, who was often to

be seen seated on the logs at the pier-head, merits a word for the

singularity of his history and appearance.  Long ago, it seems, he

fell in love with a native lady, a High Chiefess in Ua-pu.  She, on

being approached, declared she could never marry a man who was

untattooed; it looked so naked; whereupon, with some greatness of

soul, our hero put himself in the hands of the Tahukus, and, with

still greater, persevered until the process was complete.  He had

certainly to bear a great expense, for the Tahuku will not work

without reward; and certainly exquisite pain.  Kooamua, high chief

as he was, and one of the old school, was only part tattooed; he

could not, he told us with lively pantomime, endure the torture to

an end.  Our enamoured countryman was more resolved; he was

tattooed from head to foot in the most approved methods of the art;

and at last presented himself before his mistress a new man.  The

fickle fair one could never behold him from that day except with

laughter.  For my part, I could never see the man without a kind of

admiration; of him it might be said, if ever of any, that he had

loved not wisely, but too well.

The Residency stands by itself, Calaboose Hill screening it from

the fringe of town along the further bay.  The house is commodious,

with wide verandahs; all day it stands open, back and front, and

the trade blows copiously over its bare floors.  On a week-day the

garden offers a scene of most untropical animation, half a dozen

convicts toiling there cheerfully with spade and barrow, and

touching hats and smiling to the visitor like old attached family

servants.  On Sunday these are gone, and nothing to be seen but

dogs of all ranks and sizes peacefully slumbering in the shady

grounds; for the dogs of Tai-o-hae are very courtly-minded, and

make the seat of Government their promenade and place of siesta.

In front and beyond, a strip of green down loses itself in a low

wood of many species of acacia; and deep in the wood a ruinous wall

encloses the cemetery of the Europeans.  English and Scottish sleep

there, and Scandinavians, and French maitres de manoeuvres and

maitres ouvriers:  mingling alien dust.  Back in the woods,

perhaps, the blackbird, or (as they call him there) the island

nightingale, will be singing home strains; and the ceaseless

requiem of the surf hangs on the ear.  I have never seen a resting-

place more quiet; but it was a long thought how far these sleepers

had all travelled, and from what diverse homes they had set forth,

to lie here in the end together.

On the summit of its promontory hill, the calaboose stands all day

with doors and window-shutters open to the trade.  On my first

visit a dog was the only guardian visible.  He, indeed, rose with

an attitude so menacing that I was glad to lay hands on an old

barrel-hoop; and I think the weapon must have been familiar, for

the champion instantly retreated, and as I wandered round the court

and through the building, I could see him, with a couple of

companions, humbly dodging me about the corners.  The prisoners'

dormitory was a spacious, airy room, devoid of any furniture; its

whitewashed walls covered with inscriptions in Marquesan and rude

drawings:  one of the pier, not badly done; one of a murder;

several of French soldiers in uniform.  There was one legend in

French:  'Je n'est' (sic) 'pas le sou.'  From this noontide

quietude it must not be supposed the prison was untenanted; the

calaboose at Tai-o-hae does a good business.  But some of its

occupants were gardening at the Residency, and the rest were

probably at work upon the streets, as free as our scavengers at

home, although not so industrious.  On the approach of evening they

would be called in like children from play; and the harbour-master

(who is also the jailer) would go through the form of locking them

up until six the next morning.  Should a prisoner have any call in

town, whether of pleasure or affairs, he has but to unhook the

window-shutters; and if he is back again, and the shutter decently

replaced, by the hour of call on the morrow, he may have met the

harbour-master in the avenue, and there will be no complaint, far

less any punishment.  But this is not all.  The charming French

Resident, M. Delaruelle, carried me one day to the calaboose on an

official visit.  In the green court, a very ragged gentleman, his

legs deformed with the island elephantiasis, saluted us smiling.

'One of our political prisoners--an insurgent from Raiatea,' said

the Resident; and then to the jailer:  'I thought I had ordered him

a new pair of trousers.'  Meanwhile no other convict was to be

seen--'Eh bien,' said the Resident, 'ou sont vos prisonniers?'

'Monsieur le Resident,' replied the jailer, saluting with soldierly

formality, 'comme c'est jour de fete, je les ai laisse aller a la

chasse.'  They were all upon the mountains hunting goats!

Presently we came to the quarters of the women, likewise deserted--

'Ou sont vos bonnes femmes?' asked the Resident; and the jailer

cheerfully responded:  'Je crois, Monsieur le Resident, qu'elles

sont allees quelquepart faire une visite.'  It had been the design

of M. Delaruelle, who was much in love with the whimsicalities of

his small realm, to elicit something comical; but not even he

expected anything so perfect as the last.  To complete the picture

of convict life in Tai-o-hae, it remains to be added that these

criminals draw a salary as regularly as the President of the

Republic.  Ten sous a day is their hire.  Thus they have money,

food, shelter, clothing, and, I was about to write, their liberty.

The French are certainly a good-natured people, and make easy

masters.  They are besides inclined to view the Marquesans with an

eye of humorous indulgence.  'They are dying, poor devils!' said M.

Delaruelle:  'the main thing is to let them die in peace.'  And it

was not only well said, but I believe expressed the general

thought.  Yet there is another element to be considered; for these

convicts are not merely useful, they are almost essential to the

French existence.  With a people incurably idle, dispirited by what

can only be called endemic pestilence, and inflamed with ill-

feeling against their new masters, crime and convict labour are a

godsend to the Government.

Theft is practically the sole crime.  Originally petty pilferers,

the men of Tai-o-hae now begin to force locks and attack strong-

boxes.  Hundreds of dollars have been taken at a time; though, with

that redeeming moderation so common in Polynesian theft, the

Marquesan burglar will always take a part and leave a part, sharing

(so to speak) with the proprietor.  If it be Chilian coin--the

island currency--he will escape; if the sum is in gold, French

silver, or bank-notes, the police wait until the money begins to

come in circulation, and then easily pick out their man.  And now

comes the shameful part.  In plain English, the prisoner is

tortured until he confesses and (if that be possible) restores the

money.  To keep him alone, day and night, in the black hole, is to

inflict on the Marquesan torture inexpressible.  Even his robberies

are carried on in the plain daylight, under the open sky, with the

stimulus of enterprise, and the countenance of an accomplice; his

terror of the dark is still insurmountable; conceive, then, what he

endures in his solitary dungeon; conceive how he longs to confess,

become a full-fledged convict, and be allowed to sleep beside his

comrades.  While we were in Tai-o-hae a thief was under prevention.

He had entered a house about eight in the morning, forced a trunk,

and stolen eleven hundred francs; and now, under the horrors of

darkness, solitude, and a bedevilled cannibal imagination, he was

reluctantly confessing and giving up his spoil.  From one cache,

which he had already pointed out, three hundred francs had been

recovered, and it was expected that he would presently disgorge the

rest.  This would be ugly enough if it were all; but I am bound to

say, because it is a matter the French should set at rest, that

worse is continually hinted.  I heard that one man was kept six

days with his arms bound backward round a barrel; and it is the

universal report that every gendarme in the South Seas is equipped

with something in the nature of a thumbscrew.  I do not know this.

I never had the face to ask any of the gendarmes--pleasant,

intelligent, and kindly fellows--with whom I have been intimate,

and whose hospitality I have enjoyed; and perhaps the tale reposes

(as I hope it does) on a misconstruction of that ingenious cat's-

cradle with which the French agent of police so readily secures a

prisoner.  But whether physical or moral, torture is certainly

employed; and by a barbarous injustice, the state of accusation (in

which a man may very well be innocently placed) is positively

painful; the state of conviction (in which all are supposed guilty)

is comparatively free, and positively pleasant.  Perhaps worse

still,--not only the accused, but sometimes his wife, his mistress,

or his friend, is subjected to the same hardships.  I was admiring,

in the tapu system, the ingenuity of native methods of detection;

there is not much to admire in those of the French, and to lock up

a timid child in a dark room, and, if he proved obstinate, lock up

his sister in the next, is neither novel nor humane.

The main occasion of these thefts is the new vice of opium-eating.

'Here nobody ever works, and all eat opium,' said a gendarme; and

Ah Fu knew a woman who ate a dollar's worth in a day.  The

successful thief will give a handful of money to each of his

friends, a dress to a woman, pass an evening in one of the taverns

of Tai-o-hae, during which he treats all comers, produce a big lump

of opium, and retire to the bush to eat and sleep it off.  A

trader, who did not sell opium, confessed to me that he was at his

wit's end.  'I do not sell it, but others do,' said he.  'The

natives only work to buy it; if they walk over to me to sell their

cotton, they have just to walk over to some one else to buy their

opium with my money.  And why should they be at the bother of two

walks?  There is no use talking,' he added--'opium is the currency

of this country.'

The man under prevention during my stay at Tai-o-hae lost patience

while the Chinese opium-seller was being examined in his presence.

'Of course he sold me opium!' he broke out; 'all the Chinese here

sell opium.  It was only to buy opium that I stole; it is only to

buy opium that anybody steals.  And what you ought to do is to let

no opium come here, and no Chinamen.'  This is precisely what is

done in Samoa by a native Government; but the French have bound

their own hands, and for forty thousand francs sold native subjects

to crime and death.  This horrid traffic may be said to have sprung

up by accident.  It was Captain Hart who had the misfortune to be

the means of beginning it, at a time when his plantations

flourished in the Marquesas, and he found a difficulty in keeping

Chinese coolies.  To-day the plantations are practically deserted

and the Chinese gone; but in the meanwhile the natives have learned

the vice, the patent brings in a round sum, and the needy

Government at Papeete shut their eyes and open their pockets.  Of

course, the patentee is supposed to sell to Chinamen alone; equally

of course, no one could afford to pay forty thousand francs for the

privilege of supplying a scattered handful of Chinese; and every

one knows the truth, and all are ashamed of it.  French officials

shake their heads when opium is mentioned; and the agents of the

farmer blush for their employment.  Those that live in glass houses

should not throw stones; as a subject of the British crown, I am an

unwilling shareholder in the largest opium business under heaven.

But the British case is highly complicated; it implies the

livelihood of millions; and must be reformed, when it can be

reformed at all, with prudence.  This French business, on the other

hand, is a nostrum and a mere excrescence.  No native industry was

to be encouraged:  the poison is solemnly imported.  No native

habit was to be considered:  the vice has been gratuitously

introduced.  And no creature profits, save the Government at

Papeete--the not very enviable gentlemen who pay them, and the

Chinese underlings who do the dirty work.

CHAPTER IX--THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA

The history of the Marquesas is, of late years, much confused by

the coming and going of the French.  At least twice they have

seized the archipelago, at least once deserted it; and in the

meanwhile the natives pursued almost without interruption their

desultory cannibal wars.  Through these events and changing

dynasties, a single considerable figure may be seen to move:  that

of the high chief, a king, Temoana.  Odds and ends of his history

came to my ears:  how he was at first a convert to the Protestant

mission; how he was kidnapped or exiled from his native land,

served as cook aboard a whaler, and was shown, for small charge, in

English seaports; how he returned at last to the Marquesas, fell

under the strong and benign influence of the late bishop, extended

his influence in the group, was for a while joint ruler with the

prelate, and died at last the chief supporter of Catholicism and

the French.  His widow remains in receipt of two pounds a month

from the French Government.  Queen she is usually called, but in

the official almanac she figures as 'Madame Vaekehu, Grande

Chefesse.'  His son (natural or adoptive, I know not which),

Stanislao Moanatini, chief of Akaui, serves in Tai-o-hae as a kind

of Minister of Public Works; and the daughter of Stanislao is High

Chiefess of the southern island of Tauata.  These, then, are the

greatest folk of the archipelago; we thought them also the most

estimable.  This is the rule in Polynesia, with few exceptions; the

higher the family, the better the man--better in sense, better in

manners, and usually taller and stronger in body.  A stranger

advances blindfold.  He scrapes acquaintance as he can.  Save the

tattoo in the Marquesas, nothing indicates the difference of rank;

and yet almost invariably we found, after we had made them, that

our friends were persons of station.  I have said 'usually taller

and stronger.'  I might have been more absolute,--over all

Polynesia, and a part of Micronesia, the rule holds good; the great

ones of the isle, and even of the village, are greater of bone and

muscle, and often heavier of flesh, than any commoner.  The usual

explanation--that the high-born child is more industriously

shampooed, is probably the true one.  In New Caledonia, at least,

where the difference does not exist, has never been remarked, the

practice of shampooing seems to be itself unknown.  Doctors would

be well employed in a study of the point.

Vaekehu lives at the other end of the town from the Residency,

beyond the buildings of the mission.  Her house is on the European

plan:  a table in the midst of the chief room; photographs and

religious pictures on the wall.  It commands to either hand a

charming vista:  through the front door, a peep of green lawn,

scurrying pigs, the pendent fans of the coco-palm and splendour of

the bursting surf:  through the back, mounting forest glades and

coronals of precipice.  Here, in the strong thorough-draught, Her

Majesty received us in a simple gown of print, and with no mark of

royalty but the exquisite finish of her tattooed mittens, the

elaboration of her manners, and the gentle falsetto in which all

the highly refined among Marquesan ladies (and Vaekehu above all

others) delight to sing their language.  An adopted daughter

interpreted, while we gave the news, and rehearsed by name our

friends of Anaho.  As we talked, we could see, through the landward

door, another lady of the household at her toilet under the green

trees; who presently, when her hair was arranged, and her hat

wreathed with flowers, appeared upon the back verandah with

gracious salutations.

Vaekehu is very deaf; 'merci' is her only word of French; and I do

not know that she seemed clever.  An exquisite, kind refinement,

with a shade of quietism, gathered perhaps from the nuns, was what

chiefly struck us.  Or rather, upon that first occasion, we were

conscious of a sense as of district-visiting on our part, and

reduced evangelical gentility on the part of our hostess.  The

other impression followed after she was more at ease, and came with

Stanislao and his little girl to dine on board the Casco.  She had

dressed for the occasion:  wore white, which very well became her

strong brown face; and sat among us, eating or smoking her

cigarette, quite cut off from all society, or only now and then

included through the intermediary of her son.  It was a position

that might have been ridiculous, and she made it ornamental; making

believe to hear and to be entertained; her face, whenever she met

our eyes, lighting with the smile of good society; her

contributions to the talk, when she made any, and that was seldom,

always complimentary and pleasing.  No attention was paid to the

child, for instance, but what she remarked and thanked us for.  Her

parting with each, when she came to leave, was gracious and pretty,

as had been every step of her behaviour.  When Mrs. Stevenson held

out her hand to say good-bye, Vaekehu took it, held it, and a

moment smiled upon her; dropped it, and then, as upon a kindly

after-thought, and with a sort of warmth of condescension, held out

both hands and kissed my wife upon both cheeks.  Given the same

relation of years and of rank, the thing would have been so done on

the boards of the Comedie Francaise; just so might Madame Brohan

have warmed and condescended to Madame Broisat in the Marquis de

Villemer.  It was my part to accompany our guests ashore:  when I

kissed the little girl good-bye at the pier steps, Vaekehu gave a

cry of gratification, reached down her hand into the boat, took

mine, and pressed it with that flattering softness which seems the

coquetry of the old lady in every quarter of the earth.  The next

moment she had taken Stanislao's arm, and they moved off along the

pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered.  This was a queen of

cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the

greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago,

before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-

hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought

for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat

on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while

the drums were going twenty strong and the priests carried up the

blood-stained baskets of long-pig.  And now behold her, out of that

past of violence and sickening feasts, step forth, in her age, a

quiet, smooth, elaborate old lady, such as you might find at home

(mittened also, but not often so well-mannered) in a score of

country houses.  Only Vaekehu's mittens were of dye, not of silk;

and they had been paid for, not in money, but the cooked flesh of

men.  It came in my mind with a clap, what she could think of it

herself, and whether at heart, perhaps, she might not regret and

aspire after the barbarous and stirring past.  But when I asked

Stanislao--'Ah!' said he, 'she is content; she is religious, she

passes all her days with the sisters.'

Stanislao (Stanislaos, with the final consonant evaded after the

Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America,

and there educated by the fathers.  His French is fluent, his talk

sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he

is of excellent service to the French.  With the prestige of his

name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the

natives working and the roads passable.  Without Stanislao and the

convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in

Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up,

the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about

the ears of impotent officials.  And yet though the hereditary

favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has

always an eye upon the past.  He showed me where the old public

place had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told

me how great and fine it was, and surrounded on all sides by

populous houses, whence, at the beating of the drums, the folk

crowded to make holiday.  The drum-beat of the Polynesian has a

strange and gloomy stimulation for the nerves of all.  White

persons feel it--at these precipitate sounds their hearts beat

faster; and, according to old residents, its effect on the natives

was extreme.  Bishop Dordillon might entreat; Temoana himself

command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts

triumphed.  And now it might beat upon these ruins, and who should

assemble?  The houses are down, the people dead, their lineage

extinct; and the sweepings and fugitives of distant bays and

islands encamp upon their graves.  The decline of the dance

Stanislao especially laments.  'Chaque pays a ses coutumes,' said

he; but in the report of any gendarme, perhaps corruptly eager to

increase the number of delits and the instruments of his own power,

custom after custom is placed on the expurgatorial index.  'Tenez,

une danse qui n'est pas permise,' said Stanislao:  'je ne sais pas

pourquoi, elle est tres jolie, elle va comme ca,' and sticking his

umbrella upright in the road, he sketched the steps and gestures.

All his criticisms of the present, all his regrets for the past,

struck me as temperate and sensible.  The short term of office of

the Resident he thought the chief defect of the administration;

that officer having scarce begun to be efficient ere he was

recalled.  I thought I gathered, too, that he regarded with some

fear the coming change from a naval to a civil governor.  I am sure

at least that I regard it so myself; for the civil servants of

France have never appeared to any foreigner as at all the flower of

their country, while her naval officers may challenge competition

with the world.  In all his talk, Stanislao was particular to speak

of his own country as a land of savages; and when he stated an

opinion of his own, it was with some apologetic preface, alleging

that he was 'a savage who had travelled.'  There was a deal, in

this elaborate modesty, of honest pride.  Yet there was something

in the precaution that saddened me; and I could not but fear he was

only forestalling a taunt that he had heard too often.

I recall with interest two interviews with Stanislao.  The first

was a certain afternoon of tropic rain, which we passed together in

the verandah of the club; talking at times with heightened voices

as the showers redoubled overhead, passing at times into the

billiard-room, to consult, in the dim, cloudy daylight, that map of

the world which forms its chief adornment.  He was naturally

ignorant of English history, so that I had much of news to

communicate.  The story of Gordon I told him in full, and many

episodes of the Indian Mutiny, Lucknow, the second battle of Cawn-

pore, the relief of Arrah, the death of poor Spottis-woode, and Sir

Hugh Rose's hotspur, midland campaign.  He was intent to hear; his

brown face, strongly marked with small-pox, kindled and changed

with each vicissitude.  His eyes glowed with the reflected light of

battle; his questions were many and intelligent, and it was chiefly

these that sent us so often to the map.  But it is of our parting

that I keep the strongest sense.  We were to sail on the morrow,

and the night had fallen, dark, gusty, and rainy, when we stumbled

up the hill to bid farewell to Stanislao.  He had already loaded us

with gifts; but more were waiting.  We sat about the table over

cigars and green cocoa-nuts; claps of wind blew through the house

and extinguished the lamp, which was always instantly relighted

with a single match; and these recurrent intervals of darkness were

felt as a relief.  For there was something painful and embarrassing

in the kindness of that separation.  'Ah, vous devriez rester ici,

mon cher ami!' cried Stanislao.  'Vous etes les gens qu'il faut

pour les Kanaques; vous etes doux, vous et votre famille; vous

seriez obeis dans toutes les iles.'  We had been civil; not always

that, my conscience told me, and never anything beyond; and all

this to-do is a measure, not of our considerateness, but of the

want of it in others.  The rest of the evening, on to Vaekehu's and

back as far as to the pier, Stanislao walked with my arm and

sheltered me with his umbrella; and after the boat had put off, we

could still distinguish, in the murky darkness, his gestures of

farewell.  His words, if there were any, were drowned by the rain

and the loud surf.

I have mentioned presents, a vexed question in the South Seas; and

one which well illustrates the common, ignorant habit of regarding

races in a lump.  In many quarters the Polynesian gives only to

receive.  I have visited islands where the population mobbed me for

all the world like dogs after the waggon of cat's-meat; and where

the frequent proposition, 'You my pleni (friend),' or (with more of

pathos) 'You all 'e same my father,' must be received with hearty

laughter and a shout.  And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and

rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale.  It is

the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such

characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that

they do not lose.  But for persons of a different stamp the

statement must be reversed.  The shabby Polynesian is anxious till

he has received the return gift; the generous is uneasy until he

has made it.  The first is disappointed if you have not given more

than he; the second is miserable if he thinks he has given less

than you.  This is my experience; if it clash with that of others,

I pity their fortune, and praise mine:  the circumstances cannot

change what I have seen, nor lessen what I have received.  And

indeed I find that those who oppose me often argue from a ground of

singular presumptions; comparing Polynesians with an ideal person,

compact of generosity and gratitude, whom I never had the pleasure

of encountering; and forgetting that what is almost poverty to us

is wealth almost unthinkable to them.  I will give one instance:  I

chanced to speak with consideration of these gifts of Stanislao's

with a certain clever man, a great hater and contemner of Kanakas.

'Well! what were they?' he cried.  'A pack of old men's beards.

Trash!'  And the same gentleman, some half an hour later, being

upon a different train of thought, dwelt at length on the esteem in

which the Marquesans held that sort of property, how they preferred

it to all others except land, and what fancy prices it would fetch.

Using his own figures, I computed that, in this commodity alone,

the gifts of Vaekehu and Stanislao represented between two and

three hundred dollars; and the queen's official salary is of two

hundred and forty in the year.

But generosity on the one hand, and conspicuous meanness on the

other, are in the South Seas, as at home, the exception.  It is

neither with any hope of gain, nor with any lively wish to please,

that the ordinary Polynesian chooses and presents his gifts.  A

plain social duty lies before him, which he performs correctly, but

without the least enthusiasm.  And we shall best understand his

attitude of mind, if we examine our own to the cognate absurdity of

marriage presents.  There we give without any special thought of a

return; yet if the circumstance arise, and the return be withheld,

we shall judge ourselves insulted.  We give them usually without

affection, and almost never with a genuine desire to please; and

our gift is rather a mark of our own status than a measure of our

love to the recipients.  So in a great measure and with the common

run of the Polynesians; their gifts are formal; they imply no more

than social recognition; and they are made and reciprocated, as we

pay and return our morning visits.  And the practice of marking and

measuring events and sentiments by presents is universal in the

island world.  A gift plays with them the part of stamp and seal;

and has entered profoundly into the mind of islanders.  Peace and

war, marriage, adoption and naturalisation, are celebrated or

declared by the acceptance or the refusal of gifts; and it is as

natural for the islander to bring a gift as for us to carry a card-

case.

CHAPTER X--A PORTRAIT AND A STORY

I have had occasion several times to name the late bishop, Father

Dordillon, 'Monseigneur,' as he is still almost universally called,

Vicar-Apostolic of the Marquesas and Bishop of Cambysopolis in

partibus.  Everywhere in the islands, among all classes and races,

this fine, old, kindly, cheerful fellow is remembered with

affection and respect.  His influence with the natives was

paramount.  They reckoned him the highest of men--higher than an

admiral; brought him their money to keep; took his advice upon

their purchases; nor would they plant trees upon their own land

till they had the approval of the father of the islands.  During

the time of the French exodus he singly represented Europe, living

in the Residency, and ruling by the hand of Temoana.  The first

roads were made under his auspices and by his persuasion.  The old

road between Hatiheu and Anaho was got under way from either side

on the ground that it would be pleasant for an evening promenade,

and brought to completion by working on the rivalry of the two

villages.  The priest would boast in Hatiheu of the progress made

in Anaho, and he would tell the folk of Anaho, 'If you don't take

care, your neighbours will be over the hill before you are at the

top.'  It could not be so done to-day; it could then; death, opium,

and depopulation had not gone so far; and the people of Hatiheu, I

was told, still vied with each other in fine attire, and used to go

out by families, in the cool of the evening, boat-sailing and

racing in the bay.  There seems some truth at least in the common

view, that this joint reign of Temoana and the bishop was the last

and brief golden age of the Marquesas.  But the civil power

returned, the mission was packed out of the Residency at twenty-

four hours' notice, new methods supervened, and the golden age

(whatever it quite was) came to an end.  It is the strongest proof

of Father Dordillon's prestige that it survived, seemingly without

loss, this hasty deposition.

His method with the natives was extremely mild.  Among these

barbarous children he still played the part of the smiling father;

and he was careful to observe, in all indifferent matters, the

Marquesan etiquette.  Thus, in the singular system of artificial

kinship, the bishop had been adopted by Vaekehu as a grandson; Miss

Fisher, of Hatiheu, as a daughter.  From that day, Monseigneur

never addressed the young lady except as his mother, and closed his

letters with the formalities of a dutiful son.  With Europeans he

could be strict, even to the extent of harshness.  He made no

distinction against heretics, with whom he was on friendly terms;

but the rules of his own Church he would see observed; and once at

least he had a white man clapped in jail for the desecration of a

saint's day.  But even this rigour, so intolerable to laymen, so

irritating to Protestants, could not shake his popularity.  We

shall best conceive him by examples nearer home; we may all have

known some divine of the old school in Scotland, a literal

Sabbatarian, a stickler for the letter of the law, who was yet in

private modest, innocent, genial and mirthful.  Much such a man, it

seems, was Father Dordillon.  And his popularity bore a test yet

stronger.  He had the name, and probably deserved it, of a shrewd

man in business and one that made the mission pay.  Nothing so much

stirs up resentment as the inmixture in commerce of religious

bodies; but even rival traders spoke well of Monseigneur.

His character is best portrayed in the story of the days of his

decline.  A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must

desist from his literary labours:  his Marquesan hymns, grammars,

and dictionaries; his scientific papers, lives of saints, and

devotional poetry.  He cast about for a new interest:  pitched on

gardening, and was to be seen all day, with spade and water-pot, in

his childlike eagerness, actually running between the borders.

Another step of decay, and he must leave his garden also.

Instantly a new occupation was devised, and he sat in the mission

cutting paper flowers and wreaths.  His diocese was not great

enough for his activity; the churches of the Marquesas were papered

with his handiwork, and still he must be making more.  'Ah,' said

he, smiling, 'when I am dead what a fine time you will have

clearing out my trash!'  He had been dead about six months; but I

was pleased to see some of his trophies still exposed, and looked

upon them with a smile:  the tribute (if I have read his cheerful

character aright) which he would have preferred to any useless

tears.  Disease continued progressively to disable him; he who had

clambered so stalwartly over the rude rocks of the Marquesas,

bringing peace to warfaring clans, was for some time carried in a

chair between the mission and the church, and at last confined to

bed, impotent with dropsy, and tormented with bed-sores and

sciatica.  Here he lay two months without complaint; and on the

11th January 1888, in the seventy-ninth year of his life, and the

thirty-fourth of his labours in the Marquesas, passed away.

Those who have a taste for hearing missions, Protestant or

Catholic, decried, must seek their pleasure elsewhere than in my

pages.  Whether Catholic or Protestant, with all their gross blots,

with all their deficiency of candour, of humour, and of common

sense, the missionaries are the best and the most useful whites in

the Pacific.  This is a subject which will follow us throughout;

but there is one part of it that may conveniently be treated here.

The married and the celibate missionary, each has his particular

advantage and defect.  The married missionary, taking him at the

best, may offer to the native what he is much in want of--a higher

picture of domestic life; but the woman at his elbow tends to keep

him in touch with Europe and out of touch with Polynesia, and to

perpetuate, and even to ingrain, parochial decencies far best

forgotten.  The mind of the female missionary tends, for instance,

to be continually busied about dress.  She can be taught with

extreme difficulty to think any costume decent but that to which

she grew accustomed on Clapham Common; and to gratify this

prejudice, the native is put to useless expense, his mind is

tainted with the morbidities of Europe, and his health is set in

danger.  The celibate missionary, on the other hand, and whether at

best or worst, falls readily into native ways of life; to which he

adds too commonly what is either a mark of celibate man at large,

or an inheritance from mediaeval saints--I mean slovenly habits and

an unclean person.  There are, of course, degrees in this; and the

sister (of course, and all honour to her) is as fresh as a lady at

a ball.  For the diet there is nothing to be said--it must amaze

and shock the Polynesian--but for the adoption of native habits

there is much.  'Chaque pays a ses coutumes,' said Stanislao; these

it is the missionary's delicate task to modify; and the more he can

do so from within, and from a native standpoint, the better he will

do his work; and here I think the Catholics have sometimes the

advantage; in the Vicariate of Dordillon, I am sure they had it.  I

have heard the bishop blamed for his indulgence to the natives, and

above all because he did not rage with sufficient energy against

cannibalism.  It was a part of his policy to live among the natives

like an elder brother; to follow where he could; to lead where it

was necessary; never to drive; and to encourage the growth of new

habits, instead of violently rooting up the old.  And it might be

better, in the long-run, if this policy were always followed.

