"We were divided into three distinct castes," said Tetuanui. "The Arii, or princes; Raatira, or small chiefs and simple landed proprietors; and the Manahune, or proletariat. Alliances between Arii and Raatira made an intermediate class—Eietoai. There was also a caste of priests subject to the chief, their power all derived from him, but yet tending to become hereditary by the priests instructing their sons in the ceremonies and by taking care of the temple."

"That's the way the Aaron family got control of the Jewish priesthood," I interpolated. "They gave the people what they wanted, first a golden calf god, and then an ark, and they had charge of both."

The chief frowned. He was a confirmed Bible reader, and the Old Testament was so much like the Tahitian legends that he believed every word of it.

"The Arii," he said, "were sacred and had miraculous strength and powers. The food they touched was for others poison. There was a head in each Arii family to whom the others were subject; he was often an infant, and almost always a young man, for the eldest son of the chief was chief and the father only regent. This custom continued until comparatively recently in most families besides those of the Arii. The Arii were the descendants of the last conquerors of these islands. But their advent must have been ancient, for their power was uncontested, and their rights were so many, their duties so few, and the devotion of the people to them was so great, that only centuries could have established them so firmly. Probably they came after the Raatira. The Raatira were separated by too great a barrier to have assisted in the conquest. No Raatira could become an Arii; no Arii a Raatira. The latter were closer to the commoners, and paid the same respect to the Arii as did the Manahune.

"If an Arii woman wedded a Raatira man, the marriage was said to be with a taata ino, ino meaning literally bad, and taata man. This term applied to all not Arii, and indicated the contempt of the Arii for all below them. The Arii had many words solely for their own use, and tapu, or prohibited, to all others; they had a hundred privileges. The Raatira were probably the power broken by the Arii. The Raatira had conquered the Manahune, and were themselves bested by the Arii, the newest come."

The chief sighed. He was like an old Irish storyteller recounting the departed glories of Erin.

I read to him in French Bovis' opinions that the Raatira, defeated, retained part of their lands, served the new masters, and kept in subjection the people they had themselves beaten. They attached themselves to the Arii of their district, fought for them in their quarrels or wars, and were consulted in assemblies, and allowed to speak to the crowd. I recalled that this was a privilege dearly prized by all Polynesians, the lack of reading and writing having, as in Greece, developed oratory and orators to a remarkable excellence. I was in Hawaii when the offices of the first legislature under the American flag were campaigned for, after years of repression by the sugar planters' oligarchy, and I had heard the natives speak a score of times, and always with delight and wonder. They valued free speech.

"The Arii were shrewd," said Chief Tetuanui, "and early invented a plan for keeping the Raatira in subjection. If two Raatira disputed possession of land, the one who believed himself defrauded could yield to the king or a member of the royal family the land, to which he usually had no right at all. The Arii thus got possession of more and more land from time to time, and the Raatira were loath to contend among themselves.

"The Manahune owned nothing by law, but they lived on the lands of Arii and Raatira, and were seldom evicted. They had the fruits of their labor with a tithe or so for their masters; they left to their children their accumulations, tentative, but actual, and their service was pleasant; more in the nature of gifts than rent. The Manahune could not rise above his caste except by the rare nomination of the king, but they could become Teuteu Arii, or servants of an Arii, and might thus acquire immense importance.

"Like the eunuchs at courts or the mistresses of the noble and rich," I remarked.

The chief shrugged his shoulders.

"The Manahune might become a priest or even join the society of the Arioi," he rejoined. "The government was simple. The will of the prince was supreme, but by custom things ran smoothly, and the prince, or Arii, had seldom to urge his power. There were, of course, instances of extortion, of bursts of anger, of feuds, of jealousies; but most of the time the Raatira saw that the Arii were well served, and were their intermediates with the commoners. The regular obligations of the inferior classes were to meet at certain times to hand to the chiefs presents, food, clothing or useful instruments, and they sought to exceed one another in generosity. They met to build houses, to repair them, or to construct the rock foundations of houses, according to the importance of the chief, or Arii. They built the canoes, made the nets, and did the fishing. The sea was divided into properties, as was the land. The Arii had the reefs where the fish most abounded.

"War was declared with religious ceremonies. Sacrifices were the basis of these ceremonies, and a human victim the most efficacious. The augurs examined the entrails, the auspices, much as did the pagans of old. Certain priests had certain duties. The Tahua Oripo, night runners, reported the movements of the enemy. They were professional war spies, and they acquired a marvelous ability. Sometimes they were able to lead their party so as to surprise the enemy and slaughter them, but usually there were preliminaries to war which warned the other side. A herald was sent in the costume of a great warrior. He was of high birth or famous for his fighting. He delivered himself of his mission ceremoniously, and was never attacked. Every locality had its war-chants, its songs of defiance. Today only a few fragments survive. Wars were waged mostly on account of the ambitions of princes, as to-day in Europe and Asia. But the effort of Christianity to oust paganism in Tahiti brought about many sanguinary conflicts, and plainly God was with the missionaries, who caused the battles. In 1815 the Battle of Feipi gave Tahiti to Pomare the Great, and to the Protestant ministers, who were his backers. Over three hundred were killed. A woman, the queen of the island of Huahine, commanded in the absence of Pomare.

"Sometimes after a battle the vanquished sent heralds to signify their yielding and to know the wish of the victor; they disbanded their troops, left their arms on the field, and the war was over. Usually the defeated warriors were allowed to return home without more ado after their confession of failure, but when the rage was great, the victors, with furious cries, gave the signal of carnage, and slew all they met. If the prince beaten escaped the first consequences of the rout, he was safe and lost only a portion of his territory, and in some wars only his prestige. He remained respected, and his privileges were about the same as before. The Arii were all of the same tribe, all related, and though they ruled different districts and valleys, and fought one another, they would not degrade one of their own family and rank. Thus power remained in the same families, princes, chiefs, and priests, and only the Raatira and the Manahune, the bourgeoisie and the commoners, really suffered.

"We copied you in Europe," I interposed. "There the kings, kaisers, and czars took care not to lower the dignity of monarchy, and are virtually all related. None of them ever deposed another of long enthroning, and none of them has been killed in a battle in centuries."

"Aue!" exclaimed the chief. "Ioba said, 'Wisdom is no longer with the old.'"

"Job talked like a revolutionist," I said. "That would be treason among the diplomats and lawyers of Europe and America. How did women get along in your father's day?"

Tetuanui got up to stretch his huge body. He had been squatting on his haunches for an hour.

"Let Haamoura, my wife, say as to them," he returned laughingly. "She knows all the old ways. I must see if the nets are to be stretched to-day."

Mme. Tetuanui and I had a lengthy confabulation. No Tahitian was better informed than she upon the former status of her sex in Tahiti, and from her I gained a lively summary.

Woman was inferior among the old Tahitians. Man had here as everywhere so ordained, and religion had fixed her position by taboos, as among the Hebrews. She was often merely a servant, yet she maintained a unique sex freedom. Her body was her own, and not her husband's as in the English common law. She prepared the man's food and never sat at meals with him. If she ate at the same time, which was seldom, she sat at a distance, but near enough to hear his commands. It is so to-day when Tahitian men gather for feasting without foreigners, as in the Philippines, Japan, and China, and in many European countries. The Hausfrau of the small merchant, laborer, or farmer is a drudge. In Japan the woman remains subject to the hourly whims and wants of her husband, and to his frequent infidelity, though she is true to him.

The Tahiti wife had the care of the canoe, the paddles, and all the fishing and hunting things, and she accompanied her husband often in these pursuits. The husband had to make the fire, prepare the oven, kill the pig or dog or fowl, and do the outside chores; but she had a lesser position than he at all public observances. She could not become a priest or enter the temple, but must remain always at a distance from the marae. Yet she could be a queen or a chiefess, and as such was as powerful as a man, making war in person, and often leading her troops valiantly. The Tahitian women were nearly as strong as the men and mentally their full equal. They wound their husbands around their fingers or treated them cruelly in many instances, astonishing the whites by their independence. Only religion, the taboos, held them in any restraint.

If a queen bore a child by an unknown father, the child was as royal as if the descendant of a long line of kings; but if the father was notoriously a commoner, the child remained a prince, though not so high of rank as if his father had been an Arii. If a king had children by a woman beneath his rank, they had no rights from their father, but held a mixed position proportioned to the power of the father. He established their rank by his personal prestige, as the kings of Europe forced their bastards on the courts. Sixty years ago Tamatoa, King of Raiatea of the Society Islands, himself the highest born of all the chiefs of the archipelago, was forced to adopt a child of King Pomare of Tahiti to succeed him because his own children were by a woman of the people.

The woman thus had an advantage over the man in being able to transmit her rank to her children, a survival of the matriarchate custom once ruling the world. Polygamy was rarely indulged, though not forbidden. A chief here and there might have two or three wives. Women were allowed only one husband, but often avowed lovers were tolerated, if not feared, by the husband. Mr. Banks, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of England, was horrified after he had made love to Queen Oberea of Papara in the absence of her husband to find her attendant was a cavaliere servente. His Anglican morals were shocked. He had thought himself the only male sinner by her complacence.

Before Christianity was forced on them, the Tahitians married in the same rank, and with considerable right to choice. The tie might be dissolved by the same authority binding it, the chief or head of the clan. Inequality of rank, or near consanguinity, were the only obstacles to marriage. Rank might be overcome, but never the other. It was as in China, where Confucius himself laid down the law: "A man in taking a wife does not choose one of the same surname as himself." And in one of the Chinese commentaries the following reason is given for this law: "When husband and wife are of the same surname, their children do not do well and multiply." The prohibited degrees were more distant than among us. It was a horror of incest that had led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children for adoption. Only this explanation could reconcile it with the almost superstitious love the Polynesian father and mother have for children. Their feeling surpasses the parental affection prevailing in the remainder of the world, yet adoption is a stronger bond than blood. No child was raised by its own genitors. The Tetuanuis had brought up twenty-five, all freely given them at birth or after weaning. The taboo was strict.

Illegitimate children were as welcome as others. The husband might have been so jealous as to meditate killing his wife; but when her child was born, although he knew it to be a bastard, he gave it the same love and care as his own. There were exceptions, but one might cite on the opposite side innumerable cases where, despite the most open adultery, the husband has taken his wife's offspring for his own. It was well that this was so, for adultery was so habitual that were bastards not made welcome, there would have been much suffering by children, innocent themselves. Here, as in civilization, men love their bastards often more than their legitimate sons and daughters.

This prohibition against keeping one's own must have arisen when there were very few inhabitants in Tahiti, for it is the outcome of a natural guarding against sexual relationship in tribes or communities where all are thrown together intimately, and stringent opposition to such practices needed to prevent promiscuity. One must look, as in the case of taboos, deeper than the surface for the beginning of this custom of trading babies, for that is what it often amounted to—friends exchanging offspring as they might canoes.

It is said that the powerful sentiment among historical nations opposing marriage between brother and sister and other close kindred originated in the desire to make such connections odious, to preserve virtue and decency among those in hourly intimacy. Monarchs and nations long refused to bend to it. The Ptolemies and Pharaohs married incestuously; Cleopatra, her brother. The Ptolemies married their daughters, as did Artaxerxes, who wedded Atossa. The Ballinese married twins of different sex. Abraham married his half-sister by the same father. Moses's father married his aunt. Jacob took to wife two sisters, his own cousins. In Great Russia until this century a father married his son to a young woman, and then claimed her as his concubine. When a son grew up, he followed his father's example, though his wife was old and with many children. The Tamils of southeast India, the Malaialais of the Kollimallais hills, have the same custom. Inbreeding maintains a fineness of breed, but at the cost of its vigor. That inbreeding is harmful is fairly certain. Examples to the contrary are numerous in human and animal life. More than nine hundred residents of Norfolk Island are descendants of the mutineers of the British ship Bounty. They were begat by eight of the mutineers, and intermarried for a century. They show no deterioration from this cause.

Hardly any crime is more loathed than incest, but the abomination grew slowly as man progressed. Such ties have been abhorrent for long in most countries. A belief that incestuous children were weak mentally or physically came much later in the ages. The Polynesians must have remarked that inbreeding accentuated the faults in a strain, making for an accumulation of them. This would be a very far advance in human observation; but the Polynesian, by experience, or knowledge brought from his old Asiatic home, must have held such a theory, and sought in the system of adoption, and in not bringing up consanguineous children together, to ward off such misfortune. This at least is a plausible reason for such an unnatural practice among a people so unquestionably child-lovers.

The Marquesans had no totemism to save them. There were no exogamous taboos. The tribe or clan was the chief unit, not the family. The phratry tie was stronger than that of the father and mother. In the totem scheme of other islands and continental groups all the women of his mother's totem were taboo to a man, though their relationship might be remote. Yet as husband and wife had different totems, and children took their mothers' totems, a man might in rare instances, even with this barrier, wed his own daughter. This has happened in Buka and in North Bougainville.

The plan of adoption in Polynesia is matched to a degree by the fosterage common in Ireland in early days. There children were sent to be reared in the families of fellow-clansmen of wealth. At a year they left their own thresholds, and their fosterage ended only at marriage. Every fostered person was under obligation to provide for the old age of his foster-parents, and the affection arising from this relationship was usually greater and regarded more sacred than that of blood relationship. This is true to-day of the Tahitians.

"But children nowadays are often brought up by their own parents," said Mme. Tetuanui, rising to prepare the dejeuner, and I for a swim in the lagoon, "and if adopted, they go from one home to the other as they will. Parents are not as willing as before to let go their children; for whereas my grandmother had fifteen, I have none, and few of us have many. We are made sterile by your civilization. Tetuanui and I were happy and able to persuade the mothers of twenty-five to give their infants to us because we were childless and were chiefs and well-to-do. Our race is passing so fast through the miseries the white has brought us that little ones are as precious as life itself."



Chapter XVIII

The reef and the lagoon—Wonders of marine life—Fishing with spears and nets—Sponges and hermit crabs—Fish of many colors—Ancient canoes of Tahiti—A visit to Vaihiria and legends told there.

About a mile from the beach was the reef, on which the breakers beat clamorously or almost inaudibly, depending on the wind and the faraway surge of the seas. The Passe of Rautirare afforded entrance for small vessels. It was an opening in the wall about the island caused by the Vairahaha, the stream which emptied into the lagoon at our door, and the fresh waters of which had ages ago prevented the coral zooephytes from building a structure there, as at Papeete and all other passages. Fresh water did not agree with these miraculous architects whose material was their own skeletons.

I went out toward the reef many mornings in a little canoe that Tiura, the eldest son of the chief, loaned me. I carried from the house a paddle and three harpoons of different sizes. The canoe had an outrigger and was very small, so that it moved fast through the usually still lagoon, propelled by the broad-bladed paddle. In the bottom of it might be an inch of water, for occasionally I shipped a tiny wave, but wetness was no bother in this delicious climate; a pareu was easily removed if vexatious and a cocoanut-shell was an ample bale.

Low tide was at sunrise, and warmed with my fruit and coffee, and the happy ia ora na, Maru! of the family, I paddled to the reef with never-failing expectation of new wonders. The marine life of the Tahiti reef is richer than anywhere in these seas, as the soil of the island is more bountiful.

At that state of the tide the surf barely broke upon the reef, and, almost uncovered, its treasures were exposed for a little while as if especially for me. The reef itself was a marvel of contrivance by the blind animals which had died to raise it. If I had been brought to it hooded, and known nothing of such phenomena, I would have sworn it was an old concrete levee. The top was about fifty feet wide, as level as a floor, pitted with innumerable holes, the hiding-places of millions of living forms which fed on one another, and were continually replenished by the rolling billows. The wall of the reef opposed to the sea was a rough slope from the summit to the bottom, buttressed against the attacks of storms, and defended by chevaux-de-frise such as the Americans sank in the Hudson River in 1777. I ventured cautiously over the edge. A student of ancient tactics would have found there all the old defenses in coral—caltrops, and abatis, molded in dark-gray coral, battered and shot-marked. It was a dream of a sunken city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of the hoary Archimedes upon it before the inundation, directing the destruction, by his burning-glass, of the enemy's ships. The side of the reef toward the land was as sheer as an engineer could make it with a plumb-line. The coral animals had as accurate a measure of the vertical as of defense against the ocean.

Over this levee rolled or slid a dozen kinds of shellfish spying out refuges against the breakers and their brother enemies in the troughs and holes of the coral floor. With my small spears I pried out dozens of them, Mao, starfish, clams, oysters, furbelowed clams, sea-urchins, and sponges. The mao is the turbo, the queer gastropod sold in the market in Papeete. He lives in a beautiful spiral shell, and has attached to him a round piece of polished shell, blue, green, brown, or yellow, which he puts aside when he wishes to feed on the morsels passing his door, and pulls shut when he wants privacy. He fits himself tightly into a hollow in the reef and dozes away the hours behind his shield, but ready to open it instantly at the perception of his favorite food. The mao was wedged in the recess so cleverly that it was difficult to extract him by my hand alone. His portal I kept after eating him raw or cooked, to have set in silver as an exquisite souvenir of my visit. These jewels studded the drinking cups from which the Vikings drank "Skoal to the Northland!"

The starfish were magnificent, of many colors, and one with fifteen arms covered with sharp, gray spines, and underneath pale yellow, fleshy feelers with suckers like a sea-anemone. These were as pliant as rubber in the water, but, when long out, as hard as stone. The sea-urchins were of many kinds, some with large spikes, as firm as rock, and others almost as brittle as glass, their needles, half a dozen inches long and sharp, dangerous to step on even with my rubber-soled, canvas shoes. All hues were these urchins, blood-red and heavenly blue, almost black, and as white as snow, the last with a double-star etched upon his shell. Others were round like blow-fish, with their spickles at every angle, menacing in look.

The clams and oysters were small, except the furbelowed clam, whose shell is fluted, and who grows to an immense size in the atolls of the Paumotus. I always ate my fill of these delicacies raw as I walked along the reef, smashing the shells to get at the inmates.

When the tide was approaching high or when it began to ebb I had immortal experiences upon the reef. I went with Tiura or with the chief and a party, and found the waves dashing and foaming upon the natural mole, sweeping over it with the noise of thunder, crashing upon the sloping front, and riding their white steeds over the solid flagging to the lower lagoon. In this smother of water we stood knee-deep, receiving its buffets upon our waists and the spray upon our faces, and watched for the fish that were carried upon its crests. With spears couched, we waited the flying chance to arrest them upon the points, a hazardous game, for often they were powerful creatures, and were hurled against us with threatening impact.

But inspiring as was this sport at sunset or by moonlight, it was even more exciting when we trod the reef with torches of dried reeds or leaves or candlenuts threaded upon the spines of cocoanut-leaves, and lanced the fish that were drawn by the lure of the lights, or which we saw by their glare passing over the reef. The gleam of the torches, the blackness all about, the masterful figures of the Tahitians, the cries of warning, the laughter, the shouts of triumph, and the melancholy himenes, the softness and warmth of the water, the uncanny feel of living things about one's feet and body, the imaginative shudder of fear at shark or octopus or other terrible brute of the sea, the singing journey home in the canoes, and the joyous landing and counting of the catch—all these were things never to be forgotten, pictures to be unveiled in drabber scenes or on white nights of sleeplessness.

The sponges were oddities hard to recognize as the tender toilet article. Some were soft and some were full of grit. The grit was their skeletons, for every sponge has a skeleton except three or four very low specimens, and some without personal skeletons import them by attraction and make up a frame from foreign bodies. I examined and admired them, reasoning that I myself, in the debut of living creatures, was close in appearance to one; but my basic interest in them was to sit on them.

Many times I went only to where the coral began, half-way to the reef. This was away from the path of the Vairahaha River, and where the coral souls had manifestly indulged a thousand fancies in contour and color. After the million years of their labor in throwing up the bastion of the reef, with all its architectural niceties, they had found in the repose behind it opportunities for the indulgence of their artistry. They were the sculptors, painters, and gardeners of the lagoon.

I brought with me a lunette, the diver's aid, a four-sided wooden frame fifteen inches each way, with a bottom of glass and no top. I stuck my head in the box and looked through the glass, which I thrust below the surface, thus evading the opaqueness or distortion caused by the ripples. One did not need this invention ordinarily, for the water was as clear as air when undisturbed, and the garden of the sea gods was a brilliant and moving spectacle below my drifting canoe. One must be a child again to see all of it; the magic shapes, the haunting tints, the fairy forms. The gardener who had directed the growth of the aquarium believed in kelpies, undines, and mermaids, and had made for them the superbest playground conceivable even by sprites.

There were trees, bushes, and plants of yellow and white coral, of scarlet corallins, dahlias and roses, cabbages and cauliflowers simulated perfectly, lilies and heaps of precious stones. On flat tables were starfish lazying at full width, strewn shells, and hermit-crabs entering and leaving their captured homes. Mauve and primrose, pink and blue, green and brown, the coral plants nodded in the glittering light that filtered through the translucent brine. They were alive, all these things, as were the sponges, with stomachs and reactions, and impulses to perpetuate their species and to be beautiful. They had no relation to me except as I had to nature, but they were my beginnings, my simple ancestors who had stayed simple and unminded, and I was to count those hours happy when I communed with them.

Taken from their element they died, but left their mold, to harden in the air they could not breathe, and to amaze the less fortunate people who could not see them in their own estate. The seaweeds grew among them, green or brown, more primordial than the corals, with less of organic life, vegetables and not animals, but eager, too, for expression in their motions, their increase in size, and their continuance through posterity. All these were the display of the kindness of the same spirit who rode the thunder, who permitted a million babes to starve, who stirred in men the madness to slay a myriad of their brothers, and who fixed the countless stars in the firmament to guide them in the darkness.

The hermit-crabs drew my minute attention, and I anchored my canoe and with the lunette watched them by the hour. They were as provident and as handy—with claws—as the bee that stores honey. The hermit inhabits the vacant shells of other mollusks, entering one soon after birth, sometimes finding them untenanted, and sometimes killing the rightful occupant, and changing his house as he grows. I had been surprised to see small and large shells moving fast over the reef, and on the beach at the water's-edge; shells as big as my thumbnail and nearly as big as my head. I seized one, and behold! the inmate was walking on ten legs with the shell on his back, like a man carrying a dog-house. I attempted to pull him out of his lodging, and he was so firmly fastened to the interior by hooks on his belly that he held on until he was torn asunder. His abdomen is soft and pulpy and without protecting plates, as have other crabs, and he survived only by his childhood custom of stealing a univalve abode, though he murdered the honest tenant. In one I saw the large pincher of the crab so drawn back as to form a door to the shell as perfect as the original. When he felt growing pains the hermit-crab unhooked himself from his ceiling and migrated in search of a more commodious dwelling.

Interesting as were these habits of the cenobite crustacean, his keeping a policeman or two on guard on his roof, and moving them to his successive domiciles, was more so. These policemen are anemones, and I saw hermit crab-shells with three or four on them, and one even in the mouth of the shell. When the anchorite was ready for a new shell, he left his old one and examined the new ones acutely. Finding one to suit his expected growth, he entered it belly first, and transferred the anemone, by clawing and pulling loose its hold, to the outside of his chosen shell. How skilfully this was done may be judged by the fact that I could not get one free without tearing the cup-like base which fastened it. The anemone assisted in the operation by keeping its tentacles expanded, whereas it withdrew them if any foreign object came near. The stinging cells of the anemone prevent fishes from attacking the hermit, and that is the reason of his care for the parasite. It is the commensalism of the struggle for existence, learned not by the individual crab, but by his race. Some crabs wield an anemone firmly grasped in each claw, the stinging nematocysts of the parasite warding off the devilish octopus, and the anemone having a share of the crab's meals and the pleasure of vicarious transportation. The anemone at the mouth of the shell keeps guard at the weakest spot of the hermit's armor.

These sea-anemones themselves are mysterious evidences of the gradual advance of organisms from the slime to the poem. They are animals, and attach themselves by a muscular base to the rocks or shells, or are as free-swimming as perch. I saw them two feet in diameter, seeming all vegetable, some like chrysanthemums and some resembling embroidered pin-cushions. They were of many colors, and are of the coral family.

In this wonderful sea garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins, turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many so curiously marked, fashioned, and equipped with eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic shellfish, yellow, striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold, with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet, with cobalt polka-dots; silver, with a rosy flush; glossy green, dazzling crimson, black velvet, solid red.

They darted and flashed in and out of the caves in the coral, caressed the sea-anemones, idled about the shells, avoided by dexterous twistings and turnings a thousand collisions, and continued ever the primary endeavor, the search for those particular bits of food their appetites craved.

The effect upon me of all this splendor and grace of water life, as I bent over the surface of the lagoon or walked with lunette among the beds of coral, was, after the oft-repeated periods of bewilderment at the gorgeousness and whimsicality of the universe, a deep rejoicing for its prodigality of design and purpose, and a merry sorrow for those who would inflict dogma and orthodoxy on a practical and heterodox world. I leaned on the side of the canoe or on my spears and laughed at the fools of cities, and at myself, who had been a fool among them for most of my life. Just how this train of reasoning ran I cannot say, but it moved inexorably at the contemplation of the sublime radiancy of the vivarium of the Mataiea lagoon. It always appeared a symbol of the cosmic energy which poured the bounty of rain upon the sea as upon the thirsty earth, and which is beyond good and evil as we reckon them.

When I became myself the hunter for fish, and stood upon the hummocks of coral in water up to my waist or neck, lunette in one hand and spears in another, I saw a different aspect of the garden. I, naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish, my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I made on the rainbow-fish, for they fled within the caves, and only by peeping in through the glass could I see them to drive the spear into them. These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, tough wood, two of them with single iron points two feet long, and a third fitted with ten fine-pointed darning-needles. For small fish I used the latter, and in thrusting into a school was pretty sure to impale one or two.

I tied the rope of pandanus-leaves about my shoulder, and pulled the canoe along with me as a creel, tossing the fish into it as I took them. The first seven were often of different kinds, and I did not despise the yellow and black eels, the lobsters, the mao, or the oysters and clams.

I would rest my spears in the canoe, and meander slowly and meditatively over the coral terraces, repeating verses:

We wandered where the dreamy palm Murmured above the sleepy wave; And through the waters clear and calm Looked down into the coral cave Whose echoes never had been stirred By breath of man or song of bird.

When sky and wind were propitious, and other signs familiar to the Maori indicated that fish were plentiful in the lagoon, the whole village dragged the net. This belonged to the chief, who for his ownership received a percentage of the catch. The net was a hundred and fifty feet long, and was carried out by a dozen canoes or by half a hundred or more men and women, who let it sink to the bottom when up to their necks in water. They then approached the shore with the net in a half-circle, carrying it over the coral heaps, and artfully driving into it all the fish they encountered. In shallow water others waited with little baskets, and, scooping up the fish from the net, emptied them into larger baskets slung from their waists. These fish were not very big, but when larger ones were netted, marksmen with spears waited in the shallows to kill any that leaped from the seine. If the haul was bigger than the needs of the village, the overplus was sent to the market in Papeete, or kept in huge anchored, floating baskets of wicker. These fishermen had been heart and soul in the tahatai oneone, the fish strike, and when we had poor luck, often the best spearsman led the clan in the air taught them by the leader whom they remembered with pride and affection:

Hayrahrooyah! I'm a boom! Hayrahrooyah! Boomagay!

They associated the air and words with the fish, and deep down in their primitive hearts thought it an incantation, such as their tahutahu, the sorcerers of the island, spoke of old.

"Tellee haapao maitai! Kelly was a wise man!" they would lament.

Every one used a fine casting-net when fishing alone along the shores. The net was weighted, and was thrown over schools of small fish so dexterously that hundreds were snared in one fling. The tiniest fish were the size of matches. When cooked with a paste, they were as dainty as whitebait served at Greenwich to a London gourmet, and sung by Shakespere. The nets were plaited of the fibers of the hibiscus, banyan, or pandanus-bark, and when a mighty catch was expected, one of small mesh was laid inside a net of stronger and coarser make, to intercept any large fish that might break through the first line of offense. The weights were stones wrapped in cocoanut-fiber, and the floats were of the buoyant hibiscus-wood. In front of the grounds of the chefferie there hung on the trees a long line of nets drying in the breeze.

Before a feast, if there were not conditions auspicious for a tuu i te upea toro, a dragging of the seine, the village was occupied during the day or the wind was unfavorable, we went out at night after the trades had died down, and in a dozen or twenty canoes we speared them by torchlight. One was at the paddle, and the other at the prow, with uplifted flambeau, searching the waters for the fleeing shadows beneath, and launching the dart at the exact instant of proximity. The congregation of lights, the lapping of the waves, and perhaps the very gathering of humans excited the fish. They leaped and splashed, and unaware of their betrayal of their presence to slayers, informed our eyes and ears of their whereabouts. I could not compete with the Tahitians with the spears, and held a paddle, and that slight occupation gave me time and thought for the scene. The torches threw a lurid glare upon the exaggerated, semi-nude figures of the giant bronzes on the beaks of the pirogues, their arms raised in the poise of the weapon, each outlined against the darkness of the night, glorious avatars yet of their race that had been so mighty and was so soon to pass from the wave.

"Maru," said the chief, when we sat on the mats at late supper after a return from the lagoon, "it is a pity you were not here when the Tahitians had their 'ar'ia and pahi, our large canoes for navigating on the moana faa aro, the landless sea. The 'ar'ia was a double canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed together, outrigger to outrigger. A stout, broad platform was held firm between the canoes with many lashings of sennit, a strong, but yielding, framework on which was a small house of straw where the crew lived. We had no nails, but we used wooden pegs and thousands of cocoanut-fiber ropes, so that everything, aloft and alow, was taut, but giving in the toss of the sea.

"The pahi was eighty feet long, broad in the middle, very carefully and neatly planked over inside, forming a rude bulkhead or inner casing, and had a lofty carved stem rising into one or two posts, terminating in a human form. It was in these vessels that we made the long journeys from island to island, the migrations and the descents upon other Polynesian peoples in war. Both the 'ar'ia and the pahi were propelled by a huge 'i'e, or mat sail of pandanus-leaves shaped like a leg of a fat hog. In modern times these great canoes were built in Bora-Bora, the island the Hawaiians say they came from, and the name of which means 'Land of the Big House Canoes.' With a good wind we could sail a hundred and twenty miles a day in those vessels. We would attend the fa'a-Rua, which we now call the ha'a-Piti, the wind that blows both ways, for we waited for the northeast or southwest trade-winds according to the direction we made for."

The chief lifted his glass of wine, and chanted:

"Aue mouna, mouna o Havaii! Havaii tupu ai te ahi veavea!"

"Hail! mighty mountains, mountains of Havaii! Havaii where the red, flaming fire shoots up high!"

Brooke had been to Lake Vaihiria, and suggested that I go. The excursion had been long in my mind, for every time an eel was caught or served some one exclaimed, "Aue! You should see the eels in Vaihiria. But, be careful!"

The warning referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel's sorcery, as Mother Eve by the serpent, which doubtless was an eel.

As the eel and the water-snakes are the only serpentine animals in Tahiti, his reasoning was sound. The lake lies high in the mountains, at the very summit of the valley of Mataiea, and overlooks the Great Valley of Papenoo, owned by Count Polonsky, the cultivated Slav-Frenchman.

Tiura, the chief's oldest adopted son, arranged for the journey, and led the four of us who made it. One was an Australian, a doctor of the bush country of Queensland, in his thirties, very tall, and strong, though thin. He was a guest of the chief, and had walked entirely around Tahiti, barefooted, as had Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, to the consternation of the conservative English residents of Tahiti, who wanted them to live in Papeete and hold teas. Two pleasant native youths went with us to carry our necessities.

One cannot make the trip in the wet season, usually, but we had had a period of quite dry weather, and were nearing the end of the rainy period. The beginning of the Valley of Vaihiria, the next to that of Mataiea, was reached within an hour by the crooked road that leaves the beach. The valley was very fertile, and its picturesqueness a foretaste of the heights. The brook that ran through it murmured that it, too, climbed to the mountains, and would be our music on the way. The ascent was difficult and wearisome. We walked through long grass, over great rocks, and pulled ourselves around huge trees. The birds, so rare near the sea-shore, sang to us, and we saw many nests of fine moss. The scenery was different from that of the Valley of Fautaua, which I had climbed with Fragrance of the Jasmine, more rugged, and less captivating, yet beautiful and inspiring. The enormous blocks of basalt often poised upon a point alarmed us, and Tiura said that many times they had crashed down into the abyss. We saw a score of white cascades. It seemed:

A land of streams. Some like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some through wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

We arrived at a plateau after seven hours of hard toil, almost all the time pursuing a rocky path: it was the crown of the mountain and the borders of the lake. Though we had surmounted only thirteen hundred feet of vertically, we had come by such steeps that we could not wait an instant before throwing off our light garments and plunging into the water. The lake occupied an extinct crater, surrounded by four mountains unequally raised up—Tetufera, Urufaa, Purahu, and Terouotupo. It is half a mile long and a third wide, of curious shape, the banks making it appear in the dusk like a babe in swaddling-clothes with its arms outside the band. A great natural reservoir, fed by many subterranean springs, it gives birth to many others at the feet of the mountains, in Mataiea and Papeari.

After a repast, it being already late, we built a house to sleep in away from the dews of the heights, and Tiura recalled that the first Pomare took his name from a time when he had spent the night here and coughed from the exposure. His followers had spoken of the po mare, meaning literally, night cough, and the euphony pleased the king so that he adopted the name and bequeathed it to four successors. All these Polynesians took their names at birth or later from incidents in their own or others' lives, as my own chief's—"Deal Coffin," from a relative being buried in a sailor's chest; "Press Me" because the chief so named had heard these as the last word uttered by a dying grandchild, and Dim Sight because his grandfather had weak eyes.

Taata Mata, the name of a charming Tahitian woman I knew, signifies "Man's Eye," her own large eyes, perhaps, explaining the name, and Mauu, the name borne by a Tahitian man of good family in Papeete, "Moist." In all Polynesia one found picture names for people, as among the American Indians, and as among all nations, though with Europeans the meanings are forgotten. Moses means "Pulled out of the Water," or "Water Baby." Some of our names of people and places have ridiculous import in Tahiti. I remember Lovaina laughed immoderately, and called all the maids to view a line in the Tiare Hotel register in which a man had put himself down from "Omaha."

After we had eaten, we sat smoking in the darkness, I feeling very close to the blue field of stars. In the tropics the mountains, even so low as these, are impressive of a vast harmony of nature and of kinship with the force that rumpled them with its mighty hand. They have always inspired great thoughts. Moses framed in the mountains the ten taboos of Israel, which we hold as sacred as did the chosen people. Jesus made the mountains the seat of his most important acts, and was there transfigured in glory.

We had been pointed out by Tiura a great crack in the precipice, called Apoo Taria, the "Hole of the Ears." In the bloody struggles of the ancient tribes here the conquerors cut off the ears of their victims—some say their captives—and threw them in this hole.

"Because of those ears," said Tiura, "all the eels in this lake have very large ears, and it is so because the father of all the Mataiea folk was an eel. We shall see the eels to-morrow, but I must tell you of the chief of the district of Arue, near Papeete, about which M. Tourjee, the American, wrote the himene. The chief was married to a strong woman of this district, and in those days there were so many Tahitians that the mountains as well as the valleys were filled with them. He had a pet puhi, an eel named Faaraianuu. The eel had his home in a spring in the Arue district. The spring is there to this day."

"Oia ia! It is true!" I interjected. "I have seen it."

"One day," went on Tiura, "the chief remarked to his vahine that he was starting up the mountain to see her grandparents. She wanted to go, too, but he said that he would just hurry along, and be back in a day or two. Against her will he went alone. He did come back in a day or two, and to her questions replied that he had had a delightful visit to her tupuna. After that he got the peu, the habit, of departing for the mountains and remaining for hours daily. The chief's vahine became anoenoe (curious) to see what was his real reason for making these journeys every day. So she followed him secretly. She came to the mountain, where she saw him stop by an umu, a native oven he had evidently built before. He took out a bamboo, the kind in which we cooked small pieces of meat, and she saw him draw out a piece of meat and heard him say 'Maitai! Good!' as he ate it. She watched him closely, and was anxious to know what meat he had cooked, for he had said nothing about it.

"When he had left, she rushed to the oven, opened the bamboo, and saw on pieces of meat the special tattoomarks of the thighs of her grandmother and grandfather. Aue! She was riri. She fell to the earth and wept, and then she was angry. She made up her mind to get even with her false tane, and to hurt him the worst way possible. She hurried to his spring by their home in Arue, and caught his pet eel, Faaraianuu, who was sunning himself on the surface. She slashed him with her knife of pearl shell, and baked him in an umu. She ate his tail at once and put the remainder of the eel in a calabash. Then she left, with the ipu in her hand, for Lake Vaihiria."

Tiura halted his tale a minute to point out the constellation of the Scorpion, and to say, "Those stars are Pipiri Ma, the children, who lived at Mataiea long ago. That is a strange story of their leaving their parents' house for the sky!"

"Aue! Tiura," said I, "the stars are fixed, but there was the vahine with all but the tail of Faaraianuu in her ipu, walking toward this very spot. What became of her?"

The son of Tetuanui smiled, and continued:

"On her way she stopped to see the sorcerer, Tahu-Tahu and his vahine. They were friends. After a paraparau, the usual gossip of women, they asked her what she had in her calabash, and she replied, 'Playthings.' Then they told her her journey would be unsuccessful, but she kept on to this lake and put the remains of the eel in the water, right here where we are. But the eel would not stay in the lake, and though time and again she threw him in, he always came out. Finally she put him back in her ipu and returned to the house of Tahu-Tahu. She told her misfortune, and Tahu-Tahu made passes and thrashed about with the sacred ti-leaves, and commanded her to put Faaraianuu in the lake again. This she did, and he stayed, but even now, if you put a cocoanut in this lake at this spot, it will come out at the spring in Arue. The eel still has power over that spring."

Tiura spoke in Tahitian and French, and I handed on his narrative.

"The eel in Tahiti, from what I hear, has seen better days," commented the Queensland doctor. "All over the world the primitive people endowed this humble form of animal—the serpentine—with a cunning and supernatural power surpassing that of the four-footed creatures. I think it was because in the cradle of the human family there were so many hurts from the bites of snakes and sea-eels—they couldn't guard against them—that man salved his wounds by crediting his enemy with devilish qualities. That's the probable origin of the garden of Eden myth."

Again Tiura spoke of the Scorpion in the sky, and I knew he desired to talk of Pipiri Ma. The other Tahitians were already under the roof on their backs, upon the soft bed of dried leaves gathered by them for all of us, but the long, lean physician listened with unabated interest. He had run away for a change from the desert-like interior of his vast island, where he treated the ills of a large territory of sheep-herders, and to be on this mountain under such a benignant canopy, and to hear the folk-lore of the most fascinating race on earth, was to him worth foregoing sleep all night.

Tiura assumed a serious pose for the divulgement of secret lore. His language became grandiose, as if he repeated verbatim a rune of his ancestors:

"We Maoris lived at that time in the great peace of our long, quiet years. No outside influence, no evil wind, troubled our dreams. The men and women were hinuhinu, of high souls. At the head of the valley, in a grove of breadfruit, lived Taua a Tiaroroa, his vahine Rehua, and their two children, whose bodies were as round as the breadfuit, and whose eyes were like the black borders of the pearl-shells of the Conquered atolls. They were named Pipiri and Rehua iti, but were known as Pipiri Ma, the inseparables. One night when the moon, Avae, was at the height of its brilliancy, Taua and Rehua trod the green path to the sea. They lifted their canoe from its couch upon the grass, and with lighted torch of cocoanut-leaves glided toward the center of the lagoon.

"The woman stood motionless at the prow, and from her right hand issued the flames of their torch with a hissing sound—the flames which fell later in smoky clouds along the shore. A multitude of fish of strange form, fascinated by the blinding light, swam curiously about the canoe like butterflies. Taua stopped padpling, and directed his twelve-pronged harpoon toward the biggest fish. With a quick and powerful stroke the heavy harpoon shot like an arow from his hand and pierced the flashing scales. Soon the baskets of purau-fiber were filled, and they took back the canoe to its resting-place, and returned to their house, again treading the emerald trail which shone bright under the flooding moon. On the red-hot stones of the umu the fish grew golden, and sent forth a sweet odor which exceeded in deliciousness even the smell of monoi, the ointment of the oil of the cocoanut and crushed blossoms. Pipiri Ma rolled upon their soft mats, and their eyes opened with thoughts of a bountiful meal. They awaited with hearts of joy the moment when their mother would come to take them to the cook-house, the fare umu.

"The parents did not come to them. The minutes passed slowly in the silence, counted by beats of their hearts. Yet their mother was not far away. They heard the noise of the dried purau-leaves as they were placed on the grass. They distinguished the sound of the breadfruit as they rolled dully upon the large leaves, and then the silvery sound of cups filled with pape miti and the miti noanoa from which a pleasant aroma arose. They heard also the freeing of the cocoanuts from their hairy covering to release their limpid nectar. On their mats the children became restless and began to cry. Their eyes filled with bitter tears, and their throats choked with painful sobs.

"'All is ready,' said Rehua, gladly, to her husband, 'but before we eat, go and wake our little ones so dear to us.'

"Taua was afraid to break the sweet sleep of the babies. He hesitated and said:

"'No, do not let us wake them. They sleep so soundly now.'

"Pipiri Ma heard these touching words of their father. Why was he afraid to wake them to-night when always they ate the fish with their parents—the fish just from the sea and golden from the umu? Had the love of their father been so soon lost to them, as under the foul breath of a demon that may have wandered about their home?

"Taua eats and enjoys his meal, but Rehua is distracted. A cloud gathers on her brow, and her eyes, full of sadness, are always toward the house where the children are sleeping. The meal finished, she, with her husband, hurry to the mats on which the children slept, but the little ones had heard the noise of their feet upon the dewy leaves.

"'Haere atu! Let us go!' said the brother to the sister. The door is closed, and with his slender arms he parts the light bamboo palings which surround the house, and both flee through the opening.

"A long time they wandered. They followed the reaches of the valley. They dipped their bruised feet in the amorous river that sang as it crept toward the ocean. They broke through the twisted brush which was shadowed by the giant leaves, and while they so hurried they heard often the words of their parents, which the echoes of the valley brought to their ears:

"'Come back! Come back to us, Pipiri Ma! Ma! Haere mai, haere mai, Pipiri Ma!'

"And they called back from the depths of their bosoms, 'No, no; we will never come back. The torchlight fishing will again yield the children nothing.'

"They hid themselves on the highest mountains which caress the sky with their misty locks. They climbed with great difficulty the lower hills from which they looked down on the houses as small as a sailing canoe on the horizon. They came upon a dark cave where the tupapaus made their terrible noises, and in this cavern dwelt a tahu, a sorcerer. They were afraid, but the sorcerer was kind, and when he awoke, spoke so softly to them they thought they heard the sough of the hupe, the wind of the night, out of the valley below them.

"When he spoke, the spirit with whom the tahu was familiar let down a cloud and from it fell a fringe of varied hues. Pipiri Ma seized the threads that looked the most seducing, threads of gold and rose, and upon these they climbed to the skies. Their parents who saw them as they ascended, begged them, 'Pipiri Ma, come back! Oh, come back to us!' but the babes were already high in the heavens, higher than Orohena, the loftiest mountain, and their voices came almost from under the sun: 'No, we will never return. The fishing with the torches might be bad again. It might not be good for the children.'

"Taua and Rehua went back to their hut in tears. Whenever the torchlight fishing was bountiful, and the fish were glowing on the hot stones of the umu, Rehua lifted sorrowful eyes toward the skies, and vainly supplicated, 'Pipiri Ma, return to us!' and Taua answered, shaking his head with a doleful and unbelieving nod, 'Alas! it is over. Pipiri Ma will not come back, for one day the torchlight fishing was bad for the children.'"

Tiura finished with a finger pointing to Antares, of the Scorpion constellation.

"That," he concluded, "is the cloud which was itself transformed."

The doctor shook out his pipe as we entered the flimsy hut.

"Sounds like it was written by a child who wanted a continuous supply of sweets, but these people are so crazy on children that their legends point a moral to parents and never to the kiddies. They reverse 'Honor thy father and mother.'"

In the morning the Valley of Vaihiria unrolled under the rays of the sun like a spreading green carpet, and the sea in the distance, a mirror, sent back the darts of the beams. After breakfast we built a raft of banana-trunks, which we tied with lianas, and on it we floated about to observe the big-eared eels. Except by the shore the natives warned us