Chapter IX: Part 9

But the crowd increased very much between us and Tofae’s house, and twice I had been obliged to single out some offender and drive him off with a threatened stick, when something dawned upon me; these people were really coming to Tofae: no vain curiosity had led them to surround us and sit about the grave of Tofae’s father, and fill the greensward between it and the posts of his house. Something was about to take place there. Tofae was seriously taking counsel with some others, and suddenly the crowd poured around his house, the privileged ones entering it, and one little bunch of old women slowly, lingeringly stepping in between its posts.

So that I asked, relieved from my own trouble, what was it all about. This was the story: set it to music yourself and Atamo shall write the libretto. Within the fold of the chief has lately been dwelling a maiden thought to be frail, or at least of a stuff not so stern as some others. Perhaps she may have been there in exile for some slight misdemeanour, and her people may have deemed it good for her to live for a time under Tofae. For me she had little charm, if I do not mistake the young lady and confuse her with another young person who has also had refuge there, having bolted from her unpleasant husband and spending some weeks in temporary viduity.

One of our young gallants, and I am both proud and ashamed to acknowledge, one of our own crew, is a great admirer of female beauty, and fixed upon this maiden as one he should like to win, even if he had to persuade her to run away with him, for as far as I know he is married, and had never intended to set up a rival establishment in legal form. Nothing here in Samoa can be hidden for any length of time, so that a more moral place in its way it would be hard to find. To pay court in the evening supposes a certain surrounding of many young people, and often the presence of many older ones, and our young man’s wishes were understood by others than this best girl. So that, most meanly, some of the old women began to prejudice the girl’s mind against this passionate and handsome youth, and instead of opposing her, which might have defeated their object, they began to tell little tales about his past, probably exaggerated, as they went on accumulating. And as he found the girl still resisting he determined upon a straightforward course in his manly bosom, and complained to the chief, asking that these libellers be punished. And the chief listened, as was right, and summoned the old ladies before his tribunal to make good what they said, or forever after hold their peace. And here they were, come to be judged, while friends and witnesses and neighbours circumfused them, anxious about the outcome.

“Well,” I said to Charley, “and what will happen? You have heard it all.”

“They have been telling bad things of him, and Tofae will punish them. He will fine them and fine them high, perhaps as much as ten dollars,” answered righteous Charley, feeling, as we all did, for the virtuous cause. And then I withdrew, not only because I wished to go to Sivá, but I wished also to meditate upon the principles of eternal justice now about to be vindicated by Tofae. When the old women are silenced and put to naught, shall our young man be strengthened in his suit? And will the young lady triumphantly elope with him? All these contingencies of events might appear spoiled if I inquired too far, so that I have left it all alone, and I withdraw. The subject is too pretty as it stands, and, as I said before, only requires to be set to music.

Vaiala, Jan. 27, 1891.

We are nearer to the cannibal here in Samoa than you would believe at first; far away as we are from cannibal or “devil” countries, we have in the hired labourers of the German plantation a wilder set of savages than would seem from their usual behaviour and the steady work urged out of them by their German masters. You must not forget that these little black men, often so gentle and sweetly smiling, whom we see about at work--in that constant exceptions to all around us--are not absolutely converted by being taken from their cannibal native lands to work for the white man in Samoa. The smile of their white teeth, repeated by the ivory bars or rings in their noses, conceals, like the gentleness of children, depths of useless cruelty.

The timidity of behaviour of such as I had seen and described to you, who had escaped from the plantations and were in hiding among distant Samoan villages, protected by the gentler brown race from recapture and return to what after all is slavery, is not a permanent index of character. When they have escaped, and have lived in the bush a life of bare chance, finding scanty food, continually tracked and hunted by their masters, often denounced by the Samoans, who do not trust them, they turn both to ancient, ferocious habits, and to the superstitions and fears which belonged to their life at home.

They are always suspected of cannibalism; and the event which has made us all more or less miserable is considered as quite a possible thing, and likely to occur again. News came to us suddenly, out at Vaiala, that Faatulia, the wife of our friend Seumanu, the chief of Apia, had learned a dreadful thing. Her brother, some weeks ago, had sailed from the little island of Manono, and had neither returned there nor arrived anywhere. His boat was found upturned, and he was missing. The story told to Faatulia came from some of the black labourers, or else from some of those who had escaped out of slavery. Or else it came in the Samoan way, so that, though you know there is a story, it does not require to be fathered by any human tongue. “There are no secrets kept in Samoa,” says Mataafa; “they are always being told.”

This is what she learned: Her brother, in the last storm, had been driven out of his course; his canoe had been overturned, and he had barely saved his life by swimming. On reaching land in great distress, he had found in the bush a hut, occupied by runaway blacks, and had asked for shelter. He had slept, but fever had taken hold of him, and for some while he was unconscious. Thereupon came up the dread temptation to the black man. Here was that menace of superstitious harm coming from the presence of a sick man, who might die and injure them by bringing the spirit which kills, into their forlorn abode.

Here was food too, if they killed him. Perhaps--I say it with doubt, because I have but confused notions of the exact superstitions belonging to any one of the races I have not met--but the man killed and _eaten_ is not so dangerous in the other world as the man who dies a natural death.

At any rate, the story went on to say that the blacks killed Faatulia’s brother in his sleep, ate him, buried the bones, and knew nothing when inquiries were made. But somehow or other, suspicion excited by something done or said made the friends of the missing man dig and find remains which, at the time we heard the story, were being brought down to Faatulia, for identification.

And now how shall they know? The German firm will send their physician, and the American ship will send hers, and the question will assume a political meaning.

It was a sad thing to make our last call on Faatulia, and know that while she talked to us she was trying to forget the ugly thing lying behind the hangings of the hut.

Seumanu was undisturbed as usual, and bade us good-bye with all the coolness of a _tulafale_.

That same afternoon, January 27th, we looked for the last time upon the royal face of our neighbour Mataafa, while he told us again to tell Americans that Samoans owed their lives to the United States.

Then I used up my last daylight in painting a study of Maua, one of the boat’s crew, who endured it in a fidgety way that he took for patience. He was cold, for every hanging mat had to be opened, to give a little light on the dark afternoon, under the big roof of our hut.

And again in the morning I worked upon the sketch until the boatmen came up to tell me that the last moment was come. Maua flushed pink with joy, over his whole naked

body, when I told him that I had done. The children on the village green (_malae_) came to say something and to offer little presents of shells and sea beans.

The steamer was whistling for me outside the reef--Atamo was on board---- But I could not be left behind--too valuable a passenger.

I bequeathed my best cocoanut oil to Siakumo and the other girls, said good-bye to Tofae, our chief, and promised, if I returned, to come back under his wing. Samau, our boatswain, carried me on his back, into the boat, and patted my legs, as a respectful and silent good-bye.

The grey water inside the reef was smooth and quiet. For the last time our Samoan crew pulled close to the shore, to exchange _tofas_ (farewells) with Meli and her girls; and we went on board, where the sheep from Australia were still huddled on the quarter-deck due to Tahiti later. In the afternoon the island, wreathed in clouds, was already melting away behind us.

AT SEA FROM SAMOA TO TAHITI

We have had days of hard winds and grey weather, and all the more do I make pictures within my mind. For the Otaheite to which we are bound has a meaning, a classical record, a story of adventure, and historical importance, fuller than the Typee of Melville, which we may never see. The name recalls so many associations of ideas, so much romance of reading, so much of the history of thought, that I find it difficult to disentangle the varying strands of the threads. There are many boyish recollections behind the charm of Melville’s “Omoo” and of Stoddard’s Idylls, or even the mixed pleasure of Loti’s “Marriage.”

Captain Cook and Bougainville and Wallis first appeared to me with the name of Otaheite or Tahiti; and I remember the far away missionary stories and the pictures of their books--the shores fringed with palm trees, the strange, impossible mountain peaks, the half-classical figures of natives, and the eighteenth-century costumes of the gallant discoverers. I remember gruesome pictures in which figure human sacrifices and deformed idols, and the skirts of the uniform of Captain Cook. What would be the fairy reality of the engravings which delighted my childhood?

Once again all these pictures had come back to me. _Long ago_ there lay, by a Newport wharf, an old hulk, relic of former days. We were told that this had been one of the ships of Captain Cook: the once famous _Endeavour_. Here was the end of its romance; now slowly rotted the keel that had ploughed through new seas and touched the shores of races disconnected from time immemorial. Like the _Argo_, like the little _Pinta_ and _Santa Maria_, it had carried brave hearts ready to open the furthest gates of the world. The wild men of the islands had seen it, a floating island manned by gods, carrying its master to great fame and sudden death.

For he was not allowed by fate to try for further Japan, and begin, with the help of Russia, that career of conquest for England which she now dislikes to share with other nations, even with those to whom she first proposed the enterprise and half the spoils.

On that little ship, enormous to her eyes, had been Oberea, the princess, the Queen of Otaheite, whose name comes up in the stories of Wallis or of Cook, and early in the first missionary voyages.

Oberea was the tall woman of commanding presence, who, undismayed, with the freedom of a person accustomed to rule, visited Wallis on board his ship soon after his first arrival and the attempt at attacking him (July, 1767). She, you may also remember, carried him, a sick man, in her arms, as easily as if he had been a child. I remember her in the engraving, stepping toward Wallis, with a palm branch in her hand; while he stands with gun in hand, at the head of the high grenadier-capped marines.

And do you remember the parting--how the Queen could not speak for tears; how she sank inconsolable in the bow of her canoe, without noticing the presents made her? “Once more,” writes the gallant Captain, “she bade us farewell, with such tenderness of affection and grief as filled both my heart and my eyes.”

Surely this is no ordinary story--this sentimental end of an official record of discovery.

My memory makes the picture for me: the ship moving at last out of the reef, with the freshened wind, and below her level the canoe and the savage queen bent over in grief. Then right on without a break Wallis ends the chapter with these words: “At noon the harbour from which we sailed bore S. E. 1/2 E. distant about twelve miles. It lies in latitude 17° 30´s. longitude 150° W. and I gave it the name of _Port Royal Harbour_.” This foreign name has since yielded to the ancient native one. Besides the charming irrelevancy of these facts with the words describing the sentiment of eternal parting, Wallis’s conclusion gives us the place of Tahiti on the map, and will help you to follow me there.

The name of Wallis, the first discoverer, is so much overshadowed by the personality of Captain Cook, that I think it better to give you again the story that belongs to each.

Let us go back in mind to the date, the second half of the last century, 1767. The recall to _me_ of the ships of Christopher Columbus emphasizes the difference between that moment and the end of the fifteenth century. There were still vast spaces of sea unknown; still the object of commerce, of war and of discovery, was the connection with the “easternmost parts of Asia.” What lay between was only guessed at and often avoided. As when Anson, whom I have just been reading, passed through the southern seas in 1742, anxious for an unbroken passage across the great Pacific, in order to strike a blow at the Spaniard in Asiatic islands, he followed the Spanish charts; and in his own, “showing the track of the Centurion round the World,” there is nothing marked in the enormous blank space below the equinoctial line, from South America to New Guinea, but the fabulous Treasure Islands--the Isles of Solomon, placed very nearly where Tahiti lies.

When Wallis and Bougainville came upon this island they came as Columbus did--as discoverers; but the times had changed; and the meeting with a new race in this island of Tahiti--a fifth race, as it was named in my boyhood’s school-books--affected European minds very differently from the manner of three centuries before, when the Spaniards went for the first time through a like experience.

It is this new introduction of _modern_ and _changed_ Europe to another fresh knowledge of the savage world, that makes the solemnity of the discovery.

There is also something in the sudden coming together of the two new nations, England and France, so different from ancient Spain, upon this littlest of lands most lost in the greatest spaces of the sea, four thousand miles from the nearest mainland.

Hence from little Tahiti, whose double island is not more than a hundred and twenty-five miles about, begins the filling up of the map of discovery in the Pacific.

When Wallis arrived in June, 1767, Tahiti and its neighbouring island were under the rule of a chief, Amo or Aamo, as he is called by Wallis and by Cook. He was their great chief--what we have managed to translate as king. It was a moment of general peace, and the “happy islanders” enjoyed in a “terrestrial paradise” pleasures of social life, of free intercourse, whose description, even at this day, reads with a charm of impossible amenity. The wonderful island, striking in its shape, so beautiful, apparently, that each successive traveller has described it as the most beautiful of places, was prepared to offer to the discoverer expecting harsh and savage sights a race of noble proportion, of great elegance of form, accustomed to most courteous demeanour, and speaking one of the softest languages of man. Even the greatest defects of the Polynesian helped to make the exterior picture of amiability and ease of life still more graceful. If, by the time that I return, you have not read as much about their ancient habits and customs, their festivals, their dances, their human sacrifices, their practice of infanticide, their wild generosity, I shall write you fully about it all, or shall make you read what is necessary. What was visible of the harsher side added to the picture of the interest of mystery and contradiction. The residence of this Chief, Amo, and of his wife, Purea or Oberea, as Cook called her, was at Papara, on the south shore of Tahiti. Both belonged to a family whose ancestors were gods; and they lived a ceremonial life recalling, at this extreme of civilization, the courtesies, the adulation, the flattery, the superstitious veneration of the East. This family and its allies had reigned in these islands and in the others for an indefinite period. The names of their ancestors, the poetry commemorating them were and are still sung, long after the white man had helped to destroy their supremacy. When Wallis arrived at the north of the island, Amo and Oberea were not far from Papara in the south. They heard of the arrival of the floating island, whose masts were trees, whose pumps were rivers, whose inhabitants were gods in strangeness of complexion and of dress.

The same tragedy had happened there which begins the recitals of savage discovery. The islanders had no notion of the resources of the Europeans, nor had the white men a knowledge of Polynesian customs; so that soon came up the usual quarrel and the use of fire-arms taken by the natives for thunder and lightning. Amo received the news, and notwithstanding the exaggerated accounts, determined to see for himself the supposed island and test the power of its inhabitants. His was the attack described by Wallis, in which a large number of natives surrounded the ship, while Amo and Oberea looked on from a little eminence above the bay. To shorten the contest and thereby lessen the mischief Wallis fired on the canoes and the occupants, and finally on the chiefs themselves. Cannon balls fell at their feet, and tore down the surrounding trees. The unequal contest was over, and the inhabitants came with green branches in their hands, even those whose friends had been killed, to make peace with the English, and offer submission. Wallis relates how one woman, who had lost her husband and children in the fight, brought her presents weeping to him, and left him in tears, but without wrath, and gave him her hand at parting.

And you remember how, just as Wallis had left one side of the island, Bougainville, the Frenchman, came up to the other, different in its make, different in the first attitude of the natives; but with the same story of gracious kindness and feminine bounty; so that the Frenchman called it the New Cytherea, and carried home stories of pastoral, idyllic life in a savage Eden, where all was beautiful and untainted by the fierceness and greed imposed upon natural man by artificial civilization. So strong was the impression produced by what he had to say, that the keen and critical analysis of his own mistakes in judgment, which he affixed to his Journal, was, passed over, because, as he complained, people wished to have their minds made up.

And immediately upon his leaving, again to another part of the island came the representatives of another race, another, more solemn and less near to modern civilization--the Spaniards; who in their accustomed way, planted the cross next to the sacred grove, which unknown to them was that of the greedy god Oro, and sailed away, leaving two missionaries, helpless and solitary, to wait for their return.

For this other side of the island was separated from the places of landing known to Wallis, by fierce war for which Oberea had given the signal, by that haughtiest pride which only a woman can show.

The missionaries accomplished nothing; and when a few months afterward the Spaniards called and took them away, their presence had been but a dream--another strange side to the romance of the first discovery.

One year later, 1768, came Captain Cook, whose name has absorbed all others. Twice he visited Tahiti, and helped to fix in European minds the impression of a state _nearer to nature_, which the thought of the day insisted upon.

Nor can one here forget Oberea; and how she seemed to him younger than she had seemed to Wallis, who judged her age by European notions.

And how shall I refer to that “ceremony of nature” to which she invited the captain and his officers, as an exchange for his having let her be present at the service of the Church of England?

The state of nature had just then been the staple reference in the polemic literature of the century about to close. The very refined, dry and philosophic civilization of the few was troubled by the confused sentiments, the dreams, and the obscure desires of the ignorant and suffering many. Their inarticulate voice was suddenly phrased by Rousseau. With that cry came in the literary belief in the natural man, in the possibility of--analysis of the foundations of government and civilization--in the perfectibility of the human race and its persistent goodness, when freed from the weight of society’s blunders and oppressions.

My confused memories of eighteenth century declamation and reasoning bring back to me this one echo. Our little ship is not a library, and I struggle for references. I can only remember fragments of the encyclopædists and of Diderot, and the vague impression that this last romance and analysis of singular writings of Otahite is based upon a direct information outside of that derived from books: that is to say, perhaps from the travellers themselves, or the Tahitian, who, like Cook’s Omai, came to Europe with Bougainville.

Later Byron:

“The happy shores without a law,
Where all partake the earth without dispute,
And bread itself is gathered as a fruit;
Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams:
The goldless age, where gold disturbs no dreams.”

These literary images were used as illustrations of the happiness of man living in, what people still persist in calling, the state of nature. There is no doubt, of course, that at the moment of the discovery our islanders had reached a full extreme of their civilization; that numerous, splendid, and untainted in their physical development, they seemed to live in a facility of existence, in an absence of anxiety emphasized by their love of pleasure and fondness for society--by a simplicity of conscience which found little fault in what we reprobate--in a happiness which is not and could not be our own. The “pursuit of happiness” in which these islanders were engaged, and in which they seemed successful, is the catchword of the eighteenth century.

People were far then from the cruel ideas of Hobbes; and the more amiable views of the nature of man and of his rights echo in the sentimentality of the last century, like the sound of the island surf about Tahiti.

Nor am I allowed to forget the assertion of those “self-evident truths” in which the ancestor of my companion, Atamo, most certainly had a hand. So that the islands to which we are hastening with each beat of the engine, are emblems of our own past in thought, as they have played a part also in the history of which we see the development to-day, the end of the old society, the beginning of the new, the revolutions of Europe and of America, all which lies in my mind obscurely as I recall, every few moments, my vague emotions at the name of _Otaheite_.

I believe too that our feelings are intensified because they are directed toward a far-off island; a word, a thing of all time marked by man as something wherein to place the ideal, the supernatural; the home of the blest, the abode of the dead, the fountain of eternal youth, Circe and Calypso, the haven of man tired of weary sea, the calm smile of the ocean when the winds have ceased. The word sings itself within my mind, and the dreams I have been recalling give me interior light during these gray days of adverse wind, as in Heine’s song of the “Land of Perpetual Youth”:

“Little birdling Colibri,
Lead us thou to Tahiti!”

February 12th.

Six days of grey weather and dark nights, and in the last evening, quite late, the sun setting, lit up for a moment an island, Moorea, which is distant from Tahiti only some dozen miles. It made an enchanted vision of peaks and high mountains, as strange as any which you may have seen in the backgrounds of old Italian paintings, far enough to be vague in the twilight haze and yet distinct in places high up, where the singular shapes were modelled in pink and yellow-green. The level rays of the sun pierced through the forest coverings, and came back to my sight, focused from underlying rocks, in a glistening network of rainbow colours. Then all faded in a cloudy twilight, half lit by the struggling moon, and we saw a vague space of island, like a dream, edged by a white line of reef; this was Tahiti. All night we ran east and west, waiting for the day, which would allow us to pass through the reef that lies in front of the so-called City of Papeete, which is a large village, the “capital” of the island, and the centre of the French possessions in Oceanica.

TAHITI

When we rose in the early morning our ship had already passed the reef, and we were in the harbour of Papeete. There was the usual enchantment of the land, a light blue sky and a light blue sea; an air that felt colder than that of Samoa, whatever the thermometer might say; and when we had landed, a funny little town, stretched along the beach, under many tall and beautiful trees. From under their shade the outside blue was still more wonderful, and at the edge where the blue of sky and sea came together opposite us, the island of Moorea, all mountain, peaked and engrailed like some far distance of Titian’s landscapes, seemed swimming in the blue.

Near the quay neatly edged with stone steps, ships lay only a few rods off in the deep water, so that their yards ran into the boughs of the great trees. Further out, on a French man-of-war, the bugle marked the passing duty of the hour. Everything else was lazy, except the little horses driven by the _kanakas_. Natives moved easily about, no longer with the stride of the Samoans, which throws out the knees and feet, as if it were for the stage. People were lighter built, more _efface_; but there were pretty faces, many evidently those of half-breeds.

White men were there with the same contrasting look of fierceness and inquisitiveness marked in their faces; these now that we see less of them, look beaky and eager in contrast with the brown types that fill the larger part of our sight and acquaintance.

We were kindly received by the persons for whom we had introductions; and set about through various more or less shady streets marked French-wise on the corners: _Rue des Beaux-Arts_, _Rue de la Cathédrale_, etc.; first to a little restaurant, where I heard in an adjacent room, “Buvons, amis, buvons,” and the noise of fencing; then to hire furniture and buy household needs for the housekeeping we proposed to set up that very day, for there are no hotels. The evening was ended at the “Cercle,” where we played dominoes, to remind ourselves that we were in some outlying attachment of provincial France. By the next morning we were settled in a little cottage on the wonderful beach, that is shaded all along by worthy trees; we had engaged a cook, and Awoki was putting all to rights. As we walk back into the town there are French walls and yellow stuccoed houses for government purposes. A few officers in white and soldiers pass along.

A few scattered French ladies pass under the trees; so far as

we can tell (because we have been long away) dressed in some correct French fashion; looking not at all incongruous, because already we feel that this is dreamland--that anybody in any guise is natural here, except a few Europeans, who meet the place halfway, and belong neither to where they came from, nor to the unreality of the place they are in. There is no noise, the street is the beach; the trappings of the artillery horses, and the scabbards of the sabres rattle in a profound silence, so great that I can distinctly count the pulsations of the water running from the fountain near us into the sea. The shapes and finish of the government buildings, their long spaces of enclosure, the moss upon them, remind us of the sleepiest towns of out-of-the-way bits of France.

The natives slip over the dust in bare feet, the waving draperies of the long gowns of the women seeming to add to the stealthy or undulating movement which carries them along. Many draw up under the arm some corner of this long, nightgowny dress that it may not trail, or let their arms swing loosely to the rhythm of their passing by.

Most of the native men wear loose jackets, sometimes shirts above the great loin-cloth which hangs down from the waist, and which is the same as the _lava-lava_ of the Samoans, the _sulu_ of the Fijians, and is here called the _pareu_.

Many of the women have garlands round their necks and

flowers behind their ears. Occasionally we hear sounds of singing that come back to us from some cross-street; and as I have ventured to look, I see in a little enclosure some women seated, and one standing before them, making some gestures, perhaps of a dance; and I grieve to say, looking as if they had begun their latest evening very early in the day. But this I have noticed from sheer inquisitiveness. I feel that in another hour or so I shall not care to look for anything, but shall sit quietly and let everything pass like the turn of a revolving panorama. In this state of mind, which represents the idleness of arrival, we meet at our Consul’s an agreeable young gentleman belonging to a family well known to us by name--the Branders; a family that represents--though mixed with European--the best blood of the islanders. They speak French and English with the various accents and manners that belong to those divisions of European society; they are well-connected over in Scotland. Do you remember the Branders of “Lorna Doone”? At home their ancestry goes back full forty generations. They are young and pleasant, and we forget how old we are in comparison. We call on their mother later, a charming woman, and on an aunt, Mrs. Atwater, who has a similar charm of manner, accent and expression; and on another aunt, the ex-Queen Marau; but she is away with her younger sister Manihinihi.

In the evening, with some remnant of energy, we walk still further than our house upon the beach, passing over the same roads that Stoddard wearily trod in his “South Sea Idyls.” We try to find, by the little river that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the calaboose where Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our search; no one remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of woodland that Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm of light and air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to bring back home in words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if composed for Claude Lorraine. Great trees stand up within a few feet of the tideless sea. Where the shadows run in at times, canoes with outriggers are pulled up. People sit near the water’s edge, on the grass. Outside of all this shade, we see the island of Moorea further out than the far line of the reef, no longer blue, but glowing like a rose in the beginning of the twilight.

At night we hear girls passing before our little garden; we see them swinging together, with arms about the flowers of their necks. They sing--alas! not always soberly, and the wind brings the odour of the gardenias that cover their necks and heads.

In the night the silence becomes still greater around us, though we can hear at a distance the music of the band that plays in the square, which is the last amusement left to this dreary deserted village called a town. In the square, which is surrounded by many trees, through which one passes to hidden official buildings, native musicians play European music, apparently accommodated to their own ideas, but all in excellent time, so that one just realizes that somehow or other these airs must have been certain well-known ones. But nothing matters very much.

A few visitors walk about; native women sit in rows on the ground, apparently to sell flowers, which they have before them. People of distinction make visits to a few carriages drawn up under the trees. Occasionally, in the shadows or before the lights, in an uncertain manner, natives begin to dance to the accompaniment of the band. But it is all listless, apparently, at least to the sight, and just as drowsy as the day.

In the very early morning we drive to the end of the bay at Point Venus, to see the stones placed by Wilkes and subsequent French navigators, in order to test the growth of the coral outside. And we make a call on a retired French naval officer, who has been about here more or less since 1843, the time of Melville. We drive at first through back roads of no special character. We pass through a great avenue of trees over-arching, the pride of the town; we cross a river torrent, and the end of our road brings us along the sea, but far up, so that we look down over spaces of palm and indentations of small bays fringed with foam, all in the shade below us. On the sea outline, always the island of Moorea, and back on Tahiti, the great mountain, the Aorai, the edge apparently of a great central crater; a fantastic serrated peak called the “Diadem,” also an edge of the great chasm; and on either side along slopes that run to the sea, from the central heights, and recall the slopes of Hawaii. But all is green; even the eight thousand feet of the Aorai, which look blue and violet, melt into the green around us, so as to show that the same verdure passes unbroken, wherever there is a foothold, from the sea to the highest tops. This haze of green, so delicate as to be namable only by other colours, gives a look of sweetness to these high spaces, and makes them repeat, in tones of light, against the blue of the sky, chords of colour similar to those of the trees and the grass against the blue and the violet of the sea.

Nearer us the slopes are all broken up into knife edges of green velvet streaked right near us by clay, which in contrast seems almost like vermilion. So far the roads were good, though the slippery clay might be very different when the great rains came down; and as our driver forced his horses at a gallop near the edges of the cliffs hanging over the lovely pictures of the secluded trees and water, we felt that a more sandy, more prosaic road would better suit the South Sea habits of carriage travel.

All the trees were about us that we knew in Samoa; and many more rounded mango trees, with red fruit hanging on long stems, or lying green by the road. All this was to be seen with cool air full of life, and under a sky more like ours than the Samoan, but exquisitely blue and gay.

Little has been done by us, even of going about; Atamo has written many letters; I have tried to sketch a little from our verandah, in front of which, on the shore, grows a twisted _purau_, called _fau_ in Samoa. Through its branches I see the sea and the reef, and the island of Moorea, in every tint of blue that keeps the light, even in the evening or in the afterglow, when the sunset lights up in yellow and purple the sky behind it. And yet there is a reminiscence in my mind of something not foreign to us, even at this moment, when the haze of light seems new, and the pale blue sea is spangled with little silver stars, as far as I can see distinctly.

We have called on the ex-King; and in the evening, at the club, I have seen him--a handsome, elderly man, somewhat broken and far from sober. He was playing with a certain

Keke, a black Senegambian in the French service, a prince of his own negro land, who speaks excellent French, and whom I surprised sitting on the sill of his house one evening (while we were taking a rainy walk). Keke wore in this retirement a pair of marvellous trousers, of a brilliant yellow, with red flamboyant pattern--something too fine for the ordinary out-of-door world. Many of the officials are coloured men from the French colonies, and so is the governor more or less. Of course the idea is infinitely respectable and humanitarian, as so many French things are, but I fear that the Republic is unwise in sending people whom the native here cannot look up to as he does to a white man.

Of course they are all French and have votes, as the natives here can have also; but whether it is for the real good of a population accustomed to dependence I am not so sure. There are many curious anomalies: our American friends of Samoa speak, with our natural way of looking at things correctly, of the preposterous way the French have of backing the Catholic missions and protecting their missionaries, even as we would. But here I find the Catholic mission dependent upon the gifts of the faithful, while the Protestant missions are supported by the French government, as the Protestant clergy would be in France.

The King, upon whom we called and whom we met at the club in affable mood, surrendered his rights to the French, a few years ago, under long pressure and with some advice from the missionaries. In exchange he received an annual income, and retained his honours and certain privileges. This end I suppose to have been inevitable. His mother, the famous Queen whose name was known to all sea-going people in that half of the globe, whose resistance to French pretensions had come, apparently, for a moment, near bringing France and England into a quarrel, had lived for many years under French authority, a government under the name of protectorate. Such, I suppose, must always be the end, as it has been everywhere that the English have been; as it has been in Fiji; as it will be to-morrow, probably, when King George of Tonga dies; as it will be in Hawaii, whenever the whites there determine to use their power. Nor is the line of the Pomaré, any more than that of the Hawaiian rulers, so connected with all antiquity as to be typical of what a Polynesian great chief might be to the people whom he rules. The Pomarés date only from the time of Cook. They were slowly wresting the power from the great family of the Tevas, by war and by that still more powerful means--marriage, which in the South Seas is the only full and legitimate source of authority.

You know from all that I have told you of Samoa that in Polynesia descent is the only real absolute aristocracy; there is no ruling except through blood. Hence the absurdity of the kingships that we have fostered or established, which in our own minds seemed quite legitimate, because they embodied the European ideas which belong to our ancestry. Hence the general discomfort and trouble that we have helped to foster. Hence also--and far worse--the breaking down, in reality, of all the bases upon which these old societies rested, the saving of which in part was the only hope remaining for the gradual education of the brown man for his keeping to ideas of order different from our own, it is true, but still involving the same original foundations. Hence the demoralization, the arbitrary “white laws,” always misunderstood, always bringing on the vices which they were meant to control; hence the end of the “brown” man by himself.

The missionaries’ good-will has never gone so far as to try to understand him as a being with the same rights to methods of thinking as we claim for ourselves. Part of this sad trouble is of course owing to the unfortunate moment which gave birth both to greater missionary enterprise, to a first acquaintance with these races, and to the disruption of authority in the West. Perhaps, indeed, it might then have required more comprehension than could be asked of any but the most exceptional mind to realize that what we call savagery was a mode of civilization. So must have been the European world when the civilization of antiquity broke down, and things of price went into the night of forgetfulness, along with the mistaken beliefs and superstitions that were joined to them. So here, where, as in all civilizations, religious views, manners, customs, superstitions were woven about every bit of life, the exterminating of anything that might seem pagan involved many habits, and some good ones, which necessarily, from their fundamental antiquity, had been protected by religious rites. Hence we brought on idleness and consequent vice; for idleness is as bad for the savage, whom we innocently suppose to be idle, because we do not understand how he busies himself, as it is for the worker in modern civilization. It is not the actual doing that is important, but such occupation as may determine a habit of useful or harmless attention, which prevents the suggestion of untried moral experiments.

Even tattooing was a matter which like any society duty involved attention, considerable self-abnegation and suffering, so as to suit the supposed requirement of civilization, and a recognition of some manly standard, however childish it might seem to us, even if it seems as absurd as some of our society standards might seem to the so-called savage.

These reflections came from reading a law of missionary civilization which I find in the records of the year 1822, in the neighbouring island of Huahine; in which a man or woman who shall mark with tattoo, if not clearly proved, shall be tried and punished, and made, for the man, to work on the road, for the woman, to make mats; in a proportion of which the only exact measure that I find is that for the man it is about the same as that for bigamy; for the woman just the same as adultery.

With the coming of the missionaries, with the coming of the white men traders, coincided the first attempts of the ambition of these Pomaré chieftains. They had already done a good deal for themselves before Cook left for the last time. He had seen Oberea, of whom I first spoke, a great person. When he left, her line of family was already on the decline; war and massacre had weakened it. Pomaré--the Pomaré of that day--with the support of the guns of the white men, established his final superiority, and becoming the great chief was solemnly crowned and oiled by the missionaries, like a new king of Scripture. And this man is the last of the line. His first great ancestor, Otu, just appears with the first discoverers’ records of the details of the ceremonials and etiquette belonging to high chieftainship, which are recorded in the first missionary accounts.

You may remember the picture painted by Robert Smirke, Royal Academician, where the high-priest of Tahiti cedes the district in which we now are to Captain Wilson of the missionary ship the _Duff_, for the missionaries. In the centre, with a background of palms and peaks, two young people--Pomaré, the son of Otu, and his queen--are represented on men’s shoulders. That was the old fashion of Tahiti, the great chief not being allowed to touch the land with his feet, lest it become his by touch.

And therein also is shown the peculiar political arrangement by which the young chief took his father’s place when a child, and ruled, in appearance at least; for there in the picture alongside of the two young sovereigns, called kings by us, stand father and mother uncovered to the waist, out of respect to their child’s higher position. Otu and Iddeah, the dear lady whose notions about infanticide troubled the good missionaries to such an extent, but whose courtesy was willing to go so far as to promise that she “never would do it again,” when once she had done as she pleased. As I understand it, the Pomarés, then, pass away with the present King, but the great line whose place they took--the Tevas or their representatives--remain. In that line continues a descent from that Queen Oberea, whose figure, in another picture that I have referred to and which I beg you will look up in the volume containing Wallis’s discovery, is so charmingly made a type for an imaginary kingdom, like those of the operas and the tapestries of the eighteenth century, in which nothing is untouched by fancy but the muskets and grenadier caps and uniforms of Wallis and his men.

I have almost been tempted, as you see, to begin a sort of explanation of the history of the island; but I think that I can manage later to give you certain stories which will have the advantage of a more personal knowledge of acquaintance with what might be called the text, than these vague reminiscences of the books that I have read and which are nearer to you than they are to me. Meanwhile, let me tell you that last evening, at the club, His Majesty, who was in extreme good humour, singled us out, told us how he liked us, that he liked Americans, who themselves liked Tahitians, and that the French, who stood all about him, were all d--d--d----

This he said in English, in a proper reminiscence of nautical terms of reproach, and added blandly, “But I don’t understand English.”

He has a fine, aristocratic head, and must have been a very handsome man. He has for an adopted son one of the young gentlemen of the Branders, who will succeed to an empty honour; though there might perhaps yet be a part to fill, for the family that represents all that there has been far back and recently.

Next week we shall go into the country, further along the coast, and make a visit to the old lady who is the head of the house, grandmother of these young men, and who is the chiefess representing that great line of the Teva, alongside of which the Pomaré--the kings through the foreigner--are new people. Then I may write lengthily, or at least with some detail, about matters that I only see confusedly, but which must be curiously full of ancient, archaic history, however lost or eclipsed to-day.

I notice in my habits, now forming, as I write out my journal for you, a tendency to dream away into a manner of philosophizing which evidently has for its first beginning the appreciation of the remote forms of these savage civilizations; so that as I grow to understand them better, it is necessary for my individual happiness of thought to be able to consider the earlier ways of man as not unconnected with the present, and even to be willing to consider all foundations of society as passing methods suitable to the moment, and perhaps in the great future to vary as much from the present as the past is strangely different. The good missionary, who simply looked upon a good deal of this past as strangely resembling the antiquities of the Bible, consoled himself, and persuaded many of his brown brethren in the belief that they, at last, were the famous lost tribes, who still kept, in many ways and details, that very peculiar manner of life which the Bible sets out in many details.

One evening in Samoa, the great Baker, the former missionary and ruler of Tonga, finding me interested and credulous in regard to many superstitions which he described, and many facts quite as extraordinary that he vouched for, unfolded to me, as a regard of confidence, his firm belief that in these islands of the Pacific, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Zebulon, Issachar, Dan, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh and Benjamin had found a home. And if a man so worldly wise, such a producer of money, such a controller of weaker minds, dwelt in this view with satisfaction, as a relief from the sordid necessities of power, I think that a mere dreamer like myself can be excused for turning to more scientific and accurate arrangements of men’s history.

These words come to me more distinctly suggested by the place in which I am, not because I am thinking of the ancient ways that I touch, but because I remember how Melville passed from those records of exterior life and scenery to a dwelling within his mind--a following out of metaphysical ideas, and a scheming of possible evolution in the future of man.

Papara, April 7th.

This is a land where to live would have made you happy. Outdoors and in the water, and in no compulsory dress, would have been your usual way of passing a great part of the time. I thought of you while I looked this morning at the children playing in the water of the little river, or in the surf that rolls into it or along the shore. The girls, little wee things, swam in the stream near its mouth, where it is safe, and plunged in and out, and swam under water, their feet and backs showing within the light and dark of the currents; for the river has been very full, and the surf and tide have been heavy, so that the children take their turn with the current. The boys were out in the surf, on the border of which occasionally the girls played, edging sideways to it, and running back with swinging arms. The boys and one of the men plunged out with surf boards, ducking under or riding over the waves that did not suit them; then turning just before the wave that suited, they were carried along the shore leaning on their boards. The currents of the sea carried them past us looking on. Of course they knew all about them, and rough as the surf was, one of them had got past one of the lines of the breakers and tried fishing in some bottom both higher and less vexed. It was a pretty sight, the brown limbs and bodies all red in the sun and wet, coming out of the blue and white water like red flowers. The girls were yellower and more golden than the boys--less tanned I suppose.

They have been running about with less clothing, perhaps because the family is away. They left yesterday, and the daily life is the same. That is to say that only Tati and his family, including one of the boys whose holiday is prolonged, are here with us. The old lady (Hinaarii) the Queen (Marau), Miss Piri (pronounced Pri, short for Piritani, Britain), Miss Manihinihi, and the two young men all went off together; the ladies to spend some time at their house in Faaa, the most rustic, I believe, of their residences.