It might be supposed that native missionaries would prove more

indulgent, but the reverse is found to be the case.  The new broom

sweeps clean; and the white missionary of to-day is often

embarrassed by the bigotry of his native coadjutor.  What else

should we expect?  On some islands, sorcery, polygamy, human

sacrifice, and tobacco-smoking have been prohibited, the dress of

the native has been modified, and himself warned in strong terms

against rival sects of Christianity; all by the same man, at the

same period of time, and with the like authority.  By what

criterion is the convert to distinguish the essential from the

unessential?  He swallows the nostrum whole; there has been no play

of mind, no instruction, and, except for some brute utility in the

prohibitions, no advance.  To call things by their proper names,

this is teaching superstition.  It is unfortunate to use the word;

so few people have read history, and so many have dipped into

little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to a

conclusion, and suppose the labour lost.  And far from that:  These

semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the

original evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in

practice to be highly fructifying; and in particular those who have

learned and who go forth again to teach them offer an example to

the world.  The best specimen of the Christian hero that I ever met

was one of these native missionaries.  He had saved two lives at

the risk of his own; like Nathan, he had bearded a tyrant in his

hour of blood; when a whole white population fled, he alone stood

to his duty; and his behaviour under domestic sorrow with which the

public has no concern filled the beholder with sympathy and

admiration.  A poor little smiling laborious man he looked; and you

would have thought he had nothing in him but that of which indeed

he had too much--facile good-nature.

It chances that the only rivals of Monseigneur and his mission in

the Marquesas were certain of these brown-skinned evangelists,

natives from Hawaii.  I know not what they thought of Father

Dordillon:  they are the only class I did not question; but I

suspect the prelate to have regarded them askance, for he was

eminently human.  During my stay at Tai-o-hae, the time of the

yearly holiday came round at the girls' school; and a whole fleet

of whale-boats came from Ua-pu to take the daughters of that island

home.  On board of these was Kauwealoha, one of the pastors, a

fine, rugged old gentleman, of that leonine type so common in

Hawaii.  He paid me a visit in the Casco, and there entertained me

with a tale of one of his colleagues, Kekela, a missionary in the

great cannibal isle of Hiva-oa.  It appears that shortly after a

kidnapping visit from a Peruvian slaver, the boats of an American

whaler put into a bay upon that island, were attacked, and made

their escape with difficulty, leaving their mate, a Mr. Whalon, in

the hands of the natives.  The captive, with his arms bound behind

his back, was cast into a house; and the chief announced the

capture to Kekela.  And here I begin to follow the version of

Kauwealoha; it is a good specimen of Kanaka English; and the reader

is to conceive it delivered with violent emphasis and speaking

pantomime.

'"I got 'Melican mate," the chief he say.  "What you go do 'Melican

mate?" Kekela he say.  "I go make fire, I go kill, I go eat him,"

he say; "you come to-mollow eat piece."  "I no WANT eat 'Melican

mate!" Kekela he say; "why you want?"  "This bad shippee, this

slave shippee," the chief he say.  "One time a shippee he come from

Pelu, he take away plenty Kanaka, he take away my son.  'Melican

mate he bad man.  I go eat him; you eat piece."  "I no WANT eat

'Melican mate!" Kekela he say; and he CLY--all night he cly!  To-

mollow Kekela he get up, he put on blackee coat, he go see chief;

he see Missa Whela, him hand tie' like this.  (Pantomime.)  Kekela

he cly.  He say chief:- "Chief, you like things of mine? you like

whale-boat?"  "Yes," he say.  "You like file-a'm?" (fire-arms).

"Yes," he say.  "You like blackee coat?"  "Yes," he say.  Kekela he

take Missa Whela by he shoul'a' (shoulder), he take him light out

house; he give chief he whale-boat, he file-a'm, he blackee coat.

He take Missa Whela he house, make him sit down with he wife and

chil'en.  Missa Whela all-the-same pelison (prison); he wife, he

chil'en in Amelica; he cly--O, he cly.  Kekela he solly.  One day

Kekela he see ship. (Pantomime.)  He say Missa Whela, "Ma' Whala?"

Missa Whela he say, "Yes."  Kanaka they begin go down beach.

Kekela he get eleven Kanaka, get oa' (oars), get evely thing.  He

say Missa Whela, "Now you go quick."  They jump in whale-boat.

"Now you low!"  Kekela he say:  "you low quick, quick!"  (Violent

pantomime, and a change indicating that the narrator has left the

boat and returned to the beach.)  All the Kanaka they say, "How!

'Melican mate he go away?"--jump in boat; low afta.  (Violent

pantomime, and change again to boat.)  Kekela he say, "Low quick!"'

Here I think Kauwealoha's pantomime had confused me; I have no more

of his ipsissima verba; and can but add, in my own less spirited

manner, that the ship was reached, Mr. Whalon taken aboard, and

Kekela returned to his charge among the cannibals.  But how unjust

it is to repeat the stumblings of a foreigner in a language only

partly acquired!  A thoughtless reader might conceive Kauwealoha

and his colleague to be a species of amicable baboon; but I have

here the anti-dote.  In return for his act of gallant charity,

Kekela was presented by the American Government with a sum of

money, and by President Lincoln personally with a gold watch.  From

his letter of thanks, written in his own tongue, I give the

following extract.  I do not envy the man who can read it without

emotion.

'When I saw one of your countrymen, a citizen of your great nation,

ill-treated, and about to be baked and eaten, as a pig is eaten, I

ran to save him, full of pity and grief at the evil deed of these

benighted people.  I gave my boat for the stranger's life.  This

boat came from James Hunnewell, a gift of friendship.  It became

the ransom of this countryman of yours, that he might not be eaten

by the savages who knew not Jehovah.  This was Mr. Whalon, and the

date, Jan. 14, 1864.

As to this friendly deed of mine in saving Mr. Whalon, its seed

came from your great land, and was brought by certain of your

countrymen, who had received the love of God.  It was planted in

Hawaii, and I brought it to plant in this land and in these dark

regions, that they might receive the root of all that is good and

true, which is LOVE.

'1. Love to Jehovah.

'2. Love to self.

'3. Love to our neighbour.

'If a man have a sufficiency of these three, he is good and holy,

like his God, Jehovah, in his triune character (Father, Son, and

Holy Ghost), one-three, three-one.  If he have two and wants one,

it is not well; and if he have one and wants two, indeed, is not

well; but if he cherishes all three, then is he holy, indeed, after

the manner of the Bible.

'This is a great thing for your great nation to boast of, before

all the nations of the earth.  From your great land a most precious

seed was brought to the land of darkness.  It was planted here, not

by means of guns and men-of-war and threatening.  It was planted by

means of the ignorant, the neglected, the despised.  Such was the

introduction of the word of the Almighty God into this group of

Nuuhiwa.  Great is my debt to Americans, who have taught me all

things pertaining to this life and to that which is to come.

'How shall I repay your great kindness to me?  Thus David asked of

Jehovah, and thus I ask of you, the President of the United States.

This is my only payment--that which I have received of the Lord,

love--(aloha).'

CHAPTER XI--LONG-PIG--A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing

so surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue,

will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it.

And yet we ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of

the Buddhist and the vegetarian.  We consume the carcasses of

creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs with ourselves;

we feed on babes, though not our own; and the slaughter-house

resounds daily with screams of pain and fear.  We distinguish,

indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog, an

animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy, shows how

precariously the distinction is grounded.  The pig is the main

element of animal food among the islands; and I had many occasions,

my mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe his

character and the manner of his death.  Many islanders live with

their pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth

with equal freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity,

enterprise, and sense.  He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am

told) rolls them into the sun to burst; he is the terror of the

shepherd.  Mrs. Stevenson, senior, has seen one fleeing to the

woods with a lamb in his mouth; and I saw another come rapidly (and

erroneously) to the conclusion that the Casco was going down, and

swim through the flush water to the rail in search of an escape.

It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have known one

to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to

the house of his original owner.  I was once, at Tautira, a pig-

master on a considerable scale; at first, in my pen, the utmost

good feeling prevailed; a little sow with a belly-ache came and

appealed to us for help in the manner of a child; and there was one

shapely black boar, whom we called Catholicus, for he was a

particular present from the Catholics of the village, and who early

displayed the marks of courage and friendliness; no other animal,

whether dog or pig, was suffered to approach him at his food, and

for human beings he showed a full measure of that toadying fondness

so common in the lower animals, and possibly their chief title to

the name.  One day, on visiting my piggery, I was amazed to see

Catholicus draw back from my approach with cries of terror; and if

I was amazed at the change, I was truly embarrassed when I learnt

its reason.  One of the pigs had been that morning killed;

Catholicus had seen the murder, he had discovered he was dwelling

in the shambles, and from that time his confidence and his delight

in life were ended.  We still reserved him a long while, but he

could not endure the sight of any two-legged creature, nor could

we, under the circumstances, encounter his eye without confusion.

I have assisted besides, by the ear, at the act of butchery itself;

the victim's cries of pain I think I could have borne, but the

execution was mismanaged, and his expression of terror was

contagious:  that small heart moved to the same tune with ours.

Upon such 'dread foundations' the life of the European reposes, and

yet the European is among the less cruel of races.  The

paraphernalia of murder, the preparatory brutalities of his

existence, are all hid away; an extreme sensibility reigns upon the

surface; and ladies will faint at the recital of one tithe of what

they daily expect of their butchers.  Some will be even crying out

upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of this paragraph.  And

so with the island cannibals.  They were not cruel; apart from this

custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to

cut a man's flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to

oppress him whilst he lives; and even the victims of their appetite

were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at

last.  In island circles of refinement it was doubtless thought bad

taste to expatiate on what was ugly in the practice.

Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the

Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the

lively haunt of its exercise, there by scanty but significant

survivals.  Hawaii is the most doubtful.  We find cannibalism

chronicled in Hawaii, only in the history of a single war, where it

seems to have been thought exception, as in the case of mountain

outlaws, such as fell by the hand of Theseus.  In Tahiti, a single

circumstance survived, but that appears conclusive.  In historic

times, when human oblation was made in the marae, the eyes of the

victim were formally offered to the chief:  a delicacy to the

leading guest.  All Melanesia appears tainted.  In Micronesia, in

the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a

tourist, I could find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone

I long looked and asked in vain.  I was told tales indeed of men

who had been eaten in a famine; but these were nothing to my

purpose, for the same thing is done under the same stress by all

kindreds and generations of men.  At last, in some manuscript notes

of Dr. Turner's, which I was allowed to consult at Malua, I came on

one damning evidence:  on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for

theft was to be killed and eaten.  How shall we account for the

universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of

such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such

different blood?  What circumstance is common to them all, but that

they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food?

I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on

vegetables only.  When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew

to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open

another tin of miserable mutton.  And in at least one ocean

language, a particular word denotes that a man is 'hungry for

fish,' having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer

satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews in the desert,

begins to lust after flesh-pots.  Add to this the evidences of

over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I think we

see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.

It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far

from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice.  The

higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and

Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part

forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-

sail in their waters.  It lingered only in some low islands where

life was difficult to maintain, and among inveterate savages like

the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.  The Marquesans intertwined

man-eating with the whole texture of their lives; long-pig was in a

sense their currency and sacrament; it formed the hire of the

artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion and

attraction of a feast.  To-day they are paying the penalty of this

bloody commixture.  The civil power, in its crusade against man-

eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and

pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal

element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript

list.  Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution

exquisite, the designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more

handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the

beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run,

and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European

practice of tight-lacing among women.  And now it has been found

needful to forbid the art.  Their songs and dances were numerous

(and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen).  They now face

empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall

pity them?  The least rigorous will say that they were justly

served.

Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance:  the flesh must

be eaten.  The chief who seized Mr. Whalon preferred to eat him;

and he thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a

vengeance.  Two or three years ago, the people of a valley seized

and slew a wretch who had offended them.  His offence, it is to be

supposed, was dire; they could not bear to leave their vengeance

incomplete, and, under the eyes of the French, they did not dare to

hold a public festival.  The body was accordingly divided; and

every man retired to his own house to consummate the rite in

secret, carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a Swedish

match-box.  The barbarous substance of the drama and the European

properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination.

Yet more striking is another incident of the very year when I was

there myself, 1888.  In the spring, a man and woman skulked about

the school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child

alone.  Him they approached with honeyed words and carneying

manners--'You are So-and-so, son of So-and-so?' they asked; and

caressed and beguiled him deeper in the woods.  Some instinct woke

in the child's bosom, or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of

his deceivers.  He sought to break from them; he screamed; and

they, casting off the mask, seized him the more strongly and began

to run.  His cries were heard; his schoolmates, playing not far

off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple fled and

vanished in the woods.  They were never identified; no prosecution

followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge

against the boy's father, and designed to eat him in revenge.  All

over the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be

observed that the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an

individual.  A family, a class, a village, a whole valley or

island, a whole race of mankind, share equally the guilt of any

member.  So, in the above story, the son was to pay the penalty for

his father; so Mr. Whalon, the mate of an American whaler, was to

bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian slaver.  I am

reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group, which was

told me by an eye-witness, and which I tell here again for the

strangeness of the scene.  Two men had awakened the animosity of

the Jaluit chiefs; and it was their wives who were selected to be

punished.  A single native served as executioner.  Early in the

morning, in the face of a large concourse of spectators, he waded

out upon the reef between his victims.  These neither complained

nor resisted; accompanied their destroyer patiently; stooped down,

when they had waded deep enough, at his command; and he (laying one

hand upon the shoulders of each) held them under water till they

drowned.  Doubtless, although my informant did not tell me so,

their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach.

It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high

place.

The day was sultry and clouded.  Drenching tropical showers

succeeded bursts of sweltering sunshine.  The green pathway of the

road wound steeply upward.  As we went, our little schoolboy guide

a little ahead of us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand,

and named the trees for me, and read aloud from his notes the

abstract of their virtues.  Presently the road, mounting, showed us

the vale of Hatiheu, on a larger scale; and the priest, with

occasional reference to our guide, pointed out the boundaries and

told me the names of the larger tribes that lived at perpetual war

in the old days:  one on the north-east, one along the beach, one

behind upon the mountain.  With a survivor of this latter clan

Father Simeon had spoken; until the pacification he had never been

to the sea's edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea-fish.

Each in its own district, the septs lived cantoned and beleaguered.

One step without the boundaries was to affront death.  If famine

came, the men must out to the woods to gather chestnuts and small

fruits; even as to this day, if the parents are backward in their

weekly doles, school must be broken up and the scholars sent

foraging.  But in the old days, when there was trouble in one clan,

there would be activity in all its neighbours; the woods would be

laid full of ambushes; and he who went after vegetables for himself

might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes.  Nor was the

pointed occasion needful.  A dozen different natural signs and

social junctures called this people to the war-path and the

cannibal hunt.  Let one of chiefly rank have finished his

tattooing, the wife of one be near upon her time, two of the

debauching streams have deviated nearer on the beach of Hatiheu, a

certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain ominous formation

of cloud observed above the northern sea; and instantly the arms

were oiled, and the man-hunters swarmed into the wood to lay their

fratricidal ambuscades.  It appears besides that occasionally,

perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house,

where he lay for a stated period like a person dead.  When he came

forth it was to run for three days through the territory of the

clan, naked and starving, and to sleep at night alone in the high

place.  It was now the turn of the others to keep the house, for to

encounter the priest upon his rounds was death.  On the eve of the

fourth day the time of the running was over; the priest returned to

his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the morning the number of

the victims was announced.  I have this tale of the priest on one

authority--I think a good one,--but I set it down with diffidence.

The particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I almost

think I must have heard them oftener referred to.  Upon one point

there seems to be no question:  that the feast was sometimes

furnished from within the clan.  In times of scarcity, all who were

not protected by their family connections--in the Highland

expression, all the commons of the clan--had cause to tremble.  It

was vain to resist, it was useless to flee.  They were begirt upon

all hands by cannibals; and the oven was ready to smoke for them

abroad in the country of their foes, or at home in the valley of

their fathers.

At a certain corner of the road our scholar-guide struck off to his

left into the twilight of the forest.  We were now on one of the

ancient native roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and

clambering, it seemed, at random over boulders and dead trees; but

the lad wound in and out and up and down without a check, for these

paths are to the natives as marked as the king's highway is to us;

insomuch that, in the days of the man-hunt, it was their labour

rather to block and deface than to improve them.  In the crypt of

the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold; overhead, upon the

leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but only here and

there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop would fall,

and make a spot upon my mackintosh.  Presently the huge trunk of a

banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an

ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm,

announced that we had reached the paepae tapu.

Paepae signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is

built on; and even such a paepae--a paepae hae--may be called a

paepae tapu in a lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the

haunt of spirits; but the public high place, such as I was now

treading, was a thing on a great scale.  As far as my eyes could

pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was

all paved.  Three tiers of terrace ran on the slope of the hill; in

front, a crumbling parapet contained the main arena; and the

pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with several wells

and small enclosures.  No trace remained of any superstructure, and

the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to seize.  I visited

another in Hiva-oa, smaller but more perfect, where it was easy to

follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of honour

for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a single

joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights

richly carved.  In the old days the high place was sedulously

tended.  No tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach

upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement.  The stones

were smoothly set, and I am told they were kept bright with oil.

On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to

watch and cleanse it.  No other foot of man was suffered to draw

near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there to

sleep--perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand; but, in the time of

the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body, and each

had his appointed seat.  There were places for the chiefs, the

drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests.  The drums--

perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high--

continuously throbbed in time.  In time the singers kept up their

long-drawn, lugubrious, ululating song; in time, too, the dancers,

tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and

gesticulated--their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like

butterflies.  The sense of time, in all these ocean races, is

extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that almost

every sound and movement fell in one.  So much the more unanimously

must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more

wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld

them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan,

rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of

the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a

complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes

of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead

women.  All manner of island food was meanwhile spread for the

women and the commons; and, for those who were privileged to eat of

it, there were carried up to the dead-house the baskets of long-

pig.  It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the people came

from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy

with their beastly food.  There are certain sentiments which we

call emphatically human--denying the honour of that name to those

who lack them.  In such feasts--particularly where the victim has

been slain at home, and men banqueted on the poor clay of a comrade

with whom they had played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they

had shared--the whole body of these sentiments is outraged.  To

consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, the

fervours of self-righteous old ship-captains, who would man their

guns, and open fire in passing, on a cannibal island.

And yet it was strange.  There, upon the spot, as I stood under the

high, dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the

one hand, in his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan

schoolboy on the other, the whole business appeared infinitely

distant, and fallen in the cold perspective and dry light of

history.  The bearing of the priest, perhaps, affected me. He

smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of these feasters and

their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave of one of the

old, ill-omened choruses.  Centuries might have come and gone since

this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the place

with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge.

In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still

living and latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within

the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped

victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of

some repugnance for the natives.  But here, too, the priests

maintained their jocular attitude:  rallying the cannibals as upon

an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say,

to shame them from the practice by good-natured ridicule, as we

shame a child from stealing sugar.  We may here recognise the

temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon.

CHAPTER XII--THE STORY OF A PLANTATION

Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa--

Tahuku, say the slovenly whites--may be called the port of Atuona.

It is a narrow and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points,

and opening above upon a woody valley:  a little French fort, now

disused and deserted, overhangs the valley and the inlet.  Atuona

itself, at the head of the next bay, is framed in a theatre of

mountains, which dominate the more immediate settling of Taahauku

and give the salient character of the scene.  They are reckoned at

no higher than four thousand feet; but Tahiti with eight thousand,

and Hawaii with fifteen, can offer no such picture of abrupt,

melancholy alps.  In the morning, when the sun falls directly on

their front, they stand like a vast wall:  green to the summit, if

by any chance the summit should be clear--water-courses here and

there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks.  Towards

afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the

range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge,

tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun.  At all hours of the

day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the

same menacing gloom.

The mountains, dividing and deflecting the endless airy deluge of

the Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate.  A strong

draught of wind blew day and night over the anchorage.  Day and

night the same fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the

heavens, the same dusky cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the

mountain.  The land-breezes came very strong and chill, and the

sea, like the air, was in perpetual bustle.  The swell crowded into

the narrow anchorage like sheep into a fold; broke all along both

sides, high on the one, low on the other; kept a certain blowhole

sounding and smoking like a cannon; and spent itself at last upon

the beach.

On the side away from Atuona, the sheltering promontory was a

nursery of coco-trees.  Some were mere infants, none had attained

to any size, none had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-

like shaft of the mature palm.  In the young trees the colour

alters with the age and growth.  Now all is of a grass-like hue,

infinitely dainty; next the rib grows golden, the fronds remaining

green as ferns; and then, as the trunk continues to mount and to

assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on manlier and more

decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the distance,

glisten against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the

assault of the wind.  In this young wood of Taahauku, all these

hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score.  The

trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there

interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for

storing it.  Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the

Casco tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever

before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the

cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward.  The trade-wind moving in

the fans made a ceaseless noise of summer rain; and from time to

time, with the sound of a sudden and distant drum-beat, the surf

would burst in a sea-cave.

At the upper end of the inlet, its low, cliffy lining sinks, at

both sides, into a beach.  A copra warehouse stands in the shadow

of the shoreside trees, flitted about for ever by a clan of

dwarfish swallows; and a line of rails on a high wooden staging

bends back into the mouth of the valley.  Walking on this, the new-

landed traveller becomes aware of a broad fresh-water lagoon (one

arm of which he crosses), and beyond, of a grove of noble palms,

sheltering the house of the trader, Mr. Keane.  Overhead, the cocos

join in a continuous and lofty roof; blackbirds are heard lustily

singing; the island cock springs his jubilant rattle and airs his

golden plumage; cow-bells sound far and near in the grove; and when

you sit in the broad verandah, lulled by this symphony, you may say

to yourself, if you are able:  'Better fifty years of Europe . . .'

Farther on, the floor of the valley is flat and green, and dotted

here and there with stripling coco-palms.  Through the midst, with

many changes of music, the river trots and brawls; and along its

course, where we should look for willows, puraos grow in clusters,

and make shadowy pools after an angler's heart.  A vale more rich

and peaceful, sweeter air, a sweeter voice of rural sounds, I have

found nowhere.  One circumstance alone might strike the

experienced:  here is a convenient beach, deep soil, good water,

and yet nowhere any paepaes, nowhere any trace of island

habitation.

It is but a few years since this valley was a place choked with

jungle, the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals.  Two

clans laid claim to it--neither could substantiate the claim, and

the roads lay desert, or were only visited by men in arms.  It is

for this very reason that it wears now so smiling an appearance:

cleared, planted, built upon, supplied with railways, boat-houses,

and bath-houses.  For, being no man's land, it was the more readily

ceded to a stranger.  The stranger was Captain John Hart:  Ima

Hati, 'Broken-arm,' the natives call him, because when he first

visited the islands his arm was in a sling.  Captain Hart, a man of

English birth, but an American subject, had conceived the idea of

cotton culture in the Marquesas during the American War, and was at

first rewarded with success.  His plantation at Anaho was highly

productive; island cotton fetched a high price, and the natives

used to debate which was the stronger power, Ima Hati or the

French:  deciding in favour of the captain, because, though the

French had the most ships, he had the more money.

He marked Taahauku for a suitable site, acquired it, and offered

the superintendence to Mr. Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already

some time in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on

Tauata.  Mr. Stewart was somewhat averse to the adventure, having

some acquaintance with Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu.

He had once landed there, he told me, about dusk, and found the

remains of a man and woman partly eaten.  On his starting and

sickening at the sight, one of Moipu's young men picked up a human

foot, and provocatively staring at the stranger, grinned and

nibbled at the heel.  None need be surprised if Mr. Stewart fled

incontinently to the bush, lay there all night in a great horror of

mind, and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow.  'It was

always a bad place, Atuona,' commented Mr. Stewart, in his homely

Fifeshire voice.  In spite of this dire introduction, he accepted

the captain's offer, was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen,

and proceeded to clear the jungle.

War was pursued at that time, almost without interval, between the

men of Atuona and the men of Haamau; and one day, from the opposite

sides of the valley, battle--or I should rather say the noise of

battle--raged all the afternoon:  the shots and insults of the

opposing clans passing from hill to hill over the heads of Mr.

Stewart and his Chinamen.  There was no genuine fighting; it was

like a bicker of schoolboys, only some fool had given the children

guns.  One man died of his exertions in running, the only casualty.

With night the shots and insults ceased; the men of Haamau

withdrew; and victory, on some occult principle, was scored to

Moipu.  Perhaps, in consequence, there came a day when Moipu made a

feast, and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of

it.  These passed early by Taahauku, and some of Moipu's young men

were there to be a guard of honour.  They were not long gone before

there came down from Haamau, a man, his wife, and a girl of twelve,

their daughter, bringing fungus.  Several Atuona lads were hanging

round the store; but the day being one of truce none apprehended

danger.  The fungus was weighed and paid for; the man of Haamau

proposed he should have his axe ground in the bargain; and Mr.

Stewart demurring at the trouble, some of the Atuona lads offered

to grind it for him, and set it on the wheel.  While the axe was

grinding, a friendly native whispered Mr. Stewart to have a care of

himself, for there was trouble in hand; and, all at once, the man

of Haamau was seized, and his head and arm stricken from his body,

the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe.  In the first

alert, the girl escaped among the cotton; and Mr. Stewart, having

thrust the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside,

supposed the affair was over.  But the business had not passed

without noise, and it reached the ears of an older girl who had

loitered by the way, and who now came hastily down the valley,

crying as she came for her father.  Her, too, they seized and

beheaded; I know not what they had done with the axe, it was a

blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the girl; and the

blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to foot.

Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying

the heads to Moipu.  It may be fancied how the feast broke up; but

it is notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire.

These passed back through Taahauku in extreme disorder; a little

after the valley began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing

braves; and a letter of warning coming at the same time to Mr.

Stewart, he and his Chinamen took refuge with the Protestant

missionary in Atuona.  That night the store was gutted, and the

bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves.  Three days later the

schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr. Stewart and

the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view

the grave, which was already indicated by the stench.  While they

were so employed, a party of Moipu's young men, decked with red

flannel to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from

Atuona, dug up the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried

them away on sticks.  That night the feast began.

Those who knew Mr. Stewart before this experience declare the man

to be quite altered.  He stuck, however, to his post; and somewhat

later, when the plantation was already well established, and gave

employment to sixty Chinamen and seventy natives, he found himself

once more in dangerous times.  The men of Haamau, it was reported,

had sworn to plunder and erase the settlement; letters came

continually from the Hawaiian missionary, who acted as intelligence

department; and for six weeks Mr. Stewart and three other whites

slept in the cotton-house at night in a rampart of bales, and (what

was their best defence) ostentatiously practised rifle-shooting by

day upon the beach.  Natives were often there to watch them; the

practice was excellent; and the assault was never delivered--if it

ever was intended, which I doubt, for the natives are more famous

for false rumours than for deeds of energy.  I was told the late

French war was a case in point; the tribes on the beach accusing

those in the mountains of designs which they had never the

hardihood to entertain.  And the same testimony to their

backwardness in open battle reached me from all sides.  Captain

Hart once landed after an engagement in a certain bay; one man had

his hand hurt, an old woman and two children had been slain; and

the captain improved the occasion by poulticing the hand, and

taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair.  It is true these

wars were often merely formal--comparable with duels to the first

blood.  Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being

carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought

wanting in civility to the guests of the other.  About one-half of

the population served day about on alternate sides, so as to be

well with each when the inevitable peace should follow.  The forts

of the belligerents were over against each other, and close by.

Pigs were cooking.  Well-oiled braves, with well-oiled muskets,

strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast.  No business, however

needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed to be

centred in this mockery of war.  A few days later, by a regrettable

accident, a man was killed; it was felt at once the thing had gone

too far, and the quarrel was instantly patched up.  But the more

serious wars were prosecuted in a similar spirit; a gift of pigs

and a feast made their inevitable end; the killing of a single man

was a great victory, and the murder of defenceless solitaries

counted a heroic deed.

The foot of the cliffs, about all these islands, is the place of

fishing.  Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly

women, some nearly naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses,

perched in little surf-beat promontories--the brown precipice

overhanging them, and the convolvulus overhanging that, as if to

cut them off the more completely from assistance.  There they would

angle much of the morning; and as fast as they caught any fish, eat

them, raw and living, where they stood.  It was such helpless ones

that the warriors from the opposite island of Tauata slew, and

carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted mighty men of

valour.  Of one such exploit I can give the account of an eye-

witness.  'Portuguese Joe,' Mr. Keane's cook, was once pulling an

oar in an Atuona boat, when they spied a stranger in a canoe with

some fish and a piece of tapu.  The Atuona men cried upon him to

draw near and have a smoke.  He complied, because, I suppose, he

had no choice; but he knew, poor devil, what he was coming to, and

(as Joe said) 'he didn't seem to care about the smoke.'  A few

questions followed, as to where he came from, and what was his

business.  These he must needs answer, as he must needs draw at the

unwelcome pipe, his heart the while drying in his bosom.  And then,

of a sudden, a big fellow in Joe's boat leaned over, plucked the

stranger from his canoe, struck him with a knife in the neck--

inward and downward, as Joe showed in pantomime more expressive

than his words--and held him under water, like a fowl, until his

struggles ceased.  Whereupon the long-pig was hauled on board, the

boat's head turned about for Atuona, and these Marquesan braves

pulled home rejoicing.  Moipu was on the beach and rejoiced with

them on their arrival.  Poor Joe toiled at his oar that day with a

white face, yet he had no fear for himself.  'They were very good

to me--gave me plenty grub:  never wished to eat white man,' said

he.

If the most horrible experience was Mr. Stewart's, it was Captain

Hart himself who ran the nearest danger.  He had bought a piece of

land from Timau, chief of a neighbouring bay, and put some Chinese

there to work.  Visiting the station with one of the Godeffroys, he

found his Chinamen trooping to the beach in terror:  Timau had

driven them out, seized their effects, and was in war attire with

his young men.  A boat was despatched to Taahauku for

reinforcement; as they awaited her return, they could see, from the

deck of the schooner, Timau and his young men dancing the war-dance

on the hill-top till past twelve at night; and so soon as the boat

came (bringing three gendarmes, armed with chassepots, two white

men from Taahauku station, and some native warriors) the party set

out to seize the chief before he should awake.  Day was not come,

and it was a very bright moonlight morning, when they reached the

hill-top where (in a house of palm-leaves) Timau was sleeping off

his debauch.  The assailants were fully exposed, the interior of

the hut quite dark; the position far from sound.  The gendarmes

knelt with their pieces ready, and Captain Hart advanced alone.  As

he drew near the door he heard the snap of a gun cocking from

within, and in sheer self-defence--there being no other escape--

sprang into the house and grappled Timau.  'Timau, come with me!'

he cried.  But Timau--a great fellow, his eyes blood-red with the

abuse of kava, six foot three in stature--cast him on one side; and

the captain, instantly expecting to be either shot or brained,

discharged his pistol in the dark.  When they carried Timau out at

the door into the moonlight, he was already dead, and, upon this

unlooked-for termination of their sally, the whites appeared to

have lost all conduct, and retreated to the boats, fired upon by

the natives as they went.  Captain Hart, who almost rivals Bishop

Dordillon in popularity, shared with him the policy of extreme

indulgence to the natives, regarding them as children, making light

of their defects, and constantly in favour of mild measures.  The

death of Timau has thus somewhat weighed upon his mind; the more

so, as the chieftain's musket was found in the house unloaded.  To

a less delicate conscience the matter will seem light.  If a

drunken savage elects to cock a fire-arm, a gentleman advancing

towards him in the open cannot wait to make sure if it be charged.

I have touched on the captain's popularity.  It is one of the

things that most strikes a stranger in the Marquesas.  He comes

instantly on two names, both new to him, both locally famous, both

mentioned by all with affection and respect--the bishop's and the

captain's.  It gave me a strong desire to meet with the survivor,

which was subsequently gratified--to the enrichment of these pages.

Long after that again, in the Place Dolorous--Molokai--I came once

more on the traces of that affectionate popularity.  There was a

blind white leper there, an old sailor--'an old tough,' he called

himself--who had long sailed among the eastern islands.  Him I used

to visit, and, being fresh from the scenes of his activity, gave

him the news.  This (in the true island style) was largely a

chronicle of wrecks; and it chanced I mentioned the case of one not

very successful captain, and how he had lost a vessel for Mr. Hart;

thereupon the blind leper broke forth in lamentation.  'Did he lose

a ship of John Hart's?' he cried; 'poor John Hart!  Well, I'm sorry

it was Hart's,' with needless force of epithet, which I neglect to

reproduce.

Perhaps, if Captain Hart's affairs had continued to prosper, his

popularity might have been different.  Success wins glory, but it

kills affection, which misfortune fosters.  And the misfortune

which overtook the captain's enterprise was truly singular.  He was

at the top of his career.  Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the

French as an indemnity for the robberies at Taahauku.  But the Ile

Masse was only suitable for cattle; and his two chief stations were

Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva-

oa, some hundred miles to the southward, and facing the south-west.

Both these were on the same day swept by a tidal wave, which was

not felt in any other bay or island of the group.  The south coast

of Hiva-oa was bestrewn with building timber and camphor-wood

chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a reasonable

salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests

apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built

into their houses.  But the recovery of such jetsam could not

affect the result.  It was impossible the captain should withstand

this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the

Marquesas ended.  Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of

itself; nor has any new plantation arisen in their stead.

CHAPTER XIII--CHARACTERS

There was a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different

indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister island,

Nuka-hiva.  Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would

be a whale-boat manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra

for sale; now perhaps a single canoe come after commodities to buy.

The anchorage was besides frequented by fishers; not only the lone

females perched in niches of the cliff, but whole parties, who

would sometimes camp and build a fire upon the beach, and sometimes

lie in their canoes in the midst of the haven and jump by turns in

the water; which they would cast eight or nine feet high, to drive,

as we supposed, the fish into their nets.  The goods the purchasers

came to buy were sometimes quaint.  I remarked one outrigger

returning with a single ham swung from a pole in the stern.  And

one day there came into Mr. Keane's store a charming lad,

excellently mannered, speaking French correctly though with a

babyish accent; very handsome too, and much of a dandy, as was

shown not only in his shining raiment, but by the nature of his

purchases.  These were five ship-biscuits, a bottle of scent, and

two balls of washing blue.  He was from Tauata, whither he returned

the same night in an outrigger, daring the deep with these young-

ladyish treasures.  The gross of the native passengers were more

ill-favoured:  tall, powerful fellows, well tattooed, and with

disquieting manners.  Something coarse and jeering distinguished

them, and I was often reminded of the slums of some great city.

One night, as dusk was falling, a whale-boat put in on that part of

the beach where I chanced to be alone.  Six or seven ruffianly

fellows scrambled out; all had enough English to give me 'good-

bye,' which was the ordinary salutation; or 'good-morning,' which

they seemed to regard as an intensitive; jests followed, they

surrounded me with harsh laughter and rude looks, and I was glad to

move away.  I had not yet encountered Mr. Stewart, or I should have

been reminded of his first landing at Atuona and the humorist who

nibbled at the heel.  But their neighbourhood depressed me; and I

felt, if I had been there a castaway and out of reach of help, my

heart would have been sick.

Nor was the traffic altogether native.  While we lay in the

anchorage there befell a strange coincidence.  A schooner was

observed at sea and aiming to enter.  We knew all the schooners in

the group, but this appeared larger than any; she was rigged,

besides, after the English manner; and, coming to an anchor some

way outside the Casco, showed at last the blue ensign.  There were

at that time, according to rumour, no fewer than four yachts in the

Pacific; but it was strange that any two of them should thus lie

side by side in that outlandish inlet:  stranger still that in the

owner of the Nyanza, Captain Dewar, I should find a man of the same

country and the same county with myself, and one whom I had seen

walking as a boy on the shores of the Alpes Maritimes.

We had besides a white visitor from shore, who came and departed in

a crowded whale-boat manned by natives; having read of yachts in

the Sunday papers, and being fired with the desire to see one.

Captain Chase, they called him, an old whaler-man, thickset and

white-bearded, with a strong Indiana drawl; years old in the

country, a good backer in battle, and one of those dead shots whose

practice at the target struck terror in the braves of Haamau.

Captain Chase dwelt farther east in a bay called Hanamate, with a

Mr. M'Callum; or rather they had dwelt together once, and were now

amicably separated.  The captain is to be found near one end of the

bay, in a wreck of a house, and waited on by a Chinese.  At the

point of the opposing corner another habitation stands on a tall

paepae.  The surf runs there exceeding heavy, seas of seven and

eight feet high bursting under the walls of the house, which is

thus continually filled with their clamour, and rendered fit only

for solitary, or at least for silent, inmates.  Here it is that Mr.

M'Callum, with a Shakespeare and a Burns, enjoys the society of the

breakers.  His name and his Burns testify to Scottish blood; but he

is an American born, somewhere far east; followed the trade of a

ship-carpenter; and was long employed, the captain of a hundred

Indians, breaking up wrecks about Cape Flattery.  Many of the

whites who are to be found scattered in the South Seas represent

the more artistic portion of their class; and not only enjoy the

poetry of that new life, but came there on purpose to enjoy it.  I

have been shipmates with a man, no longer young, who sailed upon

that voyage, his first time to sea, for the mere love of Samoa; and

it was a few letters in a newspaper that sent him on that

pilgrimage.  Mr. M'Callum was another instance of the same.  He had

read of the South Seas; loved to read of them; and let their image

fasten in his heart:  till at length he could refrain no longer--

must set forth, a new Rudel, for that unseen homeland--and has now

dwelt for years in Hiva-oa, and will lay his bones there in the end

with full content; having no desire to behold again the places of

his boyhood, only, perhaps--once, before he dies--the rude and

wintry landscape of Cape Flattery.  Yet he is an active man, full

of schemes; has bought land of the natives; has planted five

thousand coco-palms; has a desert island in his eye, which he

desires to lease, and a schooner in the stocks, which he has laid

and built himself, and even hopes to finish.  Mr. M'Callum and I

did not meet, but, like gallant troubadours, corresponded in verse.

I hope he will not consider it a breach of copyright if I give here

a specimen of his muse.  He and Bishop Dordillon are the two

European bards of the Marquesas.

'Sail, ho!  Ahoy!  Casco,

First among the pleasure fleet

That came around to greet

These isles from San Francisco,

And first, too; only one

Among the literary men

That this way has ever been -

Welcome, then, to Stevenson.

Please not offended be

At this little notice

Of the Casco, Captain Otis,

With the novelist's family.

Avoir une voyage magnifical

Is our wish sincere,

That you'll have from here

Allant sur la Grande Pacifical.'

But our chief visitor was one Mapiao, a great Tahuku--which seems

to mean priest, wizard, tattooer, practiser of any art, or, in a

word, esoteric person--and a man famed for his eloquence on public

occasions and witty talk in private.  His first appearance was

typical of the man.  He came down clamorous to the eastern landing,

where the surf was running very high; scorned all our signals to go

round the bay; carried his point, was brought aboard at some hazard

to our skiff, and set down in one corner of the cockpit to his

appointed task.  He had been hired, as one cunning in the art, to

make my old men's beards into a wreath:  what a wreath for Celia's

arbour!  His own beard (which he carried, for greater safety, in a

sailor's knot) was not merely the adornment of his age, but a

substantial piece of property.  One hundred dollars was the

estimated value; and as Brother Michel never knew a native to

deposit a greater sum with Bishop Dordillon, our friend was a rich

man in virtue of his chin.  He had something of an East Indian

cast, but taller and stronger:  his nose hooked, his face narrow,

his forehead very high, the whole elaborately tattooed.  I may say

I have never entertained a guest so trying.  In the least

particular he must be waited on; he would not go to the scuttle-

butt for water; he would not even reach to get the glass, it must

be given him in his hand; if aid were denied him, he would fold his

arms, bow his head, and go without:  only the work would suffer.

Early the first forenoon he called aloud for biscuit and salmon;

biscuit and ham were brought; he looked on them inscrutably, and

signed they should be set aside.  A number of considerations

crowded on my mind; how the sort of work on which he was engaged

was probably tapu in a high degree; should by rights, perhaps, be

transacted on a tapu platform which no female might approach; and

it was possible that fish might be the essential diet.  Some salted

fish I therefore brought him, and along with that a glass of rum:

at sight of which Mapiao displayed extraordinary animation, pointed

to the zenith, made a long speech in which I picked up umati--the

word for the sun--and signed to me once more to place these

dainties out of reach.  At last I had understood, and every day the

programme was the same.  At an early period of the morning his

dinner must be set forth on the roof of the house and at a proper

distance, full in view but just out of reach; and not until the fit

hour, which was the point of noon, would the artificer partake.

This solemnity was the cause of an absurd misadventure.  He was

seated plaiting, as usual, at the beards, his dinner arrayed on the

roof, and not far off a glass of water standing.  It appears he

desired to drink; was of course far too great a gentleman to rise

and get the water for himself; and spying Mrs. Stevenson,

imperiously signed to her to hand it.  The signal was

misunderstood; Mrs. Stevenson was, by this time, prepared for any

eccentricity on the part of our guest; and instead of passing him

the water, flung his dinner overboard.  I must do Mapiao justice:

all laughed, but his laughter rang the loudest.

These troubles of service were at worst occasional; the

embarrassment of the man's talk incessant.  He was plainly a

practised conversationalist; the nicety of his inflections, the

elegance of his gestures, and the fine play of his expression, told

us that.  We, meanwhile, sat like aliens in a playhouse; we could

see the actors were upon some material business and performing

well, but the plot of the drama remained undiscoverable.  Names of

places, the name of Captain Hart, occasional disconnected words,

tantalised without enlightening us; and the less we understood, the

more gallantly, the more copiously, and with still the more

explanatory gestures, Mapiao returned to the assault.  We could see

his vanity was on the rack; being come to a place where that fine

jewel of his conversational talent could earn him no respect; and

he had times of despair when he desisted from the endeavour, and

instants of irritation when he regarded us with unconcealed

contempt.  Yet for me, as the practitioner of some kindred mystery

to his own, he manifested to the last a measure of respect.  As we

sat under the awning in opposite corners of the cockpit, he

braiding hairs from dead men's chins, I forming runes upon a sheet

of folio paper, he would nod across to me as one Tahuku to another,

or, crossing the cockpit, study for a while my shapeless scrawl and

encourage me with a heartfelt 'mitai!--good!'  So might a deaf

painter sympathise far off with a musician, as the slave and master

of some uncomprehended and yet kindred art.  A silly trade, he

doubtless considered it; but a man must make allowance for

barbarians--chaque pays a ses coutumes--and he felt the principle

was there.

The time came at last when his labours, which resembled those

rather of Penelope than Hercules, could be no more spun out, and

nothing remained but to pay him and say farewell.  After a long,

learned argument in Marquesan, I gathered that his mind was set on

fish-hooks; with three of which, and a brace of dollars, I thought

he was not ill rewarded for passing his forenoons in our cockpit,

eating, drinking, delivering his opinions, and pressing the ship's

company into his menial service.  For all that, he was a man of so

high a bearing, and so like an uncle of my own who should have gone

mad and got tattooed, that I applied to him, when we were both on

shore, to know if he were satisfied.  'Mitai ehipe?' I asked.  And

he, with rich unction, offering at the same time his hand--'Mitai

ehipe, mitai kaehae; kaoha nui!'--or, to translate freely:  'The

ship is good, the victuals are up to the mark, and we part in

friendship.'  Which testimonial uttered, he set off along the beach

with his head bowed and the air of one deeply injured.

I saw him go, on my side, with relief.  It would be more

interesting to learn how our relation seemed to Mapiao.  His

exigence, we may suppose, was merely loyal.  He had been hired by

the ignorant to do a piece of work; and he was bound that he would

do it the right way.  Countless obstacles, continual ignorant

ridicule, availed not to dissuade him.  He had his dinner laid out;

watched it, as was fit, the while he worked; ate it at the fit

hour; was in all things served and waited on; and could take his

hire in the end with a clear conscience, telling himself the

mystery was performed duly, the beards rightfully braided, and we

(in spite of ourselves) correctly served.  His view of our

stupidity, even he, the mighty talker, must have lacked language to

express.  He never interfered with my Tahuku work; civilly praised

it, idle as it seemed; civilly supposed that I was competent in my

own mystery:  such being the attitude of the intelligent and the

polite.  And we, on the other hand--who had yet the most to gain or

lose, since the product was to be ours--who had professed our

disability by the very act of hiring him to do it--were never weary

of impeding his own more important labours, and sometimes lacked

the sense and the civility to refrain from laughter.

CHAPTER XIV--IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY

The road from Taahauku to Atuona skirted the north-westerly side of

the anchorage, somewhat high up, edged, and sometimes shaded, by

the splendid flowers of the flamboyant--its English name I do not

know.  At the turn of the hand, Atuona came in view:  a long beach,

a heavy and loud breach of surf, a shore-side village scattered

among trees, and the guttered mountains drawing near on both sides

above a narrow and rich ravine.  Its infamous repute perhaps

affected me; but I thought it the loveliest, and by far the most

ominous and gloomy, spot on earth.  Beautiful it surely was; and

even more salubrious.  The healthfulness of the whole group is

amazing; that of Atuona almost in the nature of a miracle.  In

Atuona, a village planted in a shore-side marsh, the houses

standing everywhere intermingled with the pools of a taro-garden,

we find every condition of tropical danger and discomfort; and yet

there are not even mosquitoes--not even the hateful day-fly of

Nuka-hiva--and fever, and its concomitant, the island fe'efe'e, are

unknown.

This is the chief station of the French on the man-eating isle of

Hiva-oa.  The sergeant of gendarmerie enjoys the style of the vice-

resident, and hoists the French colours over a quite extensive

compound.  A Chinaman, a waif from the plantation, keeps a

restaurant in the rear quarters of the village; and the mission is

well represented by the sister's school and Brother Michel's

church.  Father Orens, a wonderful octogenarian, his frame scarce

bowed, the fire of his eye undimmed, has lived, and trembled, and

suffered in this place since 1843.  Again and again, when Moipu had

made coco-brandy, he has been driven from his house into the woods.

'A mouse that dwelt in a cat's ear' had a more easy resting-place;

and yet I have never seen a man that bore less mark of years.  He

must show us the church, still decorated with the bishop's artless

ornaments of paper--the last work of industrious old hands, and the

last earthly amusement of a man that was much of a hero.  In the

sacristy we must see his sacred vessels, and, in particular, a

vestment which was a 'vraie curiosite,' because it had been given

by a gendarme.  To the Protestant there is always something

embarrassing in the eagerness with which grown and holy men regard

these trifles; but it was touching and pretty to see Orens, his

aged eyes shining in his head, display his sacred treasures.

August 26.--The vale behind the village, narrowing swiftly to a

mere ravine, was choked with profitable trees.  A river gushed in

the midst.  Overhead, the tall coco-palms made a primary covering;

above that, from one wall of the mountain to another, the ravine

was roofed with cloud; so that we moved below, amid teeming

vegetation, in a covered house of heat.  On either hand, at every

hundred yards, instead of the houseless, disembowelling paepaes of

Nuka-hiva, populous houses turned out their inhabitants to cry

'Kaoha!' to the passers-by.  The road, too, was busy:  strings of

girls, fair and foul, as in less favoured countries; men bearing

breadfruit; the sisters, with a little guard of pupils; a fellow

bestriding a horse--passed and greeted us continually; and now it

was a Chinaman who came to the gate of his flower-yard, and gave us

'Good-day' in excellent English; and a little farther on it would

be some natives who set us down by the wayside, made us a feast of

mummy-apple, and entertained us as we ate with drumming on a tin

case.  With all this fine plenty of men and fruit, death is at work

here also.  The population, according to the highest estimate, does

not exceed six hundred in the whole vale of Atuona; and yet, when I

once chanced to put the question, Brother Michel counted up ten

whom he knew to be sick beyond recovery.  It was here, too, that I

could at last gratify my curiosity with the sight of a native house

in the very article of dissolution.  It had fallen flat along the

paepae, its poles sprawling ungainly; the rains and the mites

contended against it; what remained seemed sound enough, but much

was gone already; and it was easy to see how the insects consumed

the walls as if they had been bread, and the air and the rain ate

into them like vitriol.

A little ahead of us, a young gentleman, very well tattooed, and

dressed in a pair of white trousers and a flannel shirt, had been

marching unconcernedly.  Of a sudden, without apparent cause, he

turned back, took us in possession, and led us undissuadably along

a by-path to the river's edge.  There, in a nook of the most

attractive amenity, he bade us to sit down:  the stream splashing

at our elbow, a shock of nondescript greenery enshrining us from

above; and thither, after a brief absence, he brought us a cocoa-

nut, a lump of sandal-wood, and a stick he had begun to carve:  the

nut for present refreshment, the sandal-wood for a precious gift,

and the stick--in the simplicity of his vanity--to harvest

premature praise.  Only one section was yet carved, although the

whole was pencil-marked in lengths; and when I proposed to buy it,

Poni (for that was the artist's name) recoiled in horror.  But I

was not to be moved, and simply refused restitution, for I had long

wondered why a people who displayed, in their tattooing, so great a

gift of arabesque invention, should display it nowhere else.  Here,

at last, I had found something of the same talent in another

medium; and I held the incompleteness, in these days of world-wide

brummagem, for a happy mark of authenticity.  Neither my reasons

nor my purpose had I the means of making clear to Poni; I could

only hold on to the stick, and bid the artist follow me to the

gendarmerie, where I should find interpreters and money; but we

gave him, in the meanwhile, a boat-call in return for his sandal-

wood.  As he came behind us down the vale he sounded upon this

continually.  And continually, from the wayside houses, there

poured forth little groups of girls in crimson, or of men in white.

And to these must Poni pass the news of who the strangers were, of

what they had been doing, of why it was that Poni had a boat-

whistle; and of why he was now being haled to the vice-residency,

uncertain whether to be punished or rewarded, uncertain whether he

had lost a stick or made a bargain, but hopeful on the whole, and

in the meanwhile highly consoled by the boat-whistle.  Whereupon he

would tear himself away from this particular group of inquirers,

and once more we would hear the shrill call in our wake.

August 27.--I made a more extended circuit in the vale with Brother

Michel.  We were mounted on a pair of sober nags, suitable to these

rude paths; the weather was exquisite, and the company in which I

found myself no less agreeable than the scenes through which I

passed.  We mounted at first by a steep grade along the summit of

one of those twisted spurs that, from a distance, mark out

provinces of sun and shade upon the mountain-side.  The ground fell

away on either hand with an extreme declivity.  From either hand,

out of profound ravines, mounted the song of falling water and the

smoke of household fires.  Here and there the hills of foliage

would divide, and our eye would plunge down upon one of these deep-

nested habitations.  And still, high in front, arose the

precipitous barrier of the mountain, greened over where it seemed

that scarce a harebell could find root, barred with the zigzags of

a human road where it seemed that not a goat could scramble.  And

in truth, for all the labour that it cost, the road is regarded

even by the Marquesans as impassable; they will not risk a horse on

that ascent; and those who lie to the westward come and go in their

canoes.  I never knew a hill to lose so little on a near approach:

a consequence, I must suppose, of its surprising steepness.  When

we turned about, I was amazed to behold so deep a view behind, and

so high a shoulder of blue sea, crowned by the whale-like island of

Motane.  And yet the wall of mountain had not visibly dwindled, and

I could even have fancied, as I raised my eyes to measure it, that

it loomed higher than before.

We struck now into covert paths, crossed and heard more near at

hand the bickering of the streams, and tasted the coolness of those

recesses where the houses stood.  The birds sang about us as we

descended.  All along our path my guide was being hailed by voices:

'Mikael--Kaoha, Mikael!'  From the doorstep, from the cotton-patch,

or out of the deep grove of island-chestnuts, these friendly cries

arose, and were cheerily answered as we passed.  In a sharp angle

of a glen, on a rushing brook and under fathoms of cool foliage, we

struck a house upon a well-built paepae, the fire brightly burning

under the popoi-shed against the evening meal; and here the cries

became a chorus, and the house folk, running out, obliged us to

dismount and breathe.  It seemed a numerous family:  we saw eight

at least; and one of these honoured me with a particular attention.

This was the mother, a woman naked to the waist, of an aged

countenance, but with hair still copious and black, and breasts

still erect and youthful.  On our arrival I could see she remarked

me, but instead of offering any greeting, disappeared at once into

the bush.  Thence she returned with two crimson flowers.  'Good-

bye!' was her salutation, uttered not without coquetry; and as she

said it she pressed the flowers into my hand--'Good-bye!  I speak

Inglis.'  It was from a whaler-man, who (she informed me) was 'a

plenty good chap,' that she had learned my language; and I could

not but think how handsome she must have been in these times of her

youth, and could not but guess that some memories of the dandy

whaler-man prompted her attentions to myself.  Nor could I refrain

from wondering what had befallen her lover; in the rain and mire of

what sea-ports he had tramped since then; in what close and garish

drinking-dens had found his pleasure; and in the ward of what

infirmary dreamed his last of the Marquesas.  But she, the more

fortunate, lived on in her green island.  The talk, in this lost

house upon the mountains, ran chiefly upon Mapiao and his visits to

the Casco:  the news of which had probably gone abroad by then to

all the island, so that there was no paepae in Hiva-oa where they

did not make the subject of excited comment.

Not much beyond we came upon a high place in the foot of the

ravine.  Two roads divided it, and met in the midst.  Save for this

intersection the amphitheatre was strangely perfect, and had a

certain ruder air of things Roman.  Depths of foliage and the bulk

of the mountain kept it in a grateful shadow.  On the benches

several young folk sat clustered or apart.  One of these, a girl

perhaps fourteen years of age, buxom and comely, caught the eye of

Brother Michel.  Why was she not at school?--she was done with

school now.  What was she doing here?--she lived here now.  Why

so?--no answer but a deepening blush.  There was no severity in

Brother Michel's manner; the girl's own confusion told her story.

'Elle a honte,' was the missionary's comment, as we rode away.

Near by in the stream, a grown girl was bathing naked in a goyle

between two stepping-stones; and it amused me to see with what

alacrity and real alarm she bounded on her many-coloured under-

clothes.  Even in these daughters of cannibals shame was eloquent.

It is in Hiva-oa, owing to the inveterate cannibalism of the

natives, that local beliefs have been most rudely trodden

underfoot.  It was here that three religious chiefs were set under

a bridge, and the women of the valley made to defile over their

heads upon the road-way:  the poor, dishonoured fellows sitting

there (all observers agree) with streaming tears.  Not only was one

road driven across the high place, but two roads intersected in its

midst.  There is no reason to suppose that the last was done of

purpose, and perhaps it was impossible entirely to avoid the

numerous sacred places of the islands.  But these things are not

done without result.  I have spoken already of the regard of

Marquesans for the dead, making (as it does) so strange a contrast

with their unconcern for death.  Early on this day's ride, for

instance, we encountered a petty chief, who inquired (of course)

where we were going, and suggested by way of amendment.  'Why do

you not rather show him the cemetery?'  I saw it; it was but newly

opened, the third within eight years.  They are great builders here

in Hiva-oa; I saw in my ride paepaes that no European dry-stone

mason could have equalled, the black volcanic stones were laid so

justly, the corners were so precise, the levels so true; but the

retaining-wall of the new graveyard stood apart, and seemed to be a

work of love.  The sentiment of honour for the dead is therefore

not extinct.  And yet observe the consequence of violently

countering men's opinions.  Of the four prisoners in Atuona gaol,

three were of course thieves; the fourth was there for sacrilege.

He had levelled up a piece of the graveyard--to give a feast upon,

as he informed the court--and declared he had no thought of doing

wrong.  Why should he?  He had been forced at the point of the

bayonet to destroy the sacred places of his own piety; when he had

recoiled from the task, he had been jeered at for a superstitious

fool.  And now it is supposed he will respect our European

superstitions as by second nature.

CHAPTER XV--THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA

It had chanced (as the Casco beat through the Bordelais Straits for

Taahauku) she approached on one board very near the land in the

opposite isle of Tauata, where houses were to be seen in a grove of

tall coco-palms.  Brother Michel pointed out the spot.  'I am at

home now,' said he.  'I believe I have a large share in these

cocoa-nuts; and in that house madame my mother lives with her two

husbands!'  'With two husbands?' somebody inquired.  'C'est ma

honte,' replied the brother drily.

A word in passing on the two husbands.  I conceive the brother to

have expressed himself loosely.  It seems common enough to find a

native lady with two consorts; but these are not two husbands.  The

first is still the husband; the wife continues to be referred to by

his name; and the position of the coadjutor, or pikio, although

quite regular, appears undoubtedly subordinate.  We had

opportunities to observe one household of the sort.  The pikio was

recognised; appeared openly along with the husband when the lady

was thought to be insulted, and the pair made common cause like

brothers.  At home the inequality was more apparent.  The husband

sat to receive and entertain visitors; the pikio was running the

while to fetch cocoa-nuts like a hired servant, and I remarked he

was sent on these errands in preference even to the son.  Plainly

we have here no second husband; plainly we have the tolerated

lover.  Only, in the Marquesas, instead of carrying his lady's fan

and mantle, he must turn his hand to do the husband's housework.

The sight of Brother Michel's family estate led the conversation

for some while upon the method and consequence of artificial

kinship.  Our curiosity became extremely whetted; the brother

offered to have the whole of us adopted, and some two days later we

became accordingly the children of Paaaeua, appointed chief of

Atuona.  I was unable to be present at the ceremony, which was

primitively simple.  The two Mrs. Stevensons and Mr. Osbourne,

along with Paaaeua, his wife, and an adopted child of theirs, son

of a shipwrecked Austrian, sat down to an excellent island meal, of

which the principal and the only necessary dish was pig.  A

concourse watched them through the apertures of the house; but

none, not even Brother Michel, might partake; for the meal was

sacramental, and either creative or declaratory of the new

relationship.  In Tahiti things are not so strictly ordered; when

Ori and I 'made brothers,' both our families sat with us at table,

yet only he and I, who had eaten with intention were supposed to be

affected by the ceremony.  For the adoption of an infant I believe

no formality to be required; the child is handed over by the

natural parents, and grows up to inherit the estates of the

adoptive.  Presents are doubtless exchanged, as at all junctures of

island life, social or international; but I never heard of any

banquet--the child's presence at the daily board perhaps sufficing.

We may find the rationale in the ancient Arabian idea that a common

diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that 'he is

the father who gives the child its morning draught.'  In the

Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from the

Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled.  An

interesting parallel will probably occur to many of my readers.

What is the nature of the obligation assumed at such a festival?

It will vary with the characters of those engaged, and with the

circumstances of the case.  Thus it would be absurd to take too

seriously our adoption at Atuona.  On the part of Paaaeua it was an

affair of social ambition; when he agreed to receive us in his

family the man had not so much as seen us, and knew only that we

were inestimably rich and travelled in a floating palace.  We, upon

our side, ate of his baked meats with no true animus affiliandi,

but moved by the single sentiment of curiosity.  The affair was

formal, and a matter of parade, as when in Europe sovereigns call

each other cousin.  Yet, had we stayed at Atuona, Paaaeua would

have held himself bound to establish us upon his land, and to set

apart young men for our service, and trees for our support.  I have

mentioned the Austrian.  He sailed in one of two sister ships,

which left the Clyde in coal; both rounded the Horn, and both, at

several hundred miles of distance, though close on the same point

of time, took fire at sea on the Pacific.  One was destroyed; the

derelict iron frame of the second, after long, aimless cruising,

was at length recovered, refitted, and hails to-day from San

Francisco.  A boat's crew from one of these disasters reached,

after great hardships, the isle of Hiva-oa.  Some of these men

vowed they would never again confront the chances of the sea; but

alone of them all the Austrian has been exactly true to his

engagement, remains where he landed, and designs to die where he

has lived.  Now, with such a man, falling and taking root among

islanders, the processes described may be compared to a gardener's

graft.  He passes bodily into the native stock; ceases wholly to be

alien; has entered the commune of the blood, shares the prosperity

and consideration of his new family, and is expected to impart with

the same generosity the fruits of his European skill and knowledge.

It is this implied engagement that so frequently offends the

ingrafted white.  To snatch an immediate advantage--to get (let us

say) a station for his store--he will play upon the native custom

and become a son or a brother for the day, promising himself to

cast down the ladder by which he shall have ascended, and repudiate

the kinship so soon as it shall grow burdensome.  And he finds

there are two parties to the bargain.  Perhaps his Polynesian

relative is simple, and conceived the blood-bond literally; perhaps

he is shrewd, and himself entered the covenant with a view to gain.

And either way the store is ravaged, the house littered with lazy

natives; and the richer the man grows, the more numerous, the more

idle, and the more affectionate he finds his native relatives.

Most men thus circumstanced contrive to buy or brutally manage to

enforce their independence; but many vegetate without hope,

strangled by parasites.

We had no cause to blush with Brother Michel.  Our new parents were

kind, gentle, well-mannered, and generous in gifts; the wife was a

most motherly woman, the husband a man who stood justly high with

his employers.  Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be

deposed; and in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable

substitute.  He went always scrupulously dressed, and looked the

picture of propriety, like a dark, handsome, stupid, and probably

religious young man hot from a European funeral.  In character he

seemed the ideal of what is known as the good citizen.  He wore

gravity like an ornament.  None could more nicely represent the

desired character as an appointed chief, the outpost of

civilisation and reform.  And yet, were the French to go and native

manners to revive, fancy beholds him crowned with old men's beards

and crowding with the first to a man-eating festival.  But I must

not seem to be unjust to Paaaeua.  His respectability went deeper

than the skin; his sense of the becoming sometimes nerved him for

unexpected rigours.

One evening Captain Otis and Mr. Osbourne were on shore in the

village.  All was agog; dancing had begun; it was plain it was to

be a night of festival, and our adventurers were overjoyed at their

good fortune.  A strong fall of rain drove them for shelter to the

house of Paaaeua, where they were made welcome, wiled into a

chamber, and shut in.  Presently the rain took off, the fun was to

begin in earnest, and the young bloods of Atuona came round the

house and called to my fellow-travellers through the interstices of

the wall.  Late into the night the calls were continued and

resumed, and sometimes mingled with taunts; late into the night the

prisoners, tantalised by the noises of the festival, renewed their

efforts to escape.  But all was vain; right across the door lay

that god-fearing householder, Paaaeua, feigning sleep; and my

friends had to forego their junketing.  In this incident, so

delightfully European, we thought we could detect three strands of

sentiment.  In the first place, Paaaeua had a charge of souls:

these were young men, and he judged it right to withhold them from

the primrose path.  Secondly, he was a public character, and it was

not fitting that his guests should countenance a festival of which

he disapproved.  So might some strict clergyman at home address a

worldly visitor:  'Go to the theatre if you like, but, by your

leave, not from my house!'  Thirdly, Paaaeua was a man jealous, and

with some cause (as shall be shown) for jealousy; and the feasters

were the satellites of his immediate rival, Moipu.

For the adoption had caused much excitement in the village; it made

the strangers popular.  Paaaeua, in his difficult posture of

appointed chief, drew strength and dignity from their alliance, and

only Moipu and his followers were malcontent.  For some reason

nobody (except myself) appears to dislike Moipu.  Captain Hart, who

has been robbed and threatened by him; Father Orens, whom he has

fired at, and repeatedly driven to the woods; my own family, and

even the French officials--all seemed smitten with an irrepressible

affection for the man.  His fall had been made soft; his son, upon

his death, was to succeed Paaaeua in the chieftaincy; and he lived,

at the time of our visit, in the shoreward part of the village in a

good house, and with a strong following of young men, his late

braves and pot-hunters.  In this society, the coming of the Casco,

the adoption, the return feast on board, and the presents exchanged

between the whites and their new parents, were doubtless eagerly

and bitterly canvassed.  It was felt that a few years ago the

honours would have gone elsewhere.  In this unwonted business, in

this reception of some hitherto undreamed-of and outlandish

potentate--some Prester John or old Assaracus--a few years back it

would have been the part of Moipu to play the hero and the host,

and his young men would have accompanied and adorned the various

celebrations as the acknowledged leaders of society.  And now, by a

malign vicissitude of fortune, Moipu must sit in his house quite

unobserved; and his young men could but look in at the door while

their rivals feasted.  Perhaps M. Grevy felt a touch of bitterness

towards his successor when he beheld him figure on the broad stage

of the centenary of eighty-nine; the visit of the Casco which Moipu

had missed by so few years was a more unusual occasion in Atuona

than a centenary in France; and the dethroned chief determined to

reassert himself in the public eye.

Mr. Osbourne had gone into Atuona photographing; the population of

the village had gathered together for the occasion on the place

before the church, and Paaaeua, highly delighted with this new

appearance of his family, played the master of ceremonies.  The

church had been taken, with its jolly architect before the door;

the nuns with their pupils; sundry damsels in the ancient and

singularly unbecoming robes of tapa; and Father Orens in the midst

of a group of his parishioners.  I know not what else was in hand,

when the photographer became aware of a sensation in the crowd,

and, looking around, beheld a very noble figure of a man appear

upon the margin of a thicket and stroll nonchalantly near.  The

nonchalance was visibly affected; it was plain he came there to

arouse attention, and his success was instant.  He was introduced;

he was civil, he was obliging, he was always ineffably superior and

certain of himself; a well-graced actor.  It was presently

suggested that he should appear in his war costume; he gracefully

consented; and returned in that strange, inappropriate and ill-

omened array (which very well became his handsome person) to strut

in a circle of admirers, and be thenceforth the centre of

photography.  Thus had Moipu effected his introduction, as by

accident, to the white strangers, made it a favour to display his

finery, and reduced his rival to a secondary role on the theatre of

the disputed village.  Paaaeua felt the blow; and, with a spirit

which we never dreamed he could possess, asserted his priority.  It

was found impossible that day to get a photograph of Moipu alone;

for whenever he stood up before the camera his successor placed

himself unbidden by his side, and gently but firmly held to his

position.  The portraits of the pair, Jacob and Esau, standing

shoulder to shoulder, one in his careful European dress, one in his

barbaric trappings, figure the past and present of their island.  A

graveyard with its humble crosses would be the aptest symbol of the

future.

We are all impressed with the belief that Moipu had planned his

campaign from the beginning to the end.  It is certain that he lost

no time in pushing his advantage.  Mr. Osbourne was inveigled to

his house; various gifts were fished out of an old sea-chest;

Father Orens was called into service as interpreter, and Moipu

formally proposed to 'make brothers' with Mata-Galahi--Glass-Eyes,-

-the not very euphonious name under which Mr. Osbourne passed in

the Marquesas.  The feast of brotherhood took place on board the

Casco.  Paaaeua had arrived with his family, like a plain man; and

his presents, which had been numerous, had followed one another, at

intervals through several days.  Moipu, as if to mark at every

point the opposition, came with a certain feudal pomp, attended by

retainers bearing gifts of all descriptions, from plumes of old

men's beard to little, pious, Catholic engravings.

I had met the man before this in the village, and detested him on

sight; there was something indescribably raffish in his looks and

ways that raised my gorge; and when man-eating was referred to, and

he laughed a low, cruel laugh, part boastful, part bashful, like

one reminded of some dashing peccadillo, my repugnance was mingled

with nausea.  This is no very human attitude, nor one at all

becoming in a traveller.  And, seen more privately, the man

improved.  Something negroid in character and face was still

displeasing; but his ugly mouth became attractive when he smiled,

his figure and bearing were certainly noble, and his eyes superb.

In his appreciation of jams and pickles, in is delight in the

reverberating mirrors of the dining cabin, and consequent endless

repetition of Moipus and Mata-Galahis, he showed himself engagingly

a child.  And yet I am not sure; and what seemed childishness may

have been rather courtly art.  His manners struck me as beyond the

mark; they were refined and caressing to the point of grossness,

and when I think of the serene absent-mindedness with which he

first strolled in upon our party, and then recall him running on

hands and knees along the cabin sofas, pawing the velvet, dipping

into the beds, and bleating commendatory 'mitais' with exaggerated

emphasis, like some enormous over-mannered ape, I feel the more

sure that both must have been calculated.  And I sometimes wonder

next, if Moipu were quite alone in this polite duplicity, and ask

myself whether the Casco were quite so much admired in the

Marquesas as our visitors desired us to suppose.

I will complete this sketch of an incurable cannibal grandee with

two incongruous traits.  His favourite morsel was the human hand,

of which he speaks to-day with an ill-favoured lustfulness.  And

when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing

her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in

the falsetto of Marquesan high society, he wrote upon her mind a

sentimental impression which I try in vain to share.

PART II:  THE PAUMOTUS

CHAPTER I--THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO--ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE

In the early morning of 4th September a whale-boat manned by

natives dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round

the spouting promontory.  On the shore level it was a hot,

breathless, and yet crystal morning; but high overhead the hills of

Atuona were all cowled in cloud, and the ocean-river of the trades

streamed without pause.  As we crawled from under the immediate

shelter of the land, we reached at last the limit of their

influence.  The wind fell upon our sails in puffs, which

strengthened and grew more continuous; presently the Casco heeled

down to her day's work; the whale-boat, quite outstripped, clung

for a noisy moment to her quarter; the stipulated bread, rum, and

tobacco were passed in; a moment more and the boat was in our wake,

and our late pilots were cheering our departure.

This was the more inspiriting as we were bound for scenes so

different, and though on a brief voyage, yet for a new province of

creation.  That wide field of ocean, called loosely the South Seas,

extends from tropic to tropic, and from perhaps 123 degrees W. to

150 degrees E., a parallelogram of one hundred degrees by forty-

seven, where degrees are the most spacious.  Much of it lies

vacant, much is closely sown with isles, and the isles are of two

sorts.  No distinction is so continually dwelt upon in South Sea

talk as that between the 'low' and the 'high' island, and there is

none more broadly marked in nature.  The Himalayas are not more

different from the Sahara.  On the one hand, and chiefly in groups

of from eight to a dozen, volcanic islands rise above the sea; few

reach an altitude of less than 4000 feet; one exceeds 13,000; their

tops are often obscured in cloud, they are all clothed with various

forests, all abound in food, and are all remarkable for picturesque

and solemn scenery.  On the other hand, we have the atoll; a thing

of problematic origin and history, the reputed creature of an

insect apparently unidentified; rudely annular in shape; enclosing

a lagoon; rarely extending beyond a quarter of a mile at its chief

width; often rising at its highest point to less than the stature

of a man--man himself, the rat and the land crab, its chief

inhabitants; not more variously supplied with plants; and offering

to the eye, even when perfect, only a ring of glittering beach and

verdant foliage, enclosing and enclosed by the blue sea.

In no quarter are the atolls so thickly congregated, in none are

they so varied in size from the greatest to the least, and in none

is navigation so beset with perils, as in that archipelago that we

were now to thread.  The huge system of the trades is, for some

reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs, the wind

intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west,

hurricanes are known.  The currents are, besides, inextricably

intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to

be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands

that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser.

The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance

offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without

misgiving that my captain risked the Casco in such waters.  I

believe, indeed, it is almost understood that yachts are to avoid

this baffling archipelago; and it required all my instances--and

all Mr. Otis's private taste for adventure--to deflect our course

across its midst.

For a few days we sailed with a steady trade, and a steady westerly

current setting us to leeward; and toward sundown of the seventh it

was supposed we should have sighted Takaroa, one of Cook's so-

called King George Islands.  The sun set; yet a while longer the

old moon--semi-brilliant herself, and with a silver belly, which

was her successor--sailed among gathering clouds; she, too,

deserted us; stars of every degree of sheen, and clouds of every

variety of form disputed the sub-lustrous night; and still we gazed

in vain for Takaroa.  The mate stood on the bowsprit, his tall grey

figure slashing up and down against the stars, and still

'nihil astra praeter

Vidit et undas.

The rest of us were grouped at the port anchor davit, staring with

no less assiduity, but with far less hope on the obscure horizon.

Islands we beheld in plenty, but they were of 'such stuff as dreams

are made on,' and vanished at a wink, only to appear in other

places; and by and by not only islands, but refulgent and revolving

lights began to stud the darkness; lighthouses of the mind or of

the wearied optic nerve, solemnly shining and winking as we passed.

At length the mate himself despaired, scrambled on board again from

his unrestful perch, and announced that we had missed our

destination.  He was the only man of practice in these waters, our

sole pilot, shipped for that end at Tai-o-hae.  If he declared we

had missed Takaroa, it was not for us to quarrel with the fact,

but, if we could, to explain it.  We had certainly run down our

southing.  Our canted wake upon the sea and our somewhat drunken-

looking course upon the chart both testified with no less certainty

to an impetuous westward current.  We had no choice but to conclude

we were again set down to leeward; and the best we could do was to

bring the Casco to the wind, keep a good watch, and expect morning.

I slept that night, as was then my somewhat dangerous practice, on

deck upon the cockpit bench.  A stir at last awoke me, to see all

the eastern heaven dyed with faint orange, the binnacle lamp

already dulled against the brightness of the day, and the steersman

leaning eagerly across the wheel.  'There it is, sir!' he cried,

and pointed in the very eyeball of the dawn.  For awhile I could

see nothing but the bluish ruins of the morning bank, which lay far

along the horizon, like melting icebergs.  Then the sun rose,

pierced a gap in these debris of vapours, and displayed an

inconsiderable islet, flat as a plate upon the sea, and spiked with

palms of disproportioned altitude.

So far, so good.  Here was certainly an atoll; and we were

certainly got among the archipelago.  But which?  And where?  The

isle was too small for either Takaroa:  in all our neighbourhood,

indeed, there was none so inconsiderable, save only Tikei; and

Tikei, one of Roggewein's so-called Pernicious Islands, seemed

beside the question.  At that rate, instead of drifting to the

west, we must have fetched up thirty miles to windward.  And how

about the current?  It had been setting us down, by observation,

all these days:  by the deflection of our wake, it should be

setting us down that moment.  When had it stopped?  When had it

begun again? and what kind of torrent was that which had swept us

eastward in the interval?  To these questions, so typical of

navigation in that range of isles, I have no answer.  Such were at

least the facts; Tikei our island turned out to be; and it was our

first experience of the dangerous archipelago, to make our landfall

thirty miles out.

The sight of Tikei, thrown direct against the splendour of the

morning, robbed of all its colour, and deformed with

disproportioned trees like bristles on a broom, had scarce prepared

us to be much in love with atolls.  Later the same day we saw under

more fit conditions the island of Taiaro.  Lost in the Sea is

possibly the meaning of the name.  And it was so we saw it; lost in

blue sea and sky:  a ring of white beach, green underwood, and

tossing palms, gem-like in colour; of a fairy, of a heavenly

prettiness.  The surf ran all around it, white as snow, and broke

at one point, far to seaward, on what seems an uncharted reef.

There was no smoke, no sign of man; indeed, the isle is not

inhabited, only visited at intervals.  And yet a trader (Mr.  Narii

Salmon) was watching from the shore and wondering at the unexpected

ship.  I have spent since then long months upon low islands; I know

the tedium of their undistinguished days; I know the burden of

their diet.  With whatever envy we may have looked from the deck on

these green coverts, it was with a tenfold greater that Mr. Salmon

and his comrades saw us steer, in our trim ship, to seaward.

The night fell lovely in the extreme.  After the moon went down,

the heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars.  And as I lay in the

cockpit and looked upon the steersman I was haunted by Emerson's

verses:

'And the lone seaman all the night

Sails astonished among stars.'

By this glittering and imperfect brightness, about four bells in

the first watch we made our third atoll, Raraka.  The low line of

the isle lay straight along the sky; so that I was at first

reminded of a towpath, and we seemed to be mounting some engineered

and navigable stream.  Presently a red star appeared, about the

height and brightness of a danger signal, and with that my simile

was changed; we seemed rather to skirt the embankment of a railway,

and the eye began to look instinctively for the telegraph-posts,

and the ear to expect the coming of a train.  Here and there, but

rarely, faint tree-tops broke the level.  And the sound of the surf

accompanied us, now in a drowsy monotone, now with a menacing

swing.

The isle lay nearly east and west, barring our advance on Fakarava.

We must, therefore, hug the coast until we gained the western end,

where, through a passage eight miles wide, we might sail southward

between Raraka and the next isle, Kauehi.  We had the wind free, a

lightish air; but clouds of an inky blackness were beginning to

arise, and at times it lightened--without thunder.  Something, I

know not what, continually set us up upon the island.  We lay more

and more to the nor'ard; and you would have thought the shore

copied our manoeuvre and outsailed us. Once and twice Raraka headed

us again--again, in the sea fashion, the quite innocent steersman

was abused--and again the Casco kept away.  Had I been called on,

with no more light than that of our experience, to draw the

configuration of that island, I should have shown a series of bow-

window promontories, each overlapping the other to the nor'ard, and

the trend of the land from the south-east to the north-west, and

behold, on the chart it lay near east and west in a straight line.

We had but just repeated our manoeuvre and kept away--for not more

than five minutes the railway embankment had been lost to view and

the surf to hearing--when I was aware of land again, not only on

the weather bow, but dead ahead.  I played the part of the

judicious landsman, holding my peace till the last moment; and

presently my mariners perceived it for themselves.

'Land ahead!' said the steersman.

'By God, it's Kauehi!' cried the mate.

And so it was.  And with that I began to be sorry for

cartographers.  We were scarce doing three and a half; and they

asked me to believe that (in five minutes) we had dropped an

island, passed eight miles of open water, and run almost high and

dry upon the next.  But my captain was more sorry for himself to be

afloat in such a labyrinth; laid the Casco to, with the log line up

and down, and sat on the stern rail and watched it till the

morning.  He had enough of night in the Paumotus.

By daylight on the 9th we began to skirt Kauehi, and had now an

opportunity to see near at hand the geography of atolls.  Here and

there, where it was high, the farther side loomed up; here and

there the near side dipped entirely and showed a broad path of

water into the lagoon; here and there both sides were equally

abased, and we could look right through the discontinuous ring to

the sea horizon on the south.  Conceive, on a vast scale, the

submerged hoop of the duck-hunter, trimmed with green rushes to

conceal his head--water within, water without--you have the image

of the perfect atoll.  Conceive one that has been partly plucked of

its rush fringe; you have the atoll of Kauehi.  And for either

shore of it at closer quarters, conceive the line of some old Roman

highway traversing a wet morass, and here sunk out of view and

there re-arising, crowned with a green tuft of thicket; only

instead of the stagnant waters of a marsh, the live ocean now

boiled against, now buried the frail barrier.  Last night's

impression in the dark was thus confirmed by day, and not

corrected.  We sailed indeed by a mere causeway in the sea, of

nature's handiwork, yet of no greater magnitude than many of the

works of man.

The isle was uninhabited; it was all green brush and white sand,

set in transcendently blue water; even the coco-palms were rare,

though some of these completed the bright harmony of colour by

hanging out a fan of golden yellow.  For long there was no sign of

life beyond the vegetable, and no sound but the continuous grumble

of the surf.  In silence and desertion these fair shores slipped

past, and were submerged and rose again with clumps of thicket from

the sea.  And then a bird or two appeared, hovering and crying;

swiftly these became more numerous, and presently, looking ahead,

we were aware of a vast effervescence of winged life.  In this

place the annular isle was mostly under water, carrying here and

there on its submerged line a wooded islet.  Over one of these the

birds hung and flew with an incredible density like that of gnats

or hiving bees; the mass flashed white and black, and heaved and

quivered, and the screaming of the creatures rose over the voice of

the surf in a shrill clattering whirr.  As you descend some inland

valley a not dissimilar sound announces the nearness of a mill and

pouring river.  Some stragglers, as I said, came to meet our

approach; a few still hung about the ship as we departed.  The

crying died away, the last pair of wings was left behind, and once

more the low shores of Kauehi streamed past our eyes in silence

like a picture.  I supposed at the time that the birds lived, like

ants or citizens, concentred where we saw them.  I have been told

since (I know not if correctly) that the whole isle, or much of it,

is similarly peopled; and that the effervescence at a single spot

would be the mark of a boat's crew of egg-hunters from one of the

neighbouring inhabited atolls.  So that here at Kauehi, as the day

before at Taiaro, the Casco sailed by under the fire of unsuspected

eyes.  And one thing is surely true, that even on these ribbons of

land an army might lie hid and no passing mariner divine its

presence.

CHAPTER II--FAKARAVA:  AN ATOLL AT HAND

By a little before noon we were running down the coast of our

destination, Fakarava:  the air very light, the sea near smooth;

though still we were accompanied by a continuous murmur from the

beach, like the sound of a distant train.  The isle is of a huge

longitude, the enclosed lagoon thirty miles by ten or twelve, and

the coral tow-path, which they call the land, some eighty or ninety

miles by (possibly) one furlong.  That part by which we sailed was

all raised; the underwood excellently green, the topping wood of

coco-palms continuous--a mark, if I had known it, of man's

intervention.  For once more, and once more unconsciously, we were

within hail of fellow-creatures, and that vacant beach was but a

pistol-shot from the capital city of the archipelago.  But the life

of an atoll, unless it be enclosed, passes wholly on the shores of

the lagoon; it is there the villages are seated, there the canoes

ply and are drawn up; and the beach of the ocean is a place

accursed and deserted, the fit scene only for wizardry and

shipwreck, and in the native belief a haunting ground of murderous

spectres.

By and by we might perceive a breach in the low barrier; the woods

ceased; a glittering point ran into the sea, tipped with an emerald

shoal the mark of entrance.  As we drew near we met a little run of

sea--the private sea of the lagoon having there its origin and end,

and here, in the jaws of the gateway, trying vain conclusions with

the more majestic heave of the Pacific.  The Casco scarce avowed a

shock; but there are times and circumstances when these harbour

mouths of inland basins vomit floods, deflecting, burying, and

dismasting ships.  For, conceive a lagoon perfectly sealed but in

the one point, and that of merely navigable width; conceive the

tide and wind to have heaped for hours together in that coral fold

a superfluity of waters, and the tide to change and the wind fall--

the open sluice of some great reservoirs at home will give an image

of the unstemmable effluxion.

We were scarce well headed for the pass before all heads were

craned over the rail.  For the water, shoaling under our board,

became changed in a moment to surprising hues of blue and grey; and

in its transparency the coral branched and blossomed, and the fish

of the inland sea cruised visibly below us, stained and striped,

and even beaked like parrots.  I have paid in my time to view many

curiosities; never one so curious as that first sight over the

ship's rail in the lagoon of Fakarava.  But let not the reader be

deceived with hope.  I have since entered, I suppose, some dozen

atolls in different parts of the Pacific, and the experience has

never been repeated.  That exquisite hue and transparency of

submarine day, and these shoals of rainbow fish, have not

enraptured me again.

Before we could raise our eyes from that engaging spectacle the

schooner had slipped betwixt the pierheads of the reef, and was

already quite committed to the sea within.  The containing shores

are so little erected, and the lagoon itself is so great, that, for

the more part, it seemed to extend without a check to the horizon.

Here and there, indeed, where the reef carried an inlet, like a

signet-ring upon a finger, there would be a pencilling of palms;

here and there, the green wall of wood ran solid for a length of

miles; and on the port hand, under the highest grove of trees, a

few houses sparkled white--Rotoava, the metropolitan settlement of

the Paumotus.  Hither we beat in three tacks, and came to an anchor

close in shore, in the first smooth water since we had left San

Francisco, five fathoms deep, where a man might look overboard all

day at the vanishing cable, the coral patches, and the many-

coloured fish.

Fakarava was chosen to be the seat of Government from nautical

considerations only.  It is eccentrically situate; the productions,

even for a low island, poor; the population neither many nor--for

Low Islanders--industrious.  But the lagoon has two good passages,

one to leeward, one to windward, so that in all states of the wind

it can be left and entered, and this advantage, for a government of

scattered islands, was decisive.  A pier of coral, landing-stairs,

a harbour light upon a staff and pillar, and two spacious

Government bungalows in a handsome fence, give to the northern end

of Rotoava a great air of consequence.  This is confirmed on the

one hand by an empty prison, on the other by a gendarmerie pasted

over with hand-bills in Tahitian, land-law notices from Papeete,

and republican sentiments from Paris, signed (a little after date)

'Jules Grevy, Perihidente.'  Quite at the far end a belfried

Catholic chapel concludes the town; and between, on a smooth floor

of white coral sand and under the breezy canopy of coco-palms, the

houses of the natives stand irregularly scattered, now close on the

lagoon for the sake of the breeze, now back under the palms for

love of shadow.

Not a soul was to be seen.  But for the thunder of the surf on the

far side, it seemed you might have heard a pin drop anywhere about

that capital city.  There was something thrilling in the unexpected

silence, something yet more so in the unexpected sound.  Here

before us a sea reached to the horizon, rippling like an inland

mere; and behold! close at our back another sea assaulted with

assiduous fury the reverse of the position.  At night the lantern

was run up and lit a vacant pier.  In one house lights were seen

and voices heard, where the population (I was told) sat playing

cards.  A little beyond, from deep in the darkness of the palm-

grove, we saw the glow and smelt the aromatic odour of a coal of

cocoa-nut husk, a relic of the evening kitchen.  Crickets sang;

some shrill thing whistled in a tuft of weeds; and the mosquito

hummed and stung.  There was no other trace that night of man,

bird, or insect in the isle.  The moon, now three days old, and as

yet but a silver crescent on a still visible sphere, shone through

the palm canopy with vigorous and scattered lights.  The alleys

where we walked were smoothed and weeded like a boulevard; here and

there were plants set out; here and there dusky cottages clustered

in the shadow, some with verandahs.  A public garden by night, a

rich and fashionable watering-place in a by-season, offer sights

and vistas not dissimilar.  And still, on the one side, stretched

the lapping mere, and from the other the deep sea still growled in

the night.  But it was most of all on board, in the dead hours,

when I had been better sleeping, that the spell of Fakarava seized

and held me.  The moon was down.  The harbour lantern and two of

the greater planets drew vari-coloured wakes on the lagoon.  From

shore the cheerful watch-cry of cocks rang out at intervals above

the organ-point of surf.  And the thought of this depopulated

capital, this protracted thread of annular island with its crest of

coco-palms and fringe of breakers, and that tranquil inland sea

that stretched before me till it touched the stars, ran in my head

for hours with delight.

So long as I stayed upon that isle these thoughts were constant.  I

lay down to sleep, and woke again with an unblunted sense of my

surroundings.  I was never weary of calling up the image of that

narrow causeway, on which I had my dwelling, lying coiled like a

serpent, tail to mouth, in the outrageous ocean, and I was never

weary of passing--a mere quarter-deck parade--from the one side to

the other, from the shady, habitable shores of the lagoon to the

blinding desert and uproarious breakers of the opposite beach.  The

sense of insecurity in such a thread of residence is more than

fanciful.  Hurricanes and tidal waves over-leap these humble

obstacles; Oceanus remembers his strength, and, where houses stood

and palms flourished, shakes his white beard again over the barren

coral.  Fakarava itself has suffered; the trees immediately beyond

my house were all of recent replantation; and Anaa is only now

recovered from a heavier stroke.  I knew one who was then dwelling

in the isle.  He told me that he and two ship captains walked to

the sea beach.  There for a while they viewed the oncoming

breakers, till one of the captains clapped suddenly his hand before

his eyes and cried aloud that he could endure no longer to behold

them.  This was in the afternoon; in the dark hours of the night

the sea burst upon the island like a flood; the settlement was

razed all but the church and presbytery; and, when day returned,

the survivors saw themselves clinging in an abattis of uprooted

coco-palms and ruined houses.

Danger is but a small consideration.  But men are more nicely

sensible of a discomfort; and the atoll is a discomfortable home.

There are some, and these probably ancient, where a deep soil has

formed and the most valuable fruit-trees prosper.  I have walked in

one, with equal admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge

breadfruits, eating bananas and stumbling among taro as I went.

This was in the atoll of Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands

alone in my experience.  To give the opposite extreme, which is yet

far more near the average, I will describe the soil and productions

of Fakarava.  The surface of that narrow strip is for the more part

of broken coral lime-stone, like volcanic clinkers, and

excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe, not in

Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck.  Here and

there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and

these parts are the least productive.  The plants (such as they

are) spring from and love the broken coral, whence they grow with

that wonderful verdancy that makes the beauty of the atoll from the

sea.  The coco-palm in particular luxuriates in that stern solum,

striking down his roots to the brackish, percolated water, and

bearing his green head in the wind with every evidence of health

and pleasure.  And yet even the coco-palm must be helped in infancy

with some extraneous nutriment, and through much of the low

archipelago there is planted with each nut a piece of ship's

biscuit and a rusty nail.  The pandanus comes next in importance,

being also a food tree; and he, too, does bravely.  A green bush

called miki runs everywhere; occasionally a purao is seen; and

there are several useless weeds.  According to M. Cuzent, the whole

number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed,

even if it reaches to, one score.  Not a blade of grass appears;

not a grain of humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to

make the semblance of a garden; such gardens as bloom in cities on

the window-sill.  Insect life is sometimes dense; a cloud o'

mosquitoes, and, what is far worse, a plague of flies blackening

our food, has sometimes driven us from a meal on Apemama; and even

in Fakarava the mosquitoes were a pest.  The land crab may be seen

scuttling to his hole, and at night the rats besiege the houses and

the artificial gardens.  The crab is good eating; possibly so is

the rat; I have not tried.  Pandanus fruit is made, in the

Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle

with at the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no

use for it.  The rest of the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such

as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the

archipelago--cocoa-nut beefsteak.  Cocoa-nut green, cocoa-nut ripe,

cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and cocoa-nut to drink;

cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold--such is the bill

of fare.  And some of the entrees are no doubt delicious.  The

germinated nut, cooked in the shell and eaten with a spoon, forms a

good pudding; cocoa-nut milk--the expressed juice of a ripe nut,

not the water of a green one--goes well in coffee, and is a

valuable adjunct in cookery through the South Seas; and cocoa-nut

salad, if you be a millionaire, and can afford to eat the value of

a field of corn for your dessert, is a dish to be remembered with

affection.  But when all is done there is a sameness, and the

Israelites of the low islands murmur at their manna.

The reader may think I have forgot the sea.  The two beaches do

certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different.  In the

lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of the fine slimy

sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral.  Then comes a strip of

tidal beach on which the ripples lap.  In the coral clumps the

great holy-water clam (Tridacna) grows plentifully; a little deeper

lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and sail the resplendent fish that

charmed us at our entrance; and these are all more or less

vigorously coloured.  But the other shells are white like lime, or

faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display;

many of them dead besides, and badly rolled.  On the ocean side, on

the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right

out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every

scattered fragment of the coral, an incredible plenty of marine

life displays the most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues.

The reef itself has no passage of colour but is imitated by some

shell.  Purple and red and white, and green and yellow, pied and

striped and clouded, the living shells wear in every combination

the livery of the dead reef--if the reef be dead--so that the eye

is continually baffled and the collector continually deceived.  I

have taken shells for stones and stones for shells, the one as

often as the other.  A prevailing character of the coral is to be

dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how many

varieties of shell have adopted the same fashion and donned the

disguise of the red spot.  A shell I had found in plenty in the

Marquesas I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there

were the red spots.  A lively little crab wore the same markings.

The case of the hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being

the result of conscious choice.  This nasty little wrecker,

scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house;

so it be of the right colour he will choose the smallest shard,

tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the

world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect armour

unless it was marked with the red spot.

Some two hundred yards distant is the beach of the lagoon.  Collect

the shells from each, set them side by side, and you would suppose

they came from different hemispheres; the one so pale, the other so

brilliant; the one prevalently white, the other of a score of hues,

and infected with the scarlet spot like a disease.  This seems the

more strange, since the hermit crabs pass and repass the island,

and I have met them by the Residency well, which is about central,

journeying either way.  Without doubt many of the shells in the

lagoon are dead.  But why are they dead?  Without doubt the living

shells have a very different background set for imitation.  But why

are these so different?  We are only on the threshold of the

mysteries.

Either beach, I have said, abounds with life.  On the sea-side and

in certain atolls this profusion of vitality is even shocking:  the

rock under foot is mined with it.  I have broken off--notably in

Funafuti and Arorai--great lumps of ancient weathered rock that

rang under my blows like iron, and the fracture has been full of

pendent worms as long as my hand, as thick as a child's finger, of

a slightly pinkish white, and set as close as three or even four to

the square inch.  Even in the lagoon, where certain shell-fish seem

to sicken, others (it is notorious) prosper exceedingly and make

the riches of these islands.  Fish, too, abound; the lagoon is a

closed fish-pond, such as might rejoice the fancy of an abbot;

sharks swarm there, and chiefly round the passages, to feast upon

this plenty, and you would suppose that man had only to prepare his

angle.  Alas! it is not so.  Of these painted fish that came in

hordes about the entering Casco, some bore poisonous spines, and

others were poisonous if eaten.  The stranger must refrain, or take

his chance of painful and dangerous sickness.  The native, on his

own isle, is a safe guide; transplant him to the next, and he is

helpless as yourself.  For it is a question both of time and place.

A fish caught in a lagoon may be deadly; the same fish caught the

same day at sea, and only a few hundred yards without the passage,

will be wholesome eating:  in a neighbouring isle perhaps the case

will be reversed; and perhaps a fortnight later you shall be able

to eat of them indifferently from within and from without.

According to the natives, these bewildering vicissitudes are ruled

by the movement of the heavenly bodies.  The beautiful planet Venus

plays a great part in all island tales and customs; and among other

functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of

good fish.  With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish

were poisonous in the lagoon:  with Venus in another, the same fish

was harmless and a valued article of diet.  White men explain these

changes by the phases of the coral.

It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious

annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of

honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the

clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn

boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an

apothecary's drugs.

CHAPTER III--A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND

Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found

the island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the

hours; that we walked in that trim public garden of a town, among

closed houses, without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove

some tenancy in the back quarters; and, when we visited the

Government bungalow, that Mr. Donat, acting Vice-Resident, greeted

us alone, and entertained us with cocoa-nut punches in the Sessions

Hall and seat of judgment of that widespread archipelago, our

glasses standing arrayed with summonses and census returns.  The

unpopularity of a late Vice-Resident had begun the movement of

exodus, his native employes resigning court appointments and

retiring each to his own coco-patch in the remoter districts of the

isle.  Upon the back of that, the Governor in Papeete issued a

decree:  All land in the Paumotus must be defined and registered by

a certain date.  Now, the folk of the archipelago are half nomadic;

a man can scarce be said to belong to a particular atoll; he

belongs to several, perhaps holds a stake and counts cousinship in

half a score; and the inhabitants of Rotoava in particular, man,

woman, and child, and from the gendarme to the Mormon prophet and

the schoolmaster, owned--I was going to say land--owned at least

coral blocks and growing coco-palms in some adjacent isle.

Thither--from the gendarme to the babe in arms, the pastor followed

by his flock, the schoolmaster carrying along with him his

scholars, and the scholars with their books and slates--they had

taken ship some two days previous to our arrival, and were all now

engaged disputing boundaries.  Fancy overhears the shrillness of

their disputation mingle with the surf and scatter sea-fowl.  It

was admirable to observe the completeness of their flight, like

that of hibernating birds; nothing left but empty houses, like old

nests to be reoccupied in spring; and even the harmless necessary

dominie borne with them in their transmigration.  Fifty odd set

out, and only seven, I was informed, remained.  But when I made a

feast on board the Casco, more than seven, and nearer seven times

seven, appeared to be my guests.  Whence they appeared, how they

were summoned, whither they vanished when the feast was eaten, I

have no guess.  In view of Low Island tales, and that awful

frequentation which makes men avoid the seaward beaches of an

atoll, some two score of those that ate with us may have returned,

for the occasion, from the kingdom of the dead.

It was this solitude that put it in our minds to hire a house, and

become, for the time being, indwellers of the isle--a practice I

have ever since, when it was possible, adhered to.  Mr. Donat

placed us, with that intent, under the convoy of one Taniera

Mahinui, who combined the incongruous characters of catechist and

convict.  The reader may smile, but I affirm he was well qualified

for either part.  For that of convict, first of all, by a good

substantial felony, such as in all lands casts the perpetrator in

chains and dungeons.  Taniera was a man of birth--the chief a while

ago, as he loved to tell, of a district in Anaa of 800 souls.  In

an evil hour it occurred to the authorities in Papeete to charge

the chiefs with the collection of the taxes.  It is a question if

much were collected; it is certain that nothing was handed on; and

Taniera, who had distinguished himself by a visit to Papeete and

some high living in restaurants, was chosen for the scapegoat.  The

reader must understand that not Taniera but the authorities in

Papeete were first in fault.  The charge imposed was

disproportioned.  I have not yet heard of any Polynesian capable of

such a burden; honest and upright Hawaiians--one in particular, who

was admired even by the whites as an inflexible magistrate--have

stumbled in the narrow path of the trustee.  And Taniera, when the

pinch came, scorned to denounce accomplices; others had shared the

spoil, he bore the penalty alone.  He was condemned in five years.

The period, when I had the pleasure of his friendship, was not yet

expired; he still drew prison rations, the sole and not unwelcome

reminder of his chains, and, I believe, looked forward to the date

of his enfranchisement with mere alarm.  For he had no sense of

shame in the position; complained of nothing but the defective

table of his place of exile; regretted nothing but the fowls and

eggs and fish of his own more favoured island.  And as for his

parishioners, they did not think one hair the less of him.  A

schoolboy, mulcted in ten thousand lines of Greek and dwelling

sequestered in the dormitories, enjoys unabated consideration from

his fellows.  So with Taniera:  a marked man, not a dishonoured;

having fallen under the lash of the unthinkable gods; a Job,

perhaps, or say a Taniera in the den of lions.  Songs are likely

made and sung about this saintly Robin Hood.  On the other hand, he

was even highly qualified for his office in the Church; being by

nature a grave, considerate, and kindly man; his face rugged and

serious, his smile bright; the master of several trades, a builder

both of boats and houses; endowed with a fine pulpit voice; endowed

besides with such a gift of eloquence that at the grave of the late

chief of Fakarava he set all the assistants weeping.  I never met a

man of a mind more ecclesiastical; he loved to dispute and to

inform himself of doctrine and the history of sects; and when I

showed him the cuts in a volume of Chambers's Encyclopaedia--except

for one of an ape--reserved his whole enthusiasm for cardinals'

hats, censers, candlesticks, and cathedrals.  Methought when he

looked upon the cardinal's hat a voice said low in his ear:  'Your

foot is on the ladder.'

Under the guidance of Taniera we were soon installed in what I

believe to have been the best-appointed private house in Fakarava.

It stood just beyond the church in an oblong patch of cultivation.

More than three hundred sacks of soil were imported from Tahiti for

the Residency garden; and this must shortly be renewed, for the

earth blows away, sinks in crevices of the coral, and is sought for

at last in vain.  I know not how much earth had gone to the garden

of my villa; some at least, for an alley of prosperous bananas ran

to the gate, and over the rest of the enclosure, which was covered

with the usual clinker-like fragments of smashed coral, not only

coco-palms and mikis but also fig-trees flourished, all of a

delicious greenness.  Of course there was no blade of grass.  In

front a picket fence divided us from the white road, the palm-

fringed margin of the lagoon, and the lagoon itself, reflecting

clouds by day and stars by night.  At the back, a bulwark of

uncemented coral enclosed us from the narrow belt of bush and the

nigh ocean beach where the seas thundered, the roar and wash of

them still humming in the chambers of the house.

This itself was of one story, verandahed front and back.  It

contained three rooms, three sewing-machines, three sea-chests,

chairs, tables, a pair of beds, a cradle, a double-barrelled gun, a

pair of enlarged coloured photographs, a pair of coloured prints

after Wilkie and Mulready, and a French lithograph with the legend:

'Le brigade du General Lepasset brulant son drapeau devant Metz.'

Under the stilts of the house a stove was rusting, till we drew it

forth and put it in commission.  Not far off was the burrow in the

coral whence we supplied ourselves with brackish water.  There was

live stock, besides, on the estate--cocks and hens and a brace of

ill-regulated cats, whom Taniera came every morning with the sun to

feed on grated cocoa-nut.  His voice was our regular reveille,

ringing pleasantly about the garden:  'Pooty--pooty--poo--poo--

poo!'

Far as we were from the public offices, the nearness of the chapel

made our situation what is called eligible in advertisements, and

gave us a side look on some native life.  Every morning, as soon as

he had fed the fowls, Taniera set the bell agoing in the small

belfry; and the faithful, who were not very numerous, gathered to

prayers.  I was once present:  it was the Lord's day, and seven

females and eight males composed the congregation.  A woman played

precentor, starting with a longish note; the catechist joined in

upon the second bar; and then the faithful in a body.  Some had

printed hymn-books which they followed; some of the rest filled up

with 'eh--eh--eh,' the Paumotuan tol-de-rol.  After the hymn, we

had an antiphonal prayer or two; and then Taniera rose from the

front bench, where he had been sitting in his catechist's robes,

passed within the altar-rails, opened his Tahitian Bible, and began

to preach from notes.  I understood one word--the name of God; but

the preacher managed his voice with taste, used rare and expressive

gestures, and made a strong impression of sincerity.  The plain

service, the vernacular Bible, the hymn-tunes mostly on an English

pattern--'God save the Queen,' I was informed, a special

favourite,--all, save some paper flowers upon the altar, seemed not

merely but austerely Protestant.  It is thus the Catholics have met

their low island proselytes half-way.

Taniera had the keys of our house; it was with him I made my

bargain, if that could be called a bargain in which all was

remitted to my generosity; it was he who fed the cats and poultry,

he who came to call and pick a meal with us like an acknowledged

friend; and we long fondly supposed he was our landlord.  This

belief was not to bear the test of experience; and, as my chapter

has to relate, no certainty succeeded it.

We passed some days of airless quiet and great heat; shell-

gatherers were warned from the ocean beach, where sunstroke waited

them from ten till four; the highest palm hung motionless, there

was no voice audible but that of the sea on the far side.  At last,

about four of a certain afternoon, long cat's-paws flawed the face

of the lagoon; and presently in the tree-tops there awoke the

grateful bustle of the trades, and all the houses and alleys of the

island were fanned out.  To more than one enchanted ship, that had

lain long becalmed in view of the green shore, the wind brought

deliverance; and by daylight on the morrow a schooner and two

cutters lay moored in the port of Rotoava.  Not only in the outer

sea, but in the lagoon itself, a certain traffic woke with the

reviving breeze; and among the rest one Francois, a half-blood, set

sail with the first light in his own half-decked cutter.  He had

held before a court appointment; being, I believe, the Residency

sweeper-out.  Trouble arising with the unpopular Vice-Resident, he

had thrown his honours down, and fled to the far parts of the atoll

to plant cabbages--or at least coco-palms.  Thence he was now

driven by such need as even a Cincinnatus must acknowledge, and

fared for the capital city, the seat of his late functions, to

exchange half a ton of copra for necessary flour.  And here, for a

while, the story leaves to tell of his voyaging.

It must tell, instead, of our house, where, toward seven at night,

the catechist came suddenly in with his pleased air of being

welcome; armed besides with a considerable bunch of keys.  These he

proceeded to try on the sea-chests, drawing each in turn from its

place against the wall.  Heads of strangers appeared in the doorway

and volunteered suggestions.  All in vain.  Either they were the

wrong keys or the wrong boxes, or the wrong man was trying them.

For a little Taniera fumed and fretted; then had recourse to the

more summary method of the hatchet; one of the chests was broken

open, and an armful of clothing, male and female, baled out and

handed to the strangers on the verandah.

These were Francois, his wife, and their child.  About eight a.m.,

in the midst of the lagoon, their cutter had capsized in jibbing.

They got her righted, and though she was still full of water put

the child on board.  The mainsail had been carried away, but the

jib still drew her sluggishly along, and Francois and the woman

swam astern and worked the rudder with their hands.  The cold was

cruel; the fatigue, as time went on, became excessive; and in that

preserve of sharks, fear hunted them.  Again and again, Francois,

the half-breed, would have desisted and gone down; but the woman,

whole blood of an amphibious race, still supported him with

cheerful words.  I am reminded of a woman of Hawaii who swam with

her husband, I dare not say how many miles, in a high sea, and came

ashore at last with his dead body in her arms.  It was about five

in the evening, after nine hours' swimming, that Francois and his

wife reached land at Rotoava.  The gallant fight was won, and

instantly the more childish side of native character appears.  They

had supped, and told and retold their story, dripping as they came;

the flesh of the woman, whom Mrs. Stevenson helped to shift, was

cold as stone; and Francois, having changed to a dry cotton shirt

and trousers, passed the remainder of the evening on my floor and

between open doorways, in a thorough draught.  Yet Francois, the

son of a French father, speaks excellent French himself and seems

intelligent.

It was our first idea that the catechist, true to his evangelical

vocation, was clothing the naked from his superfluity.  Then it

came out that Francois was but dealing with his own.  The clothes

were his, so was the chest, so was the house.  Francois was in fact

the landlord.  Yet you observe he had hung back on the verandah

while Taniera tried his 'prentice hand upon the locks:  and even

now, when his true character appeared, the only use he made of the

estate was to leave the clothes of his family drying on the fence.

Taniera was still the friend of the house, still fed the poultry,

still came about us on his daily visits, Francois, during the

remainder of his stay, holding bashfully aloof.  And there was

stranger matter.  Since Francois had lost the whole load of his

cutter, the half ton of copra, an axe, bowls, knives, and clothes--

since he had in a manner to begin the world again, and his

necessary flour was not yet bought or paid for--I proposed to

advance him what he needed on the rent.  To my enduring amazement

he refused, and the reason he gave--if that can be called a reason

which but darkens counsel--was that Taniera was his friend.  His

friend, you observe; not his creditor.  I inquired into that, and

was assured that Taniera, an exile in a strange isle, might

possibly be in debt himself, but certainly was no man's creditor.

Very early one morning we were awakened by a bustling presence in

the yard, and found our camp had been surprised by a tall, lean old

native lady, dressed in what were obviously widow's weeds.  You

could see at a glance she was a notable woman, a housewife, sternly

practical, alive with energy, and with fine possibilities of

temper.  Indeed, there was nothing native about her but the skin;

and the type abounds, and is everywhere respected, nearer home.  It

did us good to see her scour the grounds, examining the plants and

chickens; watering, feeding, trimming them; taking angry, purpose-

like possession.  When she neared the house our sympathy abated;

when she came to the broken chest I wished I were elsewhere.  We

had scarce a word in common; but her whole lean body spoke for her

with indignant eloquence.  'My chest!' it cried, with a stress on

the possessive.  'My chest--broken open!  This is a fine state of

things!'  I hastened to lay the blame where it belonged--on

Francois and his wife--and found I had made things worse instead of

better.  She repeated the names at first with incredulity, then

with despair.  A while she seemed stunned, next fell to

disembowelling the box, piling the goods on the floor, and visibly

computing the extent of Francois's ravages; and presently after she

was observed in high speech with Taniera, who seemed to hang an ear

like one reproved.

Here, then, by all known marks, should be my land-lady at last;

here was every character of the proprietor fully developed.  Should

I not approach her on the still depending question of my rent?  I

carried the point to an adviser.  'Nonsense!' he cried.  'That's

the old woman, the mother.  It doesn't belong to her.  I believe

that's the man the house belongs to,' and he pointed to one of the

coloured photographs on the wall.  On this I gave up all desire of

understanding; and when the time came for me to leave, in the

judgment-hall of the archipelago, and with the awful countenance of

the acting Governor, I duly paid my rent to Taniera.  He was

satisfied, and so was I.  But what had he to do with it?  Mr.

Donat, acting magistrate and a man of kindred blood, could throw no

light upon the mystery; a plain private person, with a taste for

letters, cannot be expected to do more.

CHAPTER IV--TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS

The most careless reader must have remarked a change of air since

the Marquesas.  The house, crowded with effects, the bustling

housewife counting her possessions, the serious, indoctrinated

island pastor, the long fight for life in the lagoon:  here are

traits of a new world.  I read in a pamphlet (I will not give the

author's name) that the Marquesan especially resembles the

Paumotuan.  I should take the two races, though so near in

neighbourhood, to be extremes of Polynesian diversity.  The

Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one

of the tallest--the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and

not even handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to

religion, childishly self-indulgent--the Paumotuan greedy, hardy,

enterprising, a religious disputant, and with a trace of the

ascetic character.

Yet a few years ago, and the people of the archipelago were crafty

savages.  Their isles might be called sirens' isles, not merely

from the attraction they exerted on the passing mariner, but from

the perils that awaited him on shore.  Even to this day, in certain

outlying islands, danger lingers; and the civilized Paumotuan

dreads to land and hesitates to accost his backward brother.  But,

except in these, to-day the peril is a memory.  When our generation

were yet in the cradle and playroom it was still a living fact.

Between 1830 and 1840, Hao, for instance, was a place of the most

dangerous approach, where ships were seized and crews kidnapped.

As late as 1856, the schooner Sarah Ann sailed from Papeete and was

seen no more.  She had women on board, and children, the captain's

wife, a nursemaid, a baby, and the two young sons of a Captain

Steven on their way to the mainland for schooling.  All were

supposed to have perished in a squall.  A year later, the captain

of the Julia, coasting along the island variously called Bligh,

Lagoon, and Tematangi saw armed natives follow the course of his

schooner, clad in many-coloured stuffs.  Suspicion was at once

aroused; the mother of the lost children was profuse of money; and

one expedition having found the place deserted, and returned

content with firing a few shots, she raised and herself accompanied

another.  None appeared to greet or to oppose them; they roamed a

while among abandoned huts and empty thickets; then formed two

parties and set forth to beat, from end to end, the pandanus jungle

of the island.  One man remained alone by the landing-place--Teina,

a chief of Anaa, leader of the armed natives who made the strength

of the expedition.  Now that his comrades were departed this way

and that, on their laborious exploration, the silence fell

profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders.  A sound

of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina.  He looked, thinking to

perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being

issue from a fissure in the ground.  A shout recalled the search

parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs.  In the

cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and

singular and horrid curiosities.  One was a head of golden hair,

supposed to be a relic of the captain's wife; another was half of

the body of a European child, sun-dried and stuck upon a stick,

doubtless with some design of wizardry.

The Paumotuan is eager to be rich.  He saves, grudges, buries

money, fears not work.  For a dollar each, two natives passed the

hours of daylight cleaning our ship's copper.  It was strange to

see them so indefatigable and so much at ease in the water--working

at times with their pipes lighted, the smoker at times submerged

and only the glowing bowl above the surface; it was stranger still

to think they were next congeners to the incapable Marquesan.  But

the Paumotuan not only saves, grudges, and works, he steals

besides; or, to be more precise, he swindles.  He will never deny a

debt, he only flees his creditor.  He is always keen for an

advance; so soon as he has fingered it he disappears.  He knows

your ship; so soon as it nears one island, he is off to another.

You may think you know his name; he has already changed it.

Pursuit in that infinity of isles were fruitless.  The result can

be given in a nutshell.  It has been actually proposed in a

Government report to secure debts by taking a photograph of the

debtor; and the other day in Papeete credits on the Paumotus to the

amount of sixteen thousand pounds were sold for less than forty--

quatre cent mille francs pour moins de mille francs.  Even so, the

purchase was thought hazardous; and only the man who made it and

who had special opportunities could have dared to give so much.

The Paumotuan is sincerely attached to those of his own blood and

household.  A touching affection sometimes unites wife and husband.

Their children, while they are alive, completely rule them; after

they are dead, their bones or their mummies are often jealously

preserved and carried from atoll to atoll in the wanderings of the

family.  I was told there were many houses in Fakarava with the

mummy of a child locked in a sea-chest; after I heard it, I would

glance a little jealously at those by my own bed; in that cupboard,

also, it was possible there was a tiny skeleton.

The race seems in a fair way to survive.  From fifteen islands,

whose rolls I had occasion to consult, I found a proportion of 59

births to 47 deaths for 1887.  Dropping three out of the fifteen,

there remained for the other twelve the comfortable ratio of 50

births to 32 deaths.  Long habits of hardship and activity

doubtless explain the contrast with Marquesan figures.  But the

Paumotuan displays, besides, a certain concern for health and the

rudiments of a sanitary discipline.  Public talk with these free-

spoken people plays the part of the Contagious Diseases Act; in-

comers to fresh islands anxiously inquire if all be well; and

syphilis, when contracted, is successfully treated with indigenous

herbs.  Like their neighbours of Tahiti, from whom they have

perhaps imbibed the error, they regard leprosy with comparative

indifference, elephantiasis with disproportionate fear.  But,

unlike indeed to the Tahitian, their alarm puts on the guise of

self-defence.  Any one stricken with this painful and ugly malady

is confined to the ends of villages, denied the use of paths and

highways, and condemned to transport himself between his house and

coco-patch by water only, his very footprint being held infectious.

Fe'efe'e, being a creature of marshes and the sequel of malarial

fever, is not original in atolls.  On the single isle of Makatea,

where the lagoon is now a marsh, the disease has made a home.  Many

suffer; they are excluded (if Mr. Wilmot be right) from much of the

comfort of society; and it is believed they take a secret

vengeance.  The defections of the sick are considered highly

poisonous.  Early in the morning, it is narrated, aged and

malicious persons creep into the sleeping village, and stealthily

make water at the doors of the houses of young men.  Thus they

propagate disease; thus they breathe on and obliterate comeliness

and health, the objects of their envy.  Whether horrid fact or more

abominable legend, it equally depicts that something bitter and

energetic which distinguishes Paumotuan man.

The archipelago is divided between two main religions, Catholic and

Mormon.  They front each other proudly with a false air of

permanence; yet are but shapes, their membership in a perpetual

flux.  The Mormon attends mass with devotion:  the Catholic sits

attentive at a Mormon sermon, and to-morrow each may have

transferred allegiance.  One man had been a pillar of the Church of

Rome for fifteen years; his wife dying, he decided that must be a

poor religion that could not save a man his wife, and turned

Mormon.  According to one informant, Catholicism was the more

fashionable in health, but on the approach of sickness it was

judged prudent to secede.  As a Mormon, there were five chances out

of six you might recover; as a Catholic, your hopes were small; and

this opinion is perhaps founded on the comfortable rite of unction.

We all know what Catholics are, whether in the Paumotus or at home.

But the Paumotuan Mormon seemed a phenomenon apart.  He marries but

the one wife, uses the Protestant Bible, observes Protestant forms

of worship, forbids the use of liquor and tobacco, practises adult

baptism by immersion, and after every public sin, rechristens the

backslider.  I advised with Mahinui, whom I found well informed in

the history of the American Mormons, and he declared against the

least connection.  'Pour moi,' said he, with a fine charity, 'les

Mormons ici un petit Catholiques.'  Some months later I had an

opportunity to consult an orthodox fellow-countryman, an old

dissenting Highlander, long settled in Tahiti, but still breathing

of the heather of Tiree.  'Why do they call themselves Mormons?' I

asked.  'My dear, and that is my question!' he exclaimed.  'For by

all that I can hear of their doctrine, I have nothing to say

against it, and their life, it is above reproach.'  And for all

that, Mormons they are, but of the earlier sowing:  the so-called

Josephites, the followers of Joseph Smith, the opponents of Brigham

Young.

Grant, then, the Mormons to be Mormons.  Fresh points at once

arise:  What are the Israelites? and what the Kanitus?  For a long

while back the sect had been divided into Mormons proper and so-

called Israelites, I never could hear why.  A few years since there

came a visiting missionary of the name of Williams, who made an

excellent collection, and retired, leaving fresh disruption

imminent.  Something irregular (as I was told) in his way of

'opening the service' had raised partisans and enemies; the church

was once more rent asunder; and a new sect, the Kanitu, issued from

the division.  Since then Kanitus and Israelites, like the

Cameronians and the United Presbyterians, have made common cause;

and the ecclesiastical history of the Paumotus is, for the moment,

uneventful.  There will be more doing before long, and these isles

bid fair to be the Scotland of the South.  Two things I could never

learn.  The nature of the innovations of the Rev. Mr. Williams none

would tell me, and of the meaning of the name Kanitu none had a

guess.  It was not Tahitian, it was not Marquesan; it formed no

part of that ancient speech of the Paumotus, now passing swiftly

into obsolescence.  One man, a priest, God bless him! said it was

the Latin for a little dog.  I have found it since as the name of a

god in New Guinea; it must be a bolder man than I who should hint

at a connection.  Here, then, is a singular thing:  a brand-new

sect, arising by popular acclamation, and a nonsense word invented

for its name.

The design of mystery seems obvious, and according to a very

intelligent observer, Mr. Magee of Mangareva, this element of the

mysterious is a chief attraction of the Mormon Church.  It enjoys

some of the status of Freemasonry at home, and there is for the

convert some of the exhilaration of adventure.  Other attractions

are certainly conjoined.  Perpetual rebaptism, leading to a

succession of baptismal feasts, is found, both from the social and

the spiritual side, a pleasing feature.  More important is the fact

that all the faithful enjoy office; perhaps more important still,

the strictness of the discipline.  'The veto on liquor,' said Mr.

Magee, 'brings them plenty members.'  There is no doubt these

islanders are fond of drink, and no doubt they refrain from the

indulgence; a bout on a feast-day, for instance, may be followed by

a week or a month of rigorous sobriety.  Mr. Wilmot attributes this

to Paumotuan frugality and the love of hoarding; it goes far

deeper.  I have mentioned that I made a feast on board the Casco.

To wash down ship's bread and jam, each guest was given the choice

of rum or syrup, and out of the whole number only one man voted--in

a defiant tone, and amid shouts of mirth--for 'Trum'!  This was in

public.  I had the meanness to repeat the experiment, whenever I

had a chance, within the four walls of my house; and three at

least, who had refused at the festival, greedily drank rum behind a

door.  But there were others thoroughly consistent.  I said the

virtues of the race were bourgeois and puritan; and how bourgeois

is this! how puritanic! how Scottish! and how Yankee!--the

temptation, the resistance, the public hypocritical conformity, the

Pharisees, the Holy Willies, and the true disciples.  With such a

people the popularity of an ascetic Church appears legitimate; in

these strict rules, in this perpetual supervision, the weak find

their advantage, the strong a certain pleasure; and the doctrine of

rebaptism, a clean bill and a fresh start, will comfort many

staggering professors.

There is yet another sect, or what is called a sect--no doubt

improperly--that of the Whistlers.  Duncan Cameron, so clear in

favour of the Mormons, was no less loud in condemnation of the

Whistlers.  Yet I do not know; I still fancy there is some

connection, perhaps fortuitous, probably disavowed.  Here at least

are some doings in the house of an Israelite clergyman (or prophet)

in the island of Anaa, of which I am equally sure that Duncan would

disclaim and the Whistlers hail them for an imitation of their own.

My informant, a Tahitian and a Catholic, occupied one part of the

house; the prophet and his family lived in the other.  Night after

night the Mormons, in the one end, held their evening sacrifice of

song; night after night, in the other, the wife of the Tahitian lay

awake and listened to their singing with amazement.  At length she

could contain herself no longer, woke her husband, and asked him

what he heard.  'I hear several persons singing hymns,' said he.

'Yes,' she returned, 'but listen again!  Do you not hear something

supernatural?'  His attention thus directed, he was aware of a

strange buzzing voice--and yet he declared it was beautiful--which

justly accompanied the singers.  The next day he made inquiries.

'It is a spirit,' said the prophet, with entire simplicity, 'which

has lately made a practice of joining us at family worship.'  It

did not appear the thing was visible, and like other spirits raised

nearer home in these degenerate days, it was rudely ignorant, at

first could only buzz, and had only learned of late to bear a part

correctly in the music.

The performances of the Whistlers are more business-like.  Their

meetings are held publicly with open doors, all being 'cordially

invited to attend.'  The faithful sit about the room--according to

one informant, singing hymns; according to another, now singing and

now whistling; the leader, the wizard--let me rather say, the

medium--sits in the midst, enveloped in a sheet and silent; and

presently, from just above his head, or sometimes from the midst of

the roof, an aerial whistling proceeds, appalling to the

inexperienced.  This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its

purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts, writing,

I was told, 'as fast as a telegraph operator'; and the

communications are at last made public.  They are of the baldest

triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip

reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to

consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested.  One

of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to

the patient.  The whole business is very dreary, very silly, and

very European; it has none of the picturesque qualities of similar

conjurations in New Zealand; it seems to possess no kernel of

possible sense, like some that I shall describe among the Gilbert

islanders.  Yet I was told that many hardy, intelligent natives

were inveterate Whistlers.  'Like Mahinui?' I asked, willing to

have a standard; and I was told 'Yes.'  Why should I wonder?  Men

more enlightened than my convict-catechist sit down at home to

follies equally sterile and dull.

The medium is sometimes female.  It was a woman, for instance, who

introduced these practices on the north coast of Taiarapu, to the

scandal of her own connections, her brother-in-law in particular

declaring she was drunk.  But what shocked Tahiti might seem fit

enough in the Paumotus, the more so as certain women there possess,

by the gift of nature, singular and useful powers.  They say they

are honest, well-intentioned ladies, some of them embarrassed by

their weird inheritance.  And indeed the trouble caused by this

endowment is so great, and the protection afforded so

infinitesimally small, that I hesitate whether to call it a gift or

a hereditary curse.  You may rob this lady's coco-patch, steal her

canoes, burn down her house, and slay her family scatheless; but

one thing you must not do:  you must not lay a hand upon her

sleeping-mat, or your belly will swell, and you can only be cured

by the lady or her husband.  Here is the report of an eye-witness,

Tasmanian born, educated, a man who has made money--certainly no

fool.  In 1886 he was present in a house on Makatea, where two lads

began to skylark on the mats, and were (I think) ejected.

Instantly after, their bellies began to swell; pains took hold on

them; all manner of island remedies were exhibited in vain, and

rubbing only magnified their sufferings.  The man of the house was

called, explained the nature of the visitation, and prepared the

cure.  A cocoa-nut was husked, filled with herbs, and with all the

ceremonies of a launch, and the utterance of spells in the

Paumotuan language, committed to the sea.  From that moment the

pains began to grow more easy and the swelling to subside.  The

reader may stare.  I can assure him, if he moved much among old

residents of the archipelago, he would be driven to admit one thing

of two--either that there is something in the swollen bellies or

nothing in the evidence of man.

I have not met these gifted ladies; but I had an experience of my

own, for I have played, for one night only, the part of the

whistling spirit.  It had been blowing wearily all day, but with

the fall of night the wind abated, and the moon, which was then

full, rolled in a clear sky.  We went southward down the island on

the side of the lagoon, walking through long-drawn forest aisles of

palm, and on a floor of snowy sand.  No life was abroad, nor sound

of life; till in a clear part of the isle we spied the embers of a

fire, and not far off, in a dark house, heard natives talking

softly.  To sit without a light, even in company, and under cover,

is for a Paumotuan a somewhat hazardous extreme.  The whole scene--

the strong moonlight and crude shadows on the sand, the scattered

coals, the sound of the low voices from the house, and the lap of

the lagoon along the beach--put me (I know not how) on thoughts of

superstition.  I was barefoot, I observed my steps were noiseless,

and drawing near to the dark house, but keeping well in shadow,

began to whistle.  'The Heaving of the Lead' was my air--no very

tragic piece.  With the first note the conversation and all

movement ceased; silence accompanied me while I continued; and when

I passed that way on my return I found the lamp was lighted in the

house, but the tongues were still mute.  All night, as I now think,

the wretches shivered and were silent.  For indeed, I had no guess

at the time at the nature and magnitude of the terrors I inflicted,

or with what grisly images the notes of that old song had peopled

the dark house.

CHAPTER V--A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL

No, I had no guess of these men's terrors.  Yet I had received ere

that a hint, if I had understood; and the occasion was a funeral.

A little apart in the main avenue of Rotoava, in a low hut of

leaves that opened on a small enclosure, like a pigsty on a pen, an

old man dwelt solitary with his aged wife.  Perhaps they were too

old to migrate with the others; perhaps they were too poor, and had

no possessions to dispute.  At least they had remained behind; and

it thus befell that they were invited to my feast.  I dare say it

was quite a piece of politics in the pigsty whether to come or not

to come, and the husband long swithered between curiosity and age,

till curiosity conquered, and they came, and in the midst of that

last merrymaking death tapped him on the shoulder.  For some days,

when the sky was bright and the wind cool, his mat would be spread

in the main highway of the village, and he was to be seen lying

there inert, a mere handful of a man, his wife inertly seated by

his head.  They seemed to have outgrown alike our needs and

faculties; they neither spoke nor listened; they suffered us to

pass without a glance; the wife did not fan, she seemed not to

attend upon her husband, and the two poor antiques sat juxtaposed

under the high canopy of palms, the human tragedy reduced to its

bare elements, a sight beyond pathos, stirring a thrill of

curiosity.  And yet there was one touch of the pathetic haunted me:

that so much youth and expectation should have run in these starved

veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees of life on a

pleasure party.

On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time

pressing, he was buried the same day at four.  The cemetery lies to

seaward behind Government House; broken coral, like so much road-

metal, forms the surface; a few wooden crosses, a few

inconsiderable upright stones, designate graves; a mortared wall,

high enough to lean on, rings it about; a clustering shrub

surrounds it with pale leaves.  Here was the grave dug that

morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the nigh sea

and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in his

house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence

before the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their

eyes.

Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped

in white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind--not many,

for not many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these

were poor; the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or

the gorgeous parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women,

with a few exceptions, brightly habited.  Far in the rear came the

widow, painfully carrying the dead man's mat; a creature aged

beyond humanity, to the likeness of some missing link.

The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone

with the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and

a layman took his office.  Standing at the head of the open grave,

in a white coat and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and

one eye bound with a red handkerchief, he read solemnly that

chapter in Job which has been read and heard over the bones of so

many of our fathers, and with a good voice offered up two prayers.

The wind and the surf bore a burthen.  By the cemetery gate a

mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue.  In the midst

the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the coffin-

stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned her

back to the grave and was playing with a leaf.  Did she understand?

God knows.  The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered

and threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral.

Dust to dust:  but the grains of this dust were gross like

cherries, and the true dust that was to follow sat near by, still

cohering (as by a miracle) in the tragic semblance of a female ape.

So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral.  The well-known

passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the

grave was filled, the mourners straggled homeward.  With a little

coarser grain of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea,

a stronger glare of sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some

incongruous colours of attire, the well-remembered form had been

observed.

By rights it should have been otherwise.  The mat should have been

buried with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily

reserved for a fresh service.  The widow should have flung herself

upon the grave and raised the voice of official grief, the

neighbours have chimed in, and the narrow isle rung for a space

with lamentation.  But the widow was old; perhaps she had

forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played like a child

with leaves and coffin-stretchers.  In all ways my guest was buried

with maimed rites.  Strange to think that his last conscious

pleasure was the Casco and my feast; strange to think that he had

limped there, an old child, looking for some new good.  And the

good thing, rest, had been allotted him.

But though the widow had neglected much, there was one part she

must not utterly neglect.  She came away with the dispersing

funeral; but the dead man's mat was left behind upon the grave, and

I learned that by set of sun she must return to sleep there.  This

vigil is imperative.  From sundown till the rising of the morning

star the Paumotuan must hold his watch above the ashes of his

kindred.  Many friends, if the dead have been a man of mark, will

keep the watchers company; they will be well supplied with

coverings against the weather; I believe they bring food, and the

rite is persevered in for two weeks.  Our poor survivor, if,

indeed, she properly survived, had little to cover, and few to sit

with her; on the night of the funeral a strong squall chased her

from her place of watch; for days the weather held uncertain and

outrageous; and ere seven nights were up she had desisted, and

returned to sleep in her low roof.  That she should be at the pains

of returning for so short a visit to a solitary house, that this

borderer of the grave should fear a little wind and a wet blanket,

filled me at the time with musings.  I could not say she was

indifferent; she was so far beyond me in experience that the court

of my criticism waived jurisdiction; but I forged excuses, telling

myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps suffered much,

perhaps understood nothing.  And lo! in the whole affair there was

no question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy return

of this old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of

uncommon fortitude.

Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail.  I have

said the funeral passed much as at home.  But when all was over,

when we were trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and

down the path to the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different

spirit startled and perhaps dismayed us.  Two people walked not far

apart in our procession:  my friend Mr. Donat--Donat-Rimarau:

'Donat the much-handed'--acting Vice-Resident, present ruler of the

archipelago, by far the man of chief importance on the scene, but

known besides for one of an unshakable good temper; and a certain

comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the comeliest on the isle,

not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite.  Of a sudden, ere

yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she made a leap at

the Resident, with pointed finger, shrieked a few words, and fell

back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth.  'What did she say

to you?' I asked.  'She did not speak to ME,' said Donat, a shade

perturbed; 'she spoke to the ghost of the dead man.'  And the

purport of her speech was this:  'See there!  Donat will be a fine

feast for you to-night.'

'M. Donat called it a jest,' I wrote at the time in my diary.  'It

seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as

though she would divert the ghost's attention from herself.  A

cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms.'  The guesses of the

traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was

precisely right.  The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral,

being then in a dread spot, the graveyard.  She looked on in terror

to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the

isle.  And the words she had cried in Donat's face were indeed a

terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate

another in her stead.  One thing is to be said in her excuse.

Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great

good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-

caste.  For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of

talisman against the powers of hell.  In no other way can they

explain the unpunished recklessness of Europeans.

CHAPTER VI--GRAVEYARD STORIES

WITH my superstitious friend, the islander, I fear I am not wholly

frank, often leading the way with stories of my own, and being

always a grave and sometimes an excited hearer.  But the deceit is

scarce mortal, since I am as pleased to hear as he to tell, as

pleased with the story as he with the belief; and, besides, it is

entirely needful.  For it is scarce possible to exaggerate the

extent and empire of his superstitions; they mould his life, they

colour his thinking; and when he does not speak to me of ghosts,

and gods, and devils, he is playing the dissembler and talking only

with his lips.  With thoughts so different, one must indulge the

other; and I would rather that I should indulge his superstition

than he my incredulity.  Of one thing, besides, I may be sure:  Let

me indulge it as I please, I shall not hear the whole; for he is

already on his guard with me, and the amount of the lore is

boundless.

I will give but a few instances at random, chiefly from my own

doorstep in Upolu, during the past month (October 1890).  One of my

workmen was sent the other day to the banana patch, there to dig;

this is a hollow of the mountain, buried in woods, out of all sight

and cry of mankind; and long before dusk Lafaele was back again

beside the cook-house with embarrassed looks; he dared not longer

stay alone, he was afraid of 'spirits in the bush.'  It seems these

are the souls of the unburied dead, haunting where they fell, and

wearing woodland shapes of pig, or bird, or insect; the bush is

full of them, they seem to eat nothing, slay solitary wanderers

apparently in spite, and at times, in human form, go down to

villages and consort with the inhabitants undetected.  So much I

learned a day or so after, walking in the bush with a very

intelligent youth, a native.  It was a little before noon; a grey

day and squally; and perhaps I had spoken lightly.  A dark squall

burst on the side of the mountain; the woods shook and cried; the

dead leaves rose from the ground in clouds, like butterflies; and

my companion came suddenly to a full stop.  He was afraid, he said,

of the trees falling; but as soon as I had changed the subject of

our talk he proceeded with alacrity.  A day or two before a

messenger came up the mountain from Apia with a letter; I was in

the bush, he must await my return, then wait till I had answered:

and before I was done his voice sounded shrill with terror of the

coming night and the long forest road.  These are the commons.

Take the chiefs.  There has been a great coming and going of signs

and omens in our group.  One river ran down blood; red eels were

captured in another; an unknown fish was thrown upon the coast, an

ominous word found written on its scales.  So far we might be

reading in a monkish chronicle; now we come on a fresh note, at

once modern and Polynesian.  The gods of Upolu and Savaii, our two

chief islands, contended recently at cricket.  Since then they are

at war.  Sounds of battle are heard to roll along the coast.  A

woman saw a man swim from the high seas and plunge direct into the

bush; he was no man of that neighbourhood; and it was known he was

one of the gods, speeding to a council.  Most perspicuous of all, a

missionary on Savaii, who is also a medical man, was disturbed late

in the night by knocking; it was no hour for the dispensary, but at

length he woke his servant and sent him to inquire; the servant,

looking from a window, beheld crowds of persons, all with grievous

wounds, lopped limbs, broken heads, and bleeding bullet-holes; but

when the door was opened all had disappeared.  They were gods from

the field of battle.  Now these reports have certainly

significance; it is not hard to trace them to political grumblers

or to read in them a threat of coming trouble; from that merely

human side I found them ominous myself.  But it was the spiritual

side of their significance that was discussed in secret council by

my rulers.  I shall best depict this mingled habit of the

Polynesian mind by two connected instances.  I once lived in a

village, the name of which I do not mean to tell.  The chief and

his sister were persons perfectly intelligent:  gentlefolk, apt of

speech.  The sister was very religious, a great church-goer, one

that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that

she privately worshipped a shark.  The chief himself was somewhat

of a freethinker; at the least, a latitudinarian:  he was a man,

besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an

impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected

superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer.  Hear the sequel.  I had

discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in

the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible

authority, to task.  'There is something wrong about your

graveyard,' said I, 'which you must attend to, or it may have very

bad results.'  'Something wrong?  What is it?' he asked, with an

emotion that surprised me.  'If you care to go along there any

evening about nine o'clock you can see for yourself,' said I.  He

stepped backward.  'A ghost!' he cried.

In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to

blame another.  Half blood and whole, pious and debauched,

intelligent and dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine

with their recent Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the

old island deities.  So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly

dwindled into village bogies; so to-day, the theological Highlander

sneaks from under the eye of the Free Church divine to lay an

offering by a sacred well.

I try to deal with the whole matter here because of a particular

quality in Paumotuan superstitions.  It is true I heard them told

by a man with a genius for such narrations.  Close about our

evening lamp, within sound of the island surf, we hung on his

words, thrilling.  The reader, in far other scenes, must listen

close for the faint echo.

This bundle of weird stories sprang from the burial and the woman's

selfish conjuration.  I was dissatisfied with what I heard, harped

upon questions, and struck at last this vein of metal.  It is from

sundown to about four in the morning that the kinsfolk camp upon

the grave; and these are the hours of the spirits' wanderings.  At

any time of the night--it may be earlier, it may be later--a sound

is to be heard below, which is the noise of his liberation; at four

sharp, another and a louder marks the instant of the re-

imprisonment; between-whiles, he goes his malignant rounds.  'Did

you ever see an evil spirit?' was once asked of a Paumotuan.

'Once.'  'Under what form?'  'It was in the form of a crane.'  'And

how did you know that crane to be a spirit?' was asked.  'I will

tell you,' he answered; and this was the purport of his

inconclusive narrative.  His father had been dead nearly a

fortnight; others had wearied of the watch; and as the sun was

setting, he found himself by the grave alone.  It was not yet dark,

rather the hour of the afterglow, when he was aware of a snow-white

crane upon the coral mound; presently more cranes came, some white,

some black; then the cranes vanished, and he saw in their place a

white cat, to which there was silently joined a great company of

cats of every hue conceivable; then these also disappeared, and he

was left astonished.

This was an anodyne appearance.  Take instead the experience of

Rua-a-mariterangi on the isle of Katiu.  He had a need for some

pandanus, and crossed the isle to the sea-beach, where it chiefly

flourishes.  The day was still, and Rua was surprised to hear a

crashing sound among the thickets, and then the fall of a

considerable tree.  Here must be some one building a canoe; and he

entered the margin of the wood to find and pass the time of day

with this chance neighbour.  The crashing sounded more at hand; and

then he was aware of something drawing swiftly near among the tree-

tops.  It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so that its

hands were free for murder; it depended safely by the slightest

twigs; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua

recognised it for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging

as it came.  Prayer was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of

the Shadow, and it is to prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes

his escape.  No merely human expedition had availed.

This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was

abroad by day.  And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of

the night watch and the many references to the rising of the

morning star, it is no singular exception.  I could never find a

case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in

its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems

the signal of its coming.  Mr. Donat was once pearling on the

uninhabited isle of Haraiki.  It was a day without a breath of

wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of

contumelious breezes.  The divers were in the midst of the lagoon

upon their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in

the camp.  Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native

who accompanied Donat into the wood in quest of sea-fowls' eggs.

In a moment, out of the stillness, came the sound of the fall of a

great tree.  Donat would have passed on to find the cause.  'No,'

cried his companion, 'that was no tree.  It was something NOT

RIGHT.  Let us go back to camp.'  Next Sunday the divers were

turned on, all that part of the isle was thoroughly examined, and

sure enough no tree had fallen.  A little later Mr. Donat saw one

of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar unaffected

panic, on the same isle.  But neither would explain, and it was not

till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the occasion

of their terrors.

But whether by day or night, the purpose of the dead in these

abhorred activities is still the same.  In Samoa, my informant had

no idea of the food of the bush spirits; no such ambiguity would

exist in the mind of a Paumotuan.  In that hungry archipelago,

living and dead must alike toil for nutriment; and the race having

been cannibal in the past, the spirits are so still.  When the

living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal imagination drew the

shocking inference that the dead might eat the living.  Doubtless

they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere malice.

Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but

even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a

cannibal dainty.  And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least

in the far eastern islands, is to prowl for food.  It was as a

dainty morsel for a meal that the woman denounced Donat at the

funeral.  There are spirits besides who prey in particular not on

the bodies but on the souls of the dead.  The point is clearly made

in a Tahitian story.  A child fell sick, grew swiftly worse, and at

last showed signs of death.  The mother hastened to the house of a

sorcerer, who lived hard by.  'You are yet in time,' said he; 'a

spirit has just run past my door carrying the soul of your child

wrapped in the leaf of a purao; but I have a spirit stronger and

swifter who will run him down ere he has time to eat it.'  Wrapped

in a leaf:  like other things edible and corruptible.

Or take an experience of Mr. Donat's on the island of Anaa.  It was

a night of a high wind, with violent squalls; his child was very

sick, and the father, though he had gone to bed, lay wakeful,

hearkening to the gale.  All at once a fowl was violently dashed on

the house wall.  Supposing he had forgot to put it in shelter with

the rest, Donat arose, found the bird (a cock) lying on the

verandah, and put it in the hen-house, the door of which he

securely fastened.  Fifteen minutes later the business was

repeated, only this time, as it was being dashed against the wall,

the bird crew.  Again Donat replaced it, examining the hen-house

thoroughly and finding it quite perfect; as he was so engaged the

wind puffed out his light, and he must grope back to the door a

good deal shaken.  Yet a third time the bird was dashed upon the

wall; a third time Donat set it, now near dead, beside its mates;

and he was scarce returned before there came a rush, like that of a

furious strong man, against the door, and a whistle as loud as that

of a railway engine rang about the house.  The sceptical reader may

here detect the finger of the tempest; but the women gave up all

for lost and clustered on the beds lamenting.  Nothing followed,

and I must suppose the gale somewhat abated, for presently after a

chief came visiting.  He was a bold man to be abroad so late, but

doubtless carried a bright lantern.  And he was certainly a man of

counsel, for as soon as he heard the details of these disturbances

he was in a position to explain their nature.  'Your child,' said

he, 'must certainly die.  This is the evil spirit of our island who

lies in wait to eat the spirits of the newly dead.'  And then he

went on to expatiate on the strangeness of the spirit's conduct.

He was not usually, he explained, so open of assault, but sat

silent on the house-top waiting, in the guise of a bird, while

within the people tended the dying and bewailed the dead, and had

no thought of peril.  But when the day came and the doors were

opened, and men began to go abroad, blood-stains on the wall

betrayed the tragedy.

This is the quality I admire in Paumotuan legend.  In Tahiti the

spirit-eater is said to assume a vesture which has much more of

pomp, but how much less of horror.  It has been seen by all sorts

and conditions, native and foreign; only the last insist it is a

meteor.  My authority was not so sure.  He was riding with his wife

about two in the morning; both were near asleep, and the horses not

much better.  It was a brilliant and still night, and the road

wound over a mountain, near by a deserted marae (old Tahitian

temple).  All at once the appearance passed above them:  a form of

light; the head round and greenish; the body long, red, and with a

focus of yet redder brilliancy about the midst.  A buzzing hoot

accompanied its passage; it flew direct out of one marae, and

direct for another down the mountain side.  And this, as my

informant argued, is suggestive.  For why should a mere meteor

frequent the altars of abominable gods?  The horses, I should say,

were equally dismayed with their riders.  Now I am not dismayed at

all--not even agreeably.  Give me rather the bird upon the house-

top and the morning blood-gouts on the wall.

But the dead are not exclusive in their diet.  They carry with them

to the grave, in particular, the Polynesian taste for fish, and

enter at times with the living into a partnership in fishery.  Rua-

a-mariterangi is again my authority; I feel it diminishes the

credit of the fact, but how it builds up the image of this

inveterate ghost-seer!  He belongs to the miserably poor island of

Taenga, yet his father's house was always well supplied.  As Rua

grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with this fortunate

parent.  They rowed the lagoon at dusk, to an unlikely place, and

the lay down in the stern, and the father began vainly to cast his

line over the bows.  It is to be supposed that Rua slept; and when

he awoke there was the figure of another beside his father, and his

father was pulling in the fish hand over hand.  'Who is that man,

father?' Rua asked.  'It is none of your business,' said the

father; and Rua supposed the stranger had swum off to them from

shore.  Night after night they fared into the lagoon, often to the

most unlikely places; night after night the stranger would suddenly

be seen on board, and as suddenly be missed; and morning after

morning the canoe returned laden with fish.  'My father is a very

lucky man,' thought Rua.  At last, one fine day, there came first

one boat party and then another, who must be entertained; father

and son put off later than usual into the lagoon; and before the

canoe was landed it was four o'clock, and the morning star was

close on the horizon.  Then the stranger appeared seized with some

distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which

was that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east,

set the tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a

strange, shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan--a thing to

freeze the blood; and, the day-star just rising from the sea, he

suddenly was not.  Then Rua understood why his father prospered,

why his fishes rotted early in the day, and why some were always

carried to the cemetery and laid upon the graves.  My informant is

a man not certainly averse to superstition, but he keeps his head,

and takes a certain superior interest, which I may be allowed to

call scientific.  The last point reminding him of some parallel

practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the fish were left, or carried

home again after a formal dedication.  It appears old Mariterangi

practised both methods; sometimes treating his shadowy partner to a

mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish to rot upon the

grave.

It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and

the Polynesian varua ino or aitu o le vao is clearly the near

kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire.  Here is a tale in which the

kinship appears broadly marked.  On the atoll of Penrhyn, then

still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror

of the natives.  He died, he was buried; and his late neighbours

had scarce tasted the delights of licence ere his ghost appeared

about the village.  Fear seized upon all; a council was held of the

chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval of the Rarotongan

missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in the presence

of several whites--my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one--the grave was

opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred face

down.  The still recent staking of suicides in England and the

decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close

parallels.

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear.  During

the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes

headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but

this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still

lingered on the theatre of death.  When peace returned a singular

scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges

of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long centred and the loss had

been severe.  Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet

and guided by survivors of the fight.  The place of death was

earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground; and the

women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it.  If any

living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third

coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in,

carried home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested.  The

rite was practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the

soul was its object:  its motive, reverent affection.  The present

king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares

the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an

entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise

hurtful.  And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents

the views of the enlightened.  But the flight of my Lafaele marks

the grosser terrors of the ignorant.

This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps

explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all

to share our European horror of human bones and mummies.  Of the

first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in

houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres

dwelt with their children among the bones of generations.  The

mummy, even in the making, was as little feared.  In the Marquesas,

on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual

unction and exposure to the sun; in the Carolines, upon the

farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the family hearth.

Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in Samoa.

And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter,

cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night,

the head of her dead husband.  In all these cases we may suppose

the process, whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully

exorcised the aitu.

But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure.  Here the man is duly

buried, and he has to be watched.  He is duly watched, and the

spirit goes abroad in spite of watches.  Indeed, it is not the

purpose of the vigils to prevent these wanderings; only to mollify

by polite attention the inveterate malignity of the dead.  Neglect

(it is supposed) may irritate and thus invite his visits, and the

aged and weakly sometimes balance risks and stay at home.  Observe,

it is the dead man's kindred and next friends who thus deprecate

his fury with nocturnal watchings.  Even the placatory vigil is

held perilous, except in company, and a boy was pointed out to me

in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own father.  Not

the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect the

issue.  A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was

beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the

less his spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the

neighbourhood of Government House was still avoided after dark.  We

may sum up the cheerful doctrine thus:  All men become vampires,

and the vampire spares none.  And here we come face to face with a

tempting inconsistency.  For the whistling spirits are notoriously

clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk

only, and that the medium was always of the race of the

communicating spirit.  Here, then, we have the bonds of the family,

on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other,

helpfully persisting.

The child's soul in the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves.  It is

the spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty.  When they are

slain, the house is stained with blood.  Rua's dead fisherman was

decomposed; so--and horribly--was his arboreal demon.  The spirit,

then, is a thing material; and it is by the material ensigns of

corruption that he is distinguished from the living man.  This

opinion is widespread, adds a gross terror to the more ugly

Polynesian tales, and sometimes defaces the more engaging with a

painful and incongruous touch.  I will give two examples

sufficiently wide apart, one from Tahiti, one from Samoa.

And first from Tahiti.  A man went to visit the husband of his

sister, then some time dead.  In her life the sister had been

dainty in the island fashion, and went always adorned with a

coronet of flowers.  In the midst of the night the brother awoke

and was aware of a heavenly fragrance going to and fro in the dark

house.  The lamp I must suppose to have burned out; no Tahitian

would have lain down without one lighted.  A while he lay wondering

and delighted; then called upon the rest.  'Do none of you smell

flowers?' he asked.  'O,' said his brother-in-law, 'we are used to

that here.'  The next morning these two men went walking, and the

widower confessed that his dead wife came about the house

continually, and that he had even seen her.  She was shaped and

dressed and crowned with flowers as in her lifetime; only she moved

a few inches above the earth with a very easy progress, and flitted

dryshod above the surface of the river.  And now comes my point:

It was always in a back view that she appeared; and these brothers-

in-law, debating the affair, agreed that this was to conceal the

inroads of corruption.

Now for the Samoan story.  I owe it to the kindness of Dr. F. Otto

Sierich, whose collection of folk-tales I expect with a high degree

of interest.  A man in Manu'a was married to two wives and had no

issue.  He went to Savaii, married there a third, and was more

fortunate.  When his wife was near her time he remembered he was in

a strange island, like a poor man; and when his child was born he

must be shamed for lack of gifts.  It was in vain his wife

dissuaded him.  He returned to his father in Manu'a seeking help;

and with what he could get he set off in the night to re-embark.

Now his wives heard of his coming; they were incensed that he did

not stay to visit them; and on the beach, by his canoe, intercepted

and slew him.  Now the third wife lay asleep in Savaii;--her babe

was born and slept by her side; and she was awakened by the spirit

of her husband.  'Get up,' he said, 'my father is sick in Manu'a

and we must go to visit him.'  'It is well,' said she; 'take you

the child, while I carry its mats.'  'I cannot carry the child,'

said the spirit; 'I am too cold from the sea.'  When they were got

on board the canoe the wife smelt carrion.  'How is this?' she

said.  'What have you in the canoe that I should smell carrion?'

'It is nothing in the canoe,' said the spirit.  'It is the land-

wind blowing down the mountains, where some beast lies dead.'  It

appears it was still night when they reached Manu'a--the swiftest

passage on record--and as they entered the reef the bale-fires

burned in the village.  Again she asked him to carry the child; but

now he need no more dissemble.  'I cannot carry your child,' said

he, 'for I am dead, and the fires you see are burning for my

funeral.'

The curious may learn in Dr. Sierich's book the unexpected sequel

of the tale.  Here is enough for my purpose.  Though the man was

but new dead, the ghost was already putrefied, as though

putrefaction were the mark and of the essence of a spirit.  The

vigil on the Paumotuan grave does not extend beyond two weeks, and

they told me this period was thought to coincide with that of the

resolution of the body.  The ghost always marked with decay--the

danger seemingly ending with the process of dissolution--here is

tempting matter for the theorist.  But it will not do.  The lady of

the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still supposed

to bear the brand of perishability.  The Resident had been more

than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still supposed to go

the rounds.

Of the lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in

which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the

various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float

idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be

wearisome to tell.  One story I give, for it is singular in itself,

is well-known in Tahiti, and has this of interest, that it is post-

Christian, dating indeed from but a few years back.  A princess of

the reigning house died; was transported to the neighbouring isle

of Raiatea; fell there under the empire of a spirit who condemned

her to climb coco-palms all day and bring him the nuts; was found

after some time in this miserable servitude by a second spirit, one

of her own house; and by him, upon her lamentations, reconveyed to

Tahiti, where she found her body still waked, but already swollen

with the approaches of corruption.  It is a lively point in the

tale that, on the sight of this dishonoured tabernacle, the

princess prayed she might continue to be numbered with the dead.

But it seems it was too late, her spirit was replaced by the least

dignified of entrances, and her startled family beheld the body

move.  The seemingly purgatorial labours, the helpful kindred

spirit, and the horror of the princess at the sight of her tainted

body, are all points to be remarked.

The truth is, the tales are not necessarily consistent in

themselves; and they are further darkened for the stranger by an

ambiguity of language.  Ghosts, vampires, spirits, and gods are all

confounded.  And yet I seem to perceive that (with exceptions)

those whom we would count gods were less maleficent.  Permanent

spirits haunt and do murder in corners of Samoa; but those

legitimate gods of Upolu and Savaii, whose wars and cricketings of

late convulsed society, I did not gather to be dreaded, or not with

a like fear.  The spirit of Aana that ate souls is certainly a

fearsome inmate; but the high gods, even of the archipelago, seem

helpful.  Mahinui--from whom our convict-catechist had been named--

the spirit of the sea, like a Proteus endowed with endless avatars,

came to the assistance of the shipwrecked and carried them ashore

in the guise of a ray fish.  The same divinity bore priests from

isle to isle about the archipelago, and by his aid, within the

century, persons have been seen to fly.  The tutelar deity of each

isle is likewise helpful, and by a particular form of wedge-shaped

cloud on the horizon announces the coming of a ship.

To one who conceives of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so

beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens.

And yet there are more.  In the various brackish pools and ponds,

beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only

(timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive

again for ever.  They are known to be healthy and harmless living

people, dwellers of an underworld; and the same fancy is current in

Tahiti, where also they have the hair red.  Tetea is the Tahitian

name; the Paumotuan, Mokurea.

PART III:  THE GILBERTS

CHAPTER I--BUTARITARI

At Honolulu we had said farewell to the Casco and to Captain Otis,

and our next adventure was made in changed conditions.  Passage was

taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu,

on a pigmy trading schooner, the Equator, Captain Dennis Reid; and

on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian

fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and

bore with a fair wind for Micronesia.

The whole extent of the South Seas is a desert of ships; more

especially that part where we were now to sail.  No post runs in

these islands; communication is by accident; where you may have

designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive

another.  It was my hope, for instance, to have reached the

Carolines, and returned to the light of day by way of Manila and

the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were destined to re-

appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of mountains.

Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had

intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary

cottage.  Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings

upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins;

I had learned to welcome shark's flesh for a variety; and a

mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long

lost to sense and dear to aspiration.

The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near

the line; the latter within thirty miles.  Both enjoy a superb

ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a

heavenly brightness.  Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava,

measuring perhaps (at the widest) a quarter of a mile from beach to

beach.  In both, a coarse kind of taro thrives; its culture is a

chief business of the natives, and the consequent mounds and

ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye.  In all else they

show the customary features of an atoll:  the low horizon, the

expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the

sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and

interest of sea and sky.  Life on such islands is in many points

like life on shipboard.  The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken

for granted; and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon

the centre of attention.  The isles are populous, independent,

seats of kinglets, recently civilised, little visited.  In the last

decade many changes have crept in; women no longer go unclothed

till marriage; the widow no longer sleeps at night and goes abroad

by day with the skull of her dead husband; and, fire-arms being

introduced, the spear and the shark-tooth sword are sold for

curiosities.  Ten years ago all these things and practices were to

be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old society will have

entirely vanished.  We came in a happy moment to see its

institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed.

Populous and independent--warrens of men, ruled over with some

rustic pomp--such was the first and still the recurring impression

of these tiny lands.  As we stood across the lagoon for the town of

Butaritari, a stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with

the brown roofs of houses; those of the palace and king's summer

parlour (which are of corrugated iron) glittered near one end

conspicuously bright; the royal colours flew hard by on a tall

flagstaff; in front, on an artificial islet, the gaol played the

part of a martello.  Even upon this first and distant view, the

place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a village; rather of

that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city rustic and yet

royal.

The lagoon is shoal.  The tide being out, we waded for some quarter

of a mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a

flagrant stagnancy of sun and heat.  The lee side of a line island

after noon is indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the

trade will be still blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon

it will be blowing also, speeding the canoes; but the screen of

bush completely intercepts it from the shore, and sleep and silence

and companies of mosquitoes brood upon the towns.

We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise.  A few

inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed.

As we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to

explore a city of the dead.  Only, between the posts of open

houses, we could see the townsfolk stretched in the siesta,

sometimes a family together veiled in a mosquito-net, sometimes a

single sleeper on a platform like a corpse on a bier.

The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of

churches.  Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they

could scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when

the toys are mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale.  Many

were open sheds; some took the form of roofed stages; others were

walled and the walls pierced with little windows.  A few were

perched on piles in the lagoon; the rest stood at random on a

green, through which the roadway made a ribbon of sand, or along

the embankments of a sheet of water like a shallow dock.  One and

all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree wood and palm-

tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no hammer

sounded, in their building, and they were held together by lashings

of palm-tree sinnet.

In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island,

a lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of

framing sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the

street shows in a vista.  The proportions of the place, in such

surroundings, and built of such materials, appeared august; and we

threaded the nave with a sentiment befitting visitors in a

cathedral.  Benches run along either side.  In the midst, on a

crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king and queen when they

shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop, apparently from a

hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the hoop (which

hangs askew) is dressed with streamers of the same material, red

and white.

This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and

presently we stood before its seat and centre.  The palace is built

of imported wood upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron,

the yard enclosed with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of

lych-house.  It cannot be called spacious; a labourer in the States

is sometimes more commodiously lodged; but when we had the chance

to see it within, we found it was enriched (beyond all island

expectation) with coloured advertisements and cuts from the

illustrated papers.  Even before the gate some of the treasures of

the crown stand public:  a bell of a good magnitude, two pieces of

cannon, and a single shell.  The bell cannot be rung nor the guns

fired; they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade

of the royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square.

A straight gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace

door; the containing quay-walls excellently built of coral; over

against the mouth, by what seems an effect of landscape art, the

martello-like islet of the gaol breaks the lagoon.  Vassal chiefs

with tribute, neighbour monarchs come a-roving, might here sail in,

view with surprise these extensive public works, and be awed by

these mouths of silent cannon.  It was impossible to see the place

and not to fancy it designed for pageantry.  But the elaborate

theatre then stood empty; the royal house deserted, its doors and

windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence.

On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient

gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on

the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing moving.

The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a

parapet.  At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands

into an oblong peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and

summer parlour of the king.  The midst is occupied by an open house

or permanent marquee--called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now

pronounced, a maniap'--at the lowest estimation forty feet by

sixty.  The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a

woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of

coral, within by a frame of wood.  The floor is of broken coral,

divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far

enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and

disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen

to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon.

It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when

we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright

shed, we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful

people, some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of

Butaritari.  The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen

yawned and sprawled.  Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a

cutlass was leaned against a pillar:  the armoury of these drowsy

musketeers.  At the far end, a little closed house of wood

displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved, upon examination, to be

a privy on the European model.  In front of this, upon some mats,

lolled Tebureimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the

house, two crossed rifles represented fasces.  He wore pyjamas

which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and

cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous

and dull:  he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held

awake by apprehension:  a pepper rajah muddled with opium, and

listening for the march of a Dutch army, looks perhaps not

otherwise.  We were to grow better acquainted, and first and last I

had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet always to

hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is no

doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs.

The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming.  But the

queen, who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible;

and there was present an interpreter so willing that his volubility

became at last the cause of our departure.  He had greeted us upon

our entrance:- 'That is the honourable King, and I am his

interpreter,' he had said, with more stateliness than truth.  For

he held no appointment in the court, seemed extremely ill-

acquainted with the island language, and was present, like

ourselves, upon a visit of civility.  Mr. Williams was his name:

an American darkey, runaway ship's cook, and bar-keeper at The Land

we Live in tavern, Butaritari.  I never knew a man who had more

words in his command or less truth to communicate; neither the

gloom of the monarch, nor my own efforts to be distant, could in

the least abash him; and when the scene closed, the darkey was left

talking.

The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch

itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence.  So much the more

vivid was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the

islet, the Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his

unmelodious David, Mr. Williams, chattering through the drowsy

hours.

CHAPTER II--THE FOUR BROTHERS

The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little

Makin; some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-

independent chieftains do him qualified homage.  The importance of

the office is measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be

absolute; and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory

of residents.

On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa's father, Nakaeia, the

eldest son, succeeded.  He was a fellow of huge physical strength,

masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some

intelligence of men and business.  Alone in his islands, it was he

who dealt and profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and

his subjects toiled for his behoof in servitude.  When they wrought

long and well their taskmaster declared a holiday, and supplied and

shared a general debauch.  The scale of his providing was at times

magnificent; six hundred dollars' worth of gin and brandy was set

forth at once; the narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry:

and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering

themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the fore-hatch of a

wrecked vessel, king and commons howling and singing as they went.

At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel ended; Makin became once

more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all

the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling

under his bloodshot eye.

The fear of Nakaeia filled the land.  No regularity of justice was

affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it

seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault

and midnight murder were the forms of process.  The king himself

would play the executioner:  and his blows were dealt by stealth,

and with the help and countenance of none but his own wives.  These

were his oarswomen; one that caught a crab, he slew incontinently

with the tiller; thus disciplined, they pulled him by night to the

scene of his vengeance, which he would then execute alone and

return well-pleased with his connubial crew.  The inmates of the

harem held a station hard for us to conceive.  Beasts of draught,

and driven by the fear of death, they were yet implicitly trusted

with their sovereign's life; they were still wives and queens, and

it was supposed that no man should behold their faces.  They killed

by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those

boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood.  In the days of

Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms which

commanded the enclosure.  It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat

below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in

a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down,

and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered.

Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal.  But during the

remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in

remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission,

although still in vain; and the palms, accessories to the fact,

were ruthlessly cut down.  Such was the ideal of wifely purity in

an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise.  And yet

scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem.  He was at

that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a pleasure-

house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one day he

summoned a new wife.  She was one that had been sealed to him; that

is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the

husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets.  She would

be arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded,

decked with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her

friends supposed; for death, as she well knew.  'Tell me the man's

name, and I will spare you,' said Nakaeia.  But the girl was

staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover and the queens

strangled her between the mats.

Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated.  Deeds

that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face

of justice; his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall

with respect the firmness of his government; and even the whites,

whom he long opposed and kept at arm's-length, give him the name

(in the canonical South Sea phrase) of 'a perfect gentleman when

sober.'

When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he

summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal

policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign.  The warning was

taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the

model of Nakaeia's.  Nanteitei dispensed with guards, and walked

abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag.  To conceal his

weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day;

advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered.

The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for

the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief

means of buttressing the throne.  Nakaeia kept his harem busy for

himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others.  In his days, for

instance, Messrs.  Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the

north end of the town.  The masonry was the work of the seventeen

queens, who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses; but the man

who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished,

lest by chance he should look down and see them.

It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang.  For some

time already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari--

Maka and Kanoa, two brave childlike men.  Nakaeia would none of

their doctrine; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being

human, he had some affection for their persons.  In the house,

before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors

of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife them, and menacing the

missionary if he interfered; yet he not only spared him at the

moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some

expressions of respect.  Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more

completely under the spell.  Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in

his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence

on the king which soon grew paramount.  Nanteitei, with the royal

house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal

missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced.  It was a

compendious act.  The throne was thus impoverished, its influence

shaken, the queen's relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women

(some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market.  I have

been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married

to two of these impromptu widows, and successively divorced by both

for misconduct.  That two great and rich ladies (for both of these

were rich) should have married 'a man from another island' marks

the dissolution of society.  The laws besides were wholly

remodelled, not always for the better.  I love Maka as a man; as a

legislator he has two defects:  weak in the punishment of crime,

stern to repress innocent pleasures.

War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet

Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession

of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother,

Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the

storm burst.  The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to

have always underlain and perhaps alternated with monarchy.  The

Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in

the Speak House and debate:  and the king's chief superiority is a

form of closure--'The Speaking is over.'  After the long monocracy

of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless

grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous

of the influence of Maka.  Calumny, or rather caricature, was

called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was

reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in

the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed

affront, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings.  In

the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the

dust.  The king sat in the maniap' before the palace gate expecting

his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in

the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had

taken post and diverted the succours as they came.  They came

singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about his

neck.  'Where are you going?' asked the chief.  'The king called

us,' they would reply.  'Here is your place.  Sit down,' returned

the chief.  With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient

force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was

summoned and surrendered.  About this period, in almost every part

of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the

skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of

the isle, a menace to ambition.  Nabakatokia was more fortunate;

his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was

stripped of power.  The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public

speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the

commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the

king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a

troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt.

He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one

regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor.  This

was by repute the hero of the family.  Alone of the four brothers,

he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old;

it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia

turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right

hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.  Nontemat', Mr. Corpse, was his

appalling nickname, and he had earned it well.  Again and again, at

the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of

night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families.  Here was

the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux.  He came, summoned from

the tributary rule of Little Makin:  he was installed, he proved a

puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the

reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the

name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man's character was much commented on in the

island, and variously explained by opium and Christianity.  To my

eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency.

Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother:  King Tebureimoa is afraid of

the Old Men.  Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of

desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of

government.  He played his part of bravo in the past, following the

line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence:

to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible,

perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and

his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he

capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits

among his guards in dreadful expectation.  The same cowardice that

put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the

sceptre of a king.

A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my

observation, depicts him in his two capacities.  A chief in Little

Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, 'Who is Kaeia?'  A bird

carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a

committee of three.  Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second

commissioner died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and

green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him

the name of Abou ben Adhem.  Mr. Corpse was troubled with a

scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such

a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the

blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse

than awkward.  'I will strike the blow,' said the venerable Abou;

and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise.  The

quarry was decoyed into the bush; he was set to carrying a log; and

while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow.

Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror,

turned to flee.  But their victim recalled them to his side.  'You

need not run away now,' he said.  'You have done this thing to me.

Stay.'  He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat

with him the while:  a scene for Shakespeare.  All the stages of a

violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing

features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr.

Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he

has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery.  I

was never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the

king's thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at

unawares.  I had once an errand for his ear.  It was once more the

hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers abroad, and these

directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where

Tebureimoa lay unguarded.  We entered without ceremony, being in

some haste.  He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his

Gilbert Island Bible with compunction.  On our sudden entrance the

unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled

on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having

recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats.  So Eglon looked

on Ehud.

The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just; Nakaeia, the

author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of

kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity.

Not the nature, but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances

damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been

incongruously placed.  At home, in a quiet bystreet of a village,

the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is,

he shows some private virtues.  He has no lands, only the use of

such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the

old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and

he knows and uses it.  Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a

hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the

rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a

shilling for a child:  allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total

of three hundred pounds a year.  He had been some nine months on

the throne:  had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure

unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent

his brother's photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two

hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother's

legacy of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket.  An

affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy

carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace.

It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues; that Tebureimoa

should have a diversion filled me with surprise.

CHAPTER III--AROUND OUR HOUSE

When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and

within the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six

foreign houses of Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by

Maka, the Hawaiian missionary.  Two San Francisco firms are here

established, Messrs. Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the

first hard by the palace of the mid town, the second at the north

entry; each with a store and bar-room.  Our house was in the

Wightman compound, betwixt the store and bar, within a fenced

enclosure.  Across the road a few native houses nestled in the

margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose solid,

shutting out the breeze.  A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in

behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens' hands.

Here, when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when

the tide was low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and

an endless series of natives descended the pier stair, tailed

across the sand in strings and clusters, waded to the waist with

the bags of copra, and loitered backward to renew their charge.

The mystery of the copra trade tormented me, as I sat and watched

the profits drip on the stair and the sands.

In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at

night, the folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the

road:  families going up the island to make copra on their lands;

women bound for the bush to gather flowers against the evening

toilet; and, twice a day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife

and shell.  In the first grey of the morning, and again late in the

afternoon, these would straggle past about their tree-top business,

strike off here and there into the bush, and vanish from the face

of the earth.  At about the same hour, if the tide be low in the

lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the island for a

bath, and may enter close at their heels alleys of the palm wood.

Right in front, although the sun is not yet risen, the east is

already lighted with preparatory fires, and the huge accumulations

of the trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the coming day.

The breeze is in your face; overhead in the tops of the palms, its

playthings, it maintains a lively bustle; look where you will,

above or below, there is no human presence, only the earth and

shaken forest.  And right overhead the song of an invisible singer

breaks from the thick leaves; from farther on a second tree-top

answers; and beyond again, in the bosom of the woods, a still more

distant minstrel perches and sways and sings.  So, all round the

isle, the toddy-cutters sit on high, and are rocked by the trade,

and have a view far to seaward, where they keep watch for sails,

and like huge birds utter their songs in the morning.  They sing

with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and

the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we

anticipate the chattering of fowls.  And yet in a sense these songs

also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred;

few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was

understood the cutters 'prayed to have good toddy, and sang of

their old wars.'  The prayer is at least answered; and when the

foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage well

'worthy of a grace.'  All forenoon you may return and taste; it

only sparkles, and sharpens, and grows to be a new drink, not less

delicious; but with the progress of the day the fermentation

quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it will be yeast for

bread, in two days more a devilish intoxicant, the counsellor of

crime.

The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and

mustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets,

all stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty

lip.  The hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise

in a frizzled bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese a pointed

stick (used for a comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls.  The

women from this bush of hair look forth enticingly:  the race

cannot be compared with the Tahitian for female beauty; I doubt

even if the average be high; but some of the prettiest girls, and

one of the handsomest women I ever saw, were Gilbertines.

Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group, is

Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common

wear, the latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with

flowers, fruit, and ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the

characteristic female dress of the Gilberts no longer universal.

The ridi is its name:  a cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked

fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not unlike tarry string:  the lower edge

not reaching the mid-thigh, the upper adjusted so low upon the

haunches that it seems to cling by accident.  A sneeze, you think,

and the lady must surely be left destitute.  'The perilous,

hairbreadth ridi' was our word for it; and in the conflict that

rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither

side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous

finding it unlovely in itself.  Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would

look her best, that must be her costume.  In that and naked

otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and

life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia.  Bundle her in a gown,

the charm is fled, and she wriggles like an Englishwoman.

Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous.  The men broke

out in all the colours of the rainbow--or at least of the trade-

room,--and both men and women began to be adorned and scented with

new flowers.  A small white blossom is the favourite, sometimes

sown singly in a woman's hair like little stars, now composed in a

thick wreath.  With the night, the crowd sometimes thickened in the

road, and the padding and brushing of bare feet became continuous;

the promenades mostly grave, the silence only interrupted by some

giggling and scampering of girls; even the children quiet.  At

nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral, and the life of

the town ceased.  At four the next morning the signal is repeated

in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for seven

hours all must lie--I was about to say within doors, of a place

where doors, and even walls, are an exception--housed, at least,

under their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-

nets.  Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative

to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising

himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares

from house to house like a moving bonfire.  Only the police

themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants.

I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in

particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my

premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him.  But

the rogue was privileged.

Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain

cast anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out.

This was owing to our position between the store and the bar--the

Sans Souci, as the last was called.  Mr. Rick was not only Messrs.

Wightman's manager, but consular agent for the States; Mrs. Rick

was the only white woman on the island, and one of the only two in

the archipelago; their house besides, with its cool verandahs, its

bookshelves, its comfortable furniture, could not be rivalled

nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu.  Every one called in consequence,

save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea quarrel, hingeing on

the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a difference about

poultry.  Even these, if they did not appear upon the north, would

be presently visible to the southward, the Sans Souci drawing them

as with cords.  In an island with a total population of twelve

white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem

superfluous:  but every bullet has its billet, and the double

accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient

by the captains and the crews of ships:  The Land we Live in being

tacitly resigned to the forecastle, the Sans Souci tacitly reserved

for the afterguard.  So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding

was my fear of Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first;

but in the other, which was the club or rather the casino of the

island, I regularly passed my evenings.  It was small, but neatly

fitted, and at night (when the lamp was lit) sparkled with glass

and glowed with coloured pictures like a theatre at Christmas.  The

pictures were advertisements, the glass coarse enough, the

carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that incongruous isle, was of

unbridled luxury and inestimable expense.  Here songs were sung,

tales told, tricks performed, games played.  The Ricks, ourselves,

Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and

perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats

or by the road on foot, made up the usual company.  The traders,

all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business;

'South Sea Merchants' is the title they prefer.  'We are all

sailors here'--'Merchants, if you please'--'South Sea Merchants,'--

was a piece of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed

to lose in savour.  We found them at all times simple, genial, gay,

gallant, and obliging; and, across some interval of time, recall

with pleasure the traders of Butaritari.  There was one black sheep

indeed.  I tell of him here where he lived, against my rule; for in

this case I have no measure to preserve, and the man is typical of

a class of ruffians that once disgraced the whole field of the

South Seas, and still linger in the rarely visited isles of

Micronesia.  He had the name on the beach of 'a perfect gentleman

when sober,' but I never saw him otherwise than drunk.  The few

shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has singled out

with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of his

original baseness.  He has been accused and acquitted of a

treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which

inclines me to suppose him innocent.  His daughter is defaced by

his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to

disfigure, and in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-

brandy, fastened on the wrong victim.  The wife has since fled and

harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands

from deaf ears her forcible restoration.  The best of his business

is to make natives drink, and then advance the money for the fine

upon a lucrative mortgage.  'Respect for whites' is the man's word:

'What is the matter with this island is the want of respect for

whites.'  On his way to Butaritari, while I was there, he spied his

wife in the bush with certain natives and made a dash to capture

her; whereupon one of her companions drew a knife and the husband

retreated:  'Do you call that proper respect for whites?' he cried.

At an early stage of the acquaintance we proved our respect for his

kind of white by forbidding him our enclosure under pain of death.

Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not

what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face

(which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours

across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged

himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite

inoffensive, on his English lips incredibly incongruous.

Our enclosure, round which this composite of degradations wandered,

was of some extent.  In one corner was a trellis with a long table

of rough boards.  Here the Fourth of July feast had been held not

long before with memorable consequences, yet to be set forth; here

we took our meals; here entertained to a dinner the king and

notables of Makin.  In the midst was the house, with a verandah

front and back, and three is rooms within.  In the verandah we

slung our man-of-war hammocks, worked there by day, and slept at

night.  Within were beds, chairs, a round table, a fine hanging

lamp, and portraits of the royal family of Hawaii.  Queen Victoria

proves nothing; Kalakaua and Mrs. Bishop are diagnostic; and the

truth is we were the stealthy tenants of the parsonage.  On the day

of our arrival Maka was away; faithless trustees unlocked his

doors; and the dear rigorous man, the sworn foe of liquor and

tobacco, returned to find his verandah littered with cigarettes and

his parlour horrible with bottles.  He made but one condition--on

the round table, which he used in the celebration of the

sacraments, he begged us to refrain from setting liquor; in all

else he bowed to the accomplished fact, refused rent, retired

across the way into a native house, and, plying in his boat, beat

the remotest quarters of the isle for provender.  He found us pigs-

-I could not fancy where--no other pigs were visible; he brought us

fowls and taro; when we gave our feast to the monarch and gentry,

it was he who supplied the wherewithal, he who superintended the

cooking, he who asked grace at table, and when the king's health

was proposed, he also started the cheering with an English hip-hip-

hip.  There was never a more fortunate conception; the heart of the

fatted king exulted in his bosom at the sound.

Take him for all in all, I have never known a more engaging

creature than this parson of Butaritari:  his mirth, his kindness,

his noble, friendly feelings, brimmed from the man in speech and

gesture.  He loved to exaggerate, to act and overact the momentary

part, to exercise his lungs and muscles, and to speak and laugh

with his whole body.  He had the morning cheerfulness of birds and

healthy children; and his humour was infectious.  We were next

neighbours and met daily, yet our salutations lasted minutes at a

stretch--shaking hands, slapping shoulders, capering like a pair of

Merry-Andrews, laughing to split our sides upon some pleasantry

that would scarce raise a titter in an infant-school.  It might be

five in the morning, the toddy-cutters just gone by, the road

empty, the shade of the island lying far on the lagoon:  and the

ebullition cheered me for the day.

Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy--these jubilant

extremes could scarce be constantly maintained.  He was besides

long, and lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and

his Sabbath countenance was even saturnine.  On that day we made a

procession to the church, or (as I must always call it) the

cathedral:  Maka (a blot on the hot landscape) in tall hat, black

frock-coat, black trousers; under his arm the hymn-book and the

Bible; in his face, a reverent gravity:- beside him Mary his wife,

a quiet, wise, and handsome elderly lady, seriously attired:-

myself following with singular and moving thoughts.  Long before,

to the sound of bells and streams and birds, through a green

Lothian glen, I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a minister in

whose house I lodged; and the likeness, and the difference, and the

series of years and deaths, profoundly touched me.  In the great,

dusky, palm-tree cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty:

the men on one side, the women on the other, myself posted (for a

privilege) amongst the women, and the small missionary contingent

gathered close around the platform, we were lost in that round

vault.  The lessons were read antiphonally, the flock was

catechised, a blind youth repeated weekly a long string of psalms,

hymns were sung--I never heard worse singing,--and the sermon

followed.  To say I understood nothing were untrue; there were

points that I learned to expect with certainty; the name of

Honolulu, that of Kalakaua, the word Cap'n-man-o'-wa', the word

ship, and a description of a storm at sea, infallibly occurred; and

I was not seldom rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the

bargain.  The rest was but sound to the ears, silence for the mind:

a plain expanse of tedium, rendered unbearable by heat, a hard

chair, and the sight through the wide doors of the more happy

heathen on the green.  Sleep breathed on my joints and eyelids,

sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral.  The

congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned

aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a

dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom.  In vain

the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by

name particular hearers.  I was myself perhaps a more effective

excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my

successful struggles against sleep--and I hope they were

successful--cheered the flight of time.  He, when he was not

catching flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours, gloated with

a fixed, truculent eye upon the stages of my agony; and once, when

the service was drawing towards a close, he winked at me across the

church.

I write of the service with a smile; yet I was always there--always

with respect for Maka, always with admiration for his deep

seriousness, his burning energy, the fire of his roused eye, the

sincere and various accents of his voice.  To see him weekly

flogging a dead horse and blowing a cold fire was a lesson in

fortitude and constancy.  It may be a question whether if the

mission were fully supported, and he was set free from business

avocations, more might not result; I think otherwise myself; I

think not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock, that rigour

which has once provoked a revolution, and which to-day, in a man so

lively and engaging, amazes the beholder.  No song, no dance, no

tobacco, no liquor, no alleviative of life--only toil and church-

going; so says a voice from his face; and the face is the face of

the Polynesian Esau, but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a

different world.  And a Polynesian at the best makes a singular

missionary in the Gilberts, coming from a country recklessly

unchaste to one conspicuously strict; from a race hag-ridden with

bogies to one comparatively bold against the terrors of the dark.

The thought was stamped one morning in my mind, when I chanced to

be abroad by moonlight, and saw all the town lightless, but the

lamp faithfully burning by the missionary's bed.  It requires no

law, no fire, and no scouting police, to withhold Maka and his

countrymen from wandering in the night unlighted.

CHAPTER IV--A TALE OF A TAPU

On the morrow of our arrival (Sunday, 14th July 1889) our

photographers were early stirring.  Once more we traversed a silent

town; many were yet abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their

open houses; there was no sound of intercourse or business.  In

that hour before the shadows, the quarter of the palace and canal

seemed like a landing-place in the Arabian Nights or from the

classic poets; here were the fit destination of some 'faery

frigot,' here some adventurous prince might step ashore among new

characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it floated

on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the

repository of the Grail.  In such a scene, and at such an hour, the

impression received was not so much of foreign travel--rather of

past ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had

crossed, as centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by

the same steps, home and to-day.  A few children followed us,

mostly nude, all silent; in the clear, weedy waters of the canal

some silent damsels waded, baring their brown thighs; and to one of

the maniap's before the palace gate we were attracted by a low but

stirring hum of speech.

The oval shed was full of men sitting cross-legged.  The king was

there in striped pyjamas, his rear protected by four guards with

Winchesters, his air and bearing marked by unwonted spirit and

decision; tumblers and black bottles went the round; and the talk,

throughout loud, was general and animated.  I was inclined at first

to view this scene with suspicion.  But the hour appeared

unsuitable for a carouse; drink was besides forbidden equally by

the law of the land and the canons of the church; and while I was

yet hesitating, the king's rigorous attitude disposed of my last

doubt.  We had come, thinking to photograph him surrounded by his

guards, and at the first word of the design his piety revolted.  We

were reminded of the day--the Sabbath, in which thou shalt take no

photographs--and returned with a flea in our ear, bearing the

rejected camera.

At church, a little later, I was struck to find the throne

unoccupied.  So nice a Sabbatarian might have found the means to be

present; perhaps my doubts revived; and before I got home they were

transformed to certainties.  Tom, the bar-keeper of the Sans Souci,

was in conversation with two emissaries from the court.  The

'keen,' they said, wanted 'din,' failing which 'perandi.'  No din,

was Tom's reply, and no perandi; but 'pira' if they pleased.  It

seems they had no use for beer, and departed sorrowing.

'Why, what is the meaning of all this?' I asked.  'Is the island on

the spree?'

Such was the fact.  On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and

the king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu

against liquor.  There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies

to the superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one

can start him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop.

The tapu, raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten

days the town had been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen

it the afternoon before) in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by

the Old Men and his own appetites, continued to maintain the

liberty, to squander his savings on liquor, and to join in and lead

the debauch.  The whites were the authors of this crisis; it was

upon their own proposal that the freedom had been granted at the

first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they were

doubtless pleased it should continue.  That pleasure had now

sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded)

unduly; and it now began to be a question how it might conclude.

Hence Tom's refusal.  Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the

moment, and it was avowedly unavailing; the king's foragers, denied

by Tom at the Sans Souci, would be supplied at The Land we Live in

by the gobbling Mr. Williams.

The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I

am inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate.  Yet the

conduct of drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and

at home our populations are not armed from the highest to the

lowest with revolvers and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a

debauch by the whole townful--and I might rather say, by the whole

polity--king, magistrates, police, and army joining in one common

scene of drunkenness.  It must be thought besides that we were here

in barbarous islands, rarely visited, lately and partly civilised.

First and last, a really considerable number of whites have

perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their own misconduct; and

the natives have displayed in at least one instance a disposition

to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing but dumb

bones.  This last was the chief consideration against a sudden

closing of the bars; the bar-keepers stood in the immediate breach

and dealt direct with madmen; too surly a refusal might at any

moment precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for

a massacre.

Monday, 15th.--At the same hour we returned to the same muniap'.

Kummel (of all drinks) was served in tumblers; in the midst sat the

crown prince, a fatted youth, surrounded by fresh bottles and

busily plying the corkscrew; and king, chief, and commons showed

the loose mouth, the uncertain joints, and the blurred and animated

eye of the early drinker.  It was plain we were impatiently

expected; the king retired with alacrity to dress, the guards were

despatched after their uniforms; and we were left to await the

issue of these preparations with a shedful of tipsy natives.  The

orgie had proceeded further than on Sunday.  The day promised to be

of great heat; it was already sultry, the courtiers were already

fuddled; and still the kummel continued to go round, and the crown

prince to play butler.  Flemish freedom followed upon Flemish

excess; and a funny dog, a handsome fellow, gaily dressed, and with

a full turban of frizzed hair, delighted the company with a

humorous courtship of a lady in a manner not to be described.  It

was our diversion, in this time of waiting, to observe the

gathering of the guards.  They have European arms, European

uniforms, and (to their sorrow) European shoes.  We saw one warrior

(like Mars) in the article of being armed; two men and a stalwart

woman were scarce strong enough to boot him; and after a single

appearance on parade the army is crippled for a week.

At last, the gates under the king's house opened; the army issued,

one behind another, with guns and epaulettes; the colours stooped

under the gateway; majesty followed in his uniform bedizened with

gold lace; majesty's wife came next in a hat and feathers, and an

ample trained silk gown; the royal imps succeeded; there stood the

pageantry of Makin marshalled on its chosen theatre.  Dickens might

have told how serious they were; how tipsy; how the king melted and

streamed under his cocked hat; how he took station by the larger of

his two cannons--austere, majestic, but not truly vertical; how the

troops huddled, and were straightened out, and clubbed again; how

they and their firelocks raked at various inclinations like the

masts of ships; and how an amateur photographer reviewed, arrayed,

and adjusted them, to see his dispositions change before he reached

the camera.

The business was funny to see; I do not know that it is graceful to

laugh at; and our report of these transactions was received on our

return with the shaking of grave heads.

The day had begun ill; eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at

any moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin.

The Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded

on three sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to

contain over a thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to

the ships, in the case of an alert, was a recourse not to be

thought of.  Our talk that morning must have closely reproduced the

talk in English garrisons before the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt

that any mischief was in prospect, the sure belief that (should any

come) there was nothing left but to go down fighting, the half-

amused, half-anxious attitude of mind in which we were awaiting

fresh developments.

The kummel soon ran out; we were scarce returned before the king

had followed us in quest of more.  Mr. Corpse was now divested of

his more awful attitude, the lawless bulk of him again encased in

striped pyjamas; a guardsman brought up the rear with his rifle at

the trail:  and his majesty was further accompanied by a Rarotongan

whalerman and the playful courtier with the turban of frizzed hair.

There was never a more lively deputation.  The whalerman was

gapingly, tearfully tipsy:  the courtier walked on air; the king

himself was even sportive.  Seated in a chair in the Ricks'

sitting-room, he bore the brunt of our prayers and menaces unmoved.

He was even rated, plied with historic instances, threatened with

the men-of-war, ordered to restore the tapu on the spot--and

nothing in the least affected him.  It should be done to-morrow, he

said; to-day it was beyond his power, to-day he durst not.  'Is

that royal?' cried indignant Mr. Rick.  No, it was not royal; had

the king been of a royal character we should ourselves have held a

different language; and royal or not, he had the best of the

dispute.  The terms indeed were hardly equal; for the king was the

only man who could restore the tapu, but the Ricks were not the

only people who sold drink.  He had but to hold his ground on the

first question, and they were sure to weaken on the second.  A

little struggle they still made for the fashion's sake; and then

one exceedingly tipsy deputation departed, greatly rejoicing, a

case of brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow.  The Rarotongan

(whom I had never seen before) wrung me by the hand like a man

bound on a far voyage.  'My dear frien'!' he cried, 'good-bye, my

dear frien'!'--tears of kummel standing in his eyes; the king

lurched as he went, the courtier ambled,--a strange party of

intoxicated children to be entrusted with that barrowful of

madness.

You could never say the town was quiet; all morning there was a

ferment in the air, an aimless movement and congregation of natives

in the street.  But it was not before half-past one that a sudden

hubbub of voices called us from the house, to find the whole white

colony already gathered on the spot as by concerted signal.  The

Sans Souci was overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah

thronged.  From all these throats an inarticulate babbling cry went

up incessantly; it sounded like the bleating of young lambs, but

angrier.  In the road his royal highness (whom I had seen so lately

in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom; on the top step,

tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting to the prince.  Yet a

while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous.  Then came a

brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned, and was rejected; the

stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view, through

the disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their midst a

fourth.  By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his

knees, his face concealed, he was wrenched from the verandah and

whisked along the road into the village, howling as he disappeared.

Had his face been raised, we should have seen it bloodied, and the

blood was not his own.  The courtier with the turban of frizzed

hair had paid the costs of this disturbance with the lower part of

one ear.

So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to

the inhumane.  Yet we looked round on serious faces and--a fact

that spoke volumes--Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar.

Custom might go elsewhere, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased,

but Tom had had enough of bar-keeping for that day.  Indeed the

event had hung on a hair.  A man had sought to draw a revolver--on

what quarrel I could never learn, and perhaps he himself could not

have told; one shot, when the room was so crowded, could scarce

have failed to take effect; where many were armed and all tipsy, it

could scarce have failed to draw others; and the woman who spied

the weapon and the man who seized it may very well have saved the

white community.

The mob insensibly melted from the scene; and for the rest of the

day our neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in

solitude.  But the tranquillity was only local; din and perandi

still flowed in other quarters:  and we had one more sight of

Gilbert Island violence.  In the church, where we had wandered

photographing, we were startled by a sudden piercing outcry.  The

scene, looking forth from the doors of that great hall of shadow,

was unforgettable.  The palms, the quaint and scattered houses, the

flag of the island streaming from its tall staff, glowed with

intolerable sunshine.  In the midst two women rolled fighting on

the grass.  The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished,

because the one was stripped to the ridi and the other wore a

holoku (sacque) of some lively colour.  The first was uppermost,

her teeth locked in her adversary's face, shaking her like a dog;

the other impotently fought and scratched.  So for a moment we saw

them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then the mob closed and

shut them in.

It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore.

But we were travellers, folk that had come far in quest of the

adventurous; on the first sign of an adventure it would have been a

singular inconsistency to have withdrawn; and we sent on board

instead for our revolvers.  Mindful of Taahauku, Mr. Rick, Mr.

Osbourne, and Mrs. Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public

highway, and fired at bottles to the admiration of the natives.

Captain Reid of the Equator stayed on shore with us to be at hand

in case of trouble, and we retired to bed at the accustomed hour,

agreeably excited by the day's events.  The night was exquisite,

the silence enchanting; yet as I lay in my hammock looking on the

strong moonshine and the quiescent palms, one ugly picture haunted

me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile

embrace.  The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have

looked on death and massacre with less revolt.  The return to these

primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality,

shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost

of battles.  There are elements in our state and history which it

is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not

to dwell on.  Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day's work;

the imagination readily accepts them.  It instinctively rejects, on

the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its

lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling

pell-mell and hugger-mugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the

caves of old.  And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must

not forget the slums and dens of our cities; I must not forget that

I have passed dinnerward through Soho, and seen that which cured me

of my dinner.

CHAPTER V--A TALE OF A TAPU--continued

Tuesday, July 16.--It rained in the night, sudden and loud, in

Gilbert Island fashion.  Before the day, the crowing of a cock

aroused me and I wandered in the compound and along the street.

The squall was blown by, the moon shone with incomparable lustre,

the air lay dead as in a room, and yet all the isle sounded as

under a strong shower, the eaves thickly pattering, the lofty palms

dripping at larger intervals and with a louder note.  In this bold

nocturnal light the interior of the houses lay inscrutable, one

lump of blackness, save when the moon glinted under the roof, and

made a belt of silver, and drew the slanting shadows of the pillars

on the floor.  Nowhere in all the town was any lamp or ember; not a

creature stirred; I thought I was alone to be awake; but the police

were faithful to their duty; secretly vigilant, keeping account of

time; and a little later, the watchman struck slowly and repeatedly

on the cathedral bell; four o'clock, the warning signal.  It seemed

strange that, in a town resigned to drunkenness and tumult, curfew

and reveille should still be sounded and still obeyed.

The day came, and brought little change.  The place still lay

silent; the people slept, the town slept.  Even the few who were

awake, mostly women and children, held their peace and kept within

under the strong shadow of the thatch, where you must stop and peer

to see them.  Through the deserted streets, and past the sleeping

houses, a deputation took its way at an early hour to the palace;

the king was suddenly awakened, and must listen (probably with a

headache) to unpalatable truths.  Mrs. Rick, being a sufficient

mistress of that difficult tongue, was spokeswoman; she explained

to the sick monarch that I was an intimate personal friend of Queen

Victoria's; that immediately on my return I should make her a

report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again

invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make

reprisals.  It was scarce the fact--rather a just and necessary

parable of the fact, corrected for latitude; and it certainly told

upon the king.  He was much affected; he had conceived the notion

(he said) that I was a man of some importance, but not dreamed it

was as bad as this; and the missionary house was tapu'd under a

fine of fifty dollars.

So much was announced on the return of the deputation; not any

more; and I gathered subsequently that much more had passed.  The

protection gained was welcome.  It had been the most annoying and

not the least alarming feature of the day before, that our house

was periodically filled with tipsy natives, twenty or thirty at a

time, begging drink, fingering our goods, hard to be dislodged,

awkward to quarrel with.  Queen Victoria's friend (who was soon

promoted to be her son) was free from these intrusions.  Not only

my house, but my neighbourhood as well, was left in peace; even on

our walks abroad we were guarded and prepared for; and, like great

persons visiting a hospital, saw only the fair side.  For the

matter of a week we were thus suffered to go out and in and live in

a fool's paradise, supposing the king to have kept his word, the

tapu to be revived and the island once more sober.

Tuesday, July 23.--We dined under a bare trellis erected for the

Fourth of July; and here we used to linger by lamplight over coffee

and tobacco.  In that climate evening approaches without sensible

chill; the wind dies out before sunset; heaven glows a while and

fades, and darkens into the blueness of the tropical night; swiftly

and insensibly the shadows thicken, the stars multiply their

number; you look around you and the day is gone.  It was then that

we would see our Chinaman draw near across the compound in a

lurching sphere of light, divided by his shadows; and with the

coming of the lamp the night closed about the table.  The faces of

the company, the spars of the trellis, stood out suddenly bright on

a ground of blue and silver, faintly designed with palm-tops and

the peaked roofs of houses.  Here and there the gloss upon a leaf,

or the fracture of a stone, returned an isolated sparkle.  All else

had vanished.  We hung there, illuminated like a galaxy of stars in

vacuo; we sat, manifest and blind, amid the general ambush of the

darkness; and the islanders, passing with light footfalls and low

voices in the sand of the road, lingered to observe us, unseen.

On Tuesday the dusk had fallen, the lamp had just been brought,

when a missile struck the table with a rattling smack and rebounded

past my ear.  Three inches to one side and this page had never been

written; for the thing travelled like a cannon ball.  It was

supposed at the time to be a nut, though even at the time I thought

it seemed a small one and fell strangely.

Wednesday, July 24.--The dusk had fallen once more, and the lamp

been just brought out, when the same business was repeated.  And

again the missile whistled past my ear.  One nut I had been willing

to accept; a second, I rejected utterly.  A cocoa-nut does not come

slinging along on a windless evening, making an angle of about

fifteen degrees with the horizon; cocoa-nuts do not fall on

successive nights at the same hour and spot; in both cases,

besides, a specific moment seemed to have been chosen, that when

the lamp was just carried out, a specific person threatened, and

that the head of the family.  I may have been right or wrong, but I

believed I was the mark of some intimidation; believed the missile

was a stone, aimed not to hit, but to frighten.

No idea makes a man more angry.  I ran into the road, where the

natives were as usual promenading in the dark; Maka joined me with

a lantern; and I ran from one to another, glared in quite innocent

faces, put useless questions, and proffered idle threats.  Thence I

carried my wrath (which was worthy the son of any queen in history)

to the Ricks.  They heard me with depression, assured me this trick

of throwing a stone into a family dinner was not new; that it meant

mischief, and was of a piece with the alarming disposition of the

natives.  And then the truth, so long concealed from us, came out.

The king had broken his promise, he had defied the deputation; the

tapu was still dormant, The Land we Live in still selling drink,

and that quarter of the town disturbed and menaced by perpetual

broils.  But there was worse ahead:  a feast was now preparing for

the birthday of the little princess; and the tributary chiefs of

Kuma and Little Makin were expected daily.  Strong in a following

of numerous and somewhat savage clansmen, each of these was

believed, like a Douglas of old, to be of doubtful loyalty.  Kuma

(a little pot-bellied fellow) never visited the palace, never

entered the town, but sat on the beach on a mat, his gun across his

knees, parading his mistrust and scorn; Karaiti of Makin, although

he was more bold, was not supposed to be more friendly; and not

only were these vassals jealous of the throne, but the followers on

either side shared in the animosity.  Brawls had already taken

place; blows had passed which might at any moment be repaid in

blood.  Some of the strangers were already here and already

drinking; if the debauch continued after the bulk of them had come,

a collision, perhaps a revolution, was to be expected.

The sale of drink is in this group a measure of the jealousy of

traders; one begins, the others are constrained to follow; and to

him who has the most gin, and sells it the most recklessly, the

lion's share of copra is assured.  It is felt by all to be an

extreme expedient, neither safe, decent, nor dignified.  A trader

on Tarawa, heated by an eager rivalry, brought many cases of gin.

He told me he sat afterwards day and night in his house till it was

finished, not daring to arrest the sale, not venturing to go forth,

the bush all round him filled with howling drunkards.  At night,

above all, when he was afraid to sleep, and heard shots and voices

about him in the darkness, his remorse was black.

'My God!' he reflected, 'if I was to lose my life on such a

wretched business!'  Often and often, in the story of the Gilberts,

this scene has been repeated; and the remorseful trader sat beside

his lamp, longing for the day, listening with agony for the sound

of murder, registering resolutions for the future.  For the

business is easy to begin, but hazardous to stop.  The natives are

in their way a just and law-abiding people, mindful of their debts,

docile to the voice of their own institutions; when the tapu is re-

enforced they will cease drinking; but the white who seeks to

antedate the movement by refusing liquor does so at his peril.

Hence, in some degree, the anxiety and helplessness of Mr. Rick.

He and Tom, alarmed by the rabblement of the Sans Souci, had

stopped the sale; they had done so without danger, because The Land

we Live in still continued selling; it was claimed, besides, that

they had been the first to begin.  What step could be taken?  Could

Mr. Rick visit Mr. Muller (with whom he was not on terms) and

address him thus:  'I was getting ahead of you, now you are getting

ahead of me, and I ask you to forego your profit.  I got my place

closed in safety, thanks to your continuing; but now I think you

have continued long enough.  I begin to be alarmed; and because I

am afraid I ask you to confront a certain danger'?  It was not to

be thought of.  Something else had to be found; and there was one

person at one end of the town who was at least not interested in

copra.  There was little else to be said in favour of myself as an

ambassador.  I had arrived in the Wightman schooner, I was living

in the Wightman compound, I was the daily associate of the Wightman

coterie.  It was egregious enough that I should now intrude unasked

in the private affairs of Crawford's agent, and press upon him the

sacrifice of his interests and the venture of his life.  But bad as

I might be, there was none better; since the affair of the stone I

was, besides, sharp-set to be doing, the idea of a delicate

interview attracted me, and I thought it policy to show myself

abroad.

The night was very dark.  There was service in the church, and the

building glimmered through all its crevices like a dim Kirk

Allowa'.  I saw few other lights, but was indistinctly aware of

many people stirring in the darkness, and a hum and sputter of low

talk that sounded stealthy.  I believe (in the old phrase) my beard

was sometimes on my shoulder as I went.  Muller's was but partly

lighted, and quite silent, and the gate was fastened.  I could by

no means manage to undo the latch.  No wonder, since I found it

afterwards to be four or five feet long--a fortification in itself.

As I still fumbled, a dog came on the inside and sniffed

suspiciously at my hands, so that I was reduced to calling 'House

ahoy!'  Mr. Muller came down and put his chin across the paling in

the dark.  'Who is that?' said he, like one who has no mind to

welcome strangers.

'My name is Stevenson,' said I.

'O, Mr. Stevens!  I didn't know you.  Come inside.'  We stepped

into the dark store, when I leaned upon the counter and he against

the wall.  All the light came from the sleeping-room, where I saw

his family being put to bed; it struck full in my face, but Mr.

Muller stood in shadow.  No doubt he expected what was Coming, and

sought the advantage of position; but for a man who wished to

persuade and had nothing to conceal, mine was the preferable.

'Look here,' I began, 'I hear you are selling to the natives.'

'Others have done that before me,' he returned pointedly.

'No doubt,' said I, 'and I have nothing to do with the past, but

the future.  I want you to promise you will handle these spirits

carefully.'

'Now what is your motive in this?' he asked, and then, with a

sneer, 'Are you afraid of your life?'

'That is nothing to the purpose,' I replied.  'I know, and you

know, these spirits ought not to be used at all.'

'Tom and Mr. Rick have sold them before.'

'I have nothing to do with Tom and Mr. Rick.  All I know is I have

heard them both refuse.'

'No, I suppose you have nothing to do with them.  Then you are just

afraid of your life.'

'Come now,' I cried, being perhaps a little stung, 'you know in

your heart I am asking a reasonable thing.  I don't ask you to lose

your profit--though I would prefer to see no spirits brought here,

as you would--'

'I don't say I wouldn't.  I didn't begin this,' he interjected.

'No, I don't suppose you did,' said I.  'And I don't ask you to

lose; I ask you to give me your word, man to man, that you will

make no native drunk.'

Up to now Mr. Muller had maintained an attitude very trying to my

temper; but he had maintained it with difficulty, his sentiment

being all upon my side; and here he changed ground for the worse.

'It isn't me that sells,' said he.

'No, it's that nigger,' I agreed.  'But he's yours to buy and sell;

you have your hand on the nape of his neck; and I ask you--I have

my wife here--to use the authority you have.'

He hastily returned to his old ward.  'I don't deny I could if I

wanted,' said he.  'But there's no danger, the natives are all

quiet.  You're just afraid of your life.'

I do not like to be called a coward, even by implication; and here

I lost my temper and propounded an untimely ultimatum.  'You had

better put it plain,' I cried.  'Do you mean to refuse me what I

ask?'

'I don't want either to refuse it or grant it,' he replied.

'You'll find you have to do the one thing or the other, and right

now!' I cried, and then, striking into a happier vein, 'Come,' said

I, 'you're a better sort than that.  I see what's wrong with you--

you think I came from the opposite camp.  I see the sort of man you

are, and you know that what I ask is right.'

Again he changed ground.  'If the natives get any drink, it isn't

safe to stop them,' he objected.

'I'll be answerable for the bar,' I said.  'We are three men and

four revolvers; we'll come at a word, and hold the place against

the village.'

'You don't know what you're talking about; it's too dangerous!' he

cried.

'Look here,' said I, 'I don't mind much about losing that life you

talk so much of; but I mean to lose it the way I want to, and that

is, putting a stop to all this beastliness.'

He talked a while about his duty to the firm; I minded not at all,

I was secure of victory.  He was but waiting to capitulate, and

looked about for any potent to relieve the strain.  In the gush of

light from the bedroom door I spied a cigar-holder on the desk.

'That is well coloured,' said I.

'Will you take a cigar?' said he.

I took it and held it up unlighted.  'Now,' said I, 'you promise

me.'

'I promise you you won't have any trouble from natives that have

drunk at my place,' he replied.

'That is all I ask,' said I, and showed it was not by immediately

offering to try his stock.

So far as it was anyway critical our interview here ended.  Mr.

Muller had thenceforth ceased to regard me as an emissary from his

rivals, dropped his defensive attitude, and spoke as he believed.

I could make out that he would already, had he dared, have stopped

the sale himself.  Not quite daring, it may be imagined how he

resented the idea of interference from those who had (by his own

statement) first led him on, then deserted him in the breach, and

now (sitting themselves in safety) egged him on to a new peril,

which was all gain to them, all loss to him!  I asked him what he

thought of the danger from the feast.

'I think worse of it than any of you,' he answered.  'They were

shooting around here last night, and I heard the balls too.  I said

to myself, "That's bad."  What gets me is why you should be making

this row up at your end.  I should be the first to go.'

It was a thoughtless wonder.  The consolation of being second is

not great; the fact, not the order of going--there was our concern.

Scott talks moderately of looking forward to a time of fighting

'with a feeling that resembled pleasure.'  The resemblance seems

rather an identity.  In modern life, contact is ended; man grows

impatient of endless manoeuvres; and to approach the fact, to find

ourselves where we can push an advantage home, and stand a fair

risk, and see at last what we are made of, stirs the blood.  It was

so at least with all my family, who bubbled with delight at the

approach of trouble; and we sat deep into the night like a pack of

schoolboys, preparing the revolvers and arranging plans against the

morrow.  It promised certainly to be a busy and eventful day.  The

Old Men were to be summoned to confront me on the question of the

tapu; Muller might call us at any moment to garrison his bar; and

suppose Muller to fail, we decided in a family council to take that

matter into our own hands, The Land we Live in at the pistol's

mouth, and with the polysyllabic Williams, dance to a new tune.  As

I recall our humour I think it would have gone hard with the

mulatto.

Wednesday, July 24.--It was as well, and yet it was disappointing

that these thunder-clouds rolled off in silence.  Whether the Old

Men recoiled from an interview with Queen Victoria's son, whether

Muller had secretly intervened, or whether the step flowed

naturally from the fears of the king and the nearness of the feast,

the tapu was early that morning re-enforced; not a day too soon,

from the manner the boats began to arrive thickly, and the town was

filled with the big rowdy vassals of Karaiti.

The effect lingered for some time on the minds of the traders; it

was with the approval of all present that I helped to draw up a

petition to the United States, praying for a law against the liquor

trade in the Gilberts; and it was at this request that I added,

under my own name, a brief testimony of what had passed;--useless

pains; since the whole reposes, probably unread and possibly

unopened, in a pigeon-hole at Washington.

Sunday, July 28.--This day we had the afterpiece of the debauch.

The king and queen, in European clothes, and followed by armed

guards, attended church for the first time, and sat perched aloft

in a precarious dignity under the barrel-hoops.  Before sermon his

majesty clambered from the dais, stood lopsidedly upon the gravel

floor, and in a few words abjured drinking.  The queen followed

suit with a yet briefer allocution.  All the men in church were

next addressed in turn; each held up his right hand, and the affair

was over--throne and church were reconciled.

CHAPTER VI--THE FIVE DAYS' FESTIVAL

Thursday, July 25.--The street was this day much enlivened by the

presence of the men from Little Makin; they average taller than

Butaritarians, and being on a holiday, went wreathed with yellow

leaves and gorgeous in vivid colours.  They are said to be more

savage, and to be proud of the distinction.  Indeed, it seemed to

us they swaggered in the town, like plaided Highlanders upon the

streets of Inverness, conscious of barbaric virtues.

In the afternoon the summer parlour was observed to be packed with

people; others standing outside and stooping to peer under the

eaves, like children at home about a circus.  It was the Makin

company, rehearsing for the day of competition.  Karaiti sat in the

front row close to the singers, where we were summoned (I suppose

in honour of Queen Victoria) to join him.  A strong breathless heat

reigned under the iron roof, and the air was heavy with the scent

of wreaths.  The singers, with fine mats about their loins, cocoa-

nut feathers set in rings upon their fingers, and their heads

crowned with yellow leaves, sat on the floor by companies.  A

varying number of soloists stood up for different songs; and these

bore the chief part in the music.  But the full force of the

companies, even when not singing, contributed continuously to the

effect, and marked the ictus of the measure, mimicking, grimacing,

casting up their heads and eyes, fluttering the feathers on their

fingers, clapping hands, or beating (loud as a kettledrum) on the

left breast; the time was exquisite, the music barbarous, but full

of conscious art.  I noted some devices constantly employed.  A

sudden change would be introduced (I think of key) with no break of

the measure, but emphasised by a sudden dramatic heightening of the

voice and a swinging, general gesticulation.  The voices of the

soloists would begin far apart in a rude discord, and gradually

draw together to a unison; which, when, they had reached, they were

joined and drowned by the full chorus.  The ordinary, hurried,

barking unmelodious movement of the voices would at times be broken

and glorified by a psalm-like strain of melody, often well

constructed, or seeming so by contrast.  There was much variety of

measure, and towards the end of each piece, when the fun became

fast and furious, a recourse to this figure -

[Musical notation which cannot be produced.  It means two/four time

with quaver, quaver, crotchet repeated for three bars.]

It is difficult to conceive what fire and devilry they get into

these hammering finales; all go together, voices, hands, eyes,

leaves, and fluttering finger-rings; the chorus swings to the eye,

the song throbs on the ear; the faces are convulsed with enthusiasm

and effort.

Presently the troop stood up in a body, the drums forming a half-

circle for the soloists, who were sometimes five or even more in

number.  The songs that followed were highly dramatic; though I had

none to give me any explanation, I would at times make out some

shadowy but decisive outline of a plot; and I was continually

reminded of certain quarrelsome concerted scenes in grand operas at

home; just so the single voices issue from and fall again into the

general volume; just so do the performers separate and crowd

together, brandish the raised hand, and roll the eye to heaven--or

the gallery.  Already this is beyond the Thespian model; the art of

this people is already past the embryo:  song, dance, drums,

quartette and solo--it is the drama full developed although still

in miniature.  Of all so-called dancing in the South Seas, that

which I saw in Butaritari stands easily the first.  The hula, as it

may be viewed by the speedy globe-trotter in Honolulu, is surely

the most dull of man's inventions, and the spectator yawns under

its length as at a college lecture or a parliamentary debate.  But

the Gilbert Island dance leads on the mind; it thrills, rouses,

subjugates; it has the essence of all art, an unexplored imminent

significance.  Where so many are engaged, and where all must make

(at a given moment) the same swift, elaborate, and often arbitrary

movement, the toil of rehearsal is of course extreme.  But they

begin as children.  A child and a man may often be seen together in

a maniap':  the man sings and gesticulates, the child stands before

him with streaming tears and tremulously copies him in act and

sound; it is the Gilbert Island artist learning (as all artists

must) his art in sorrow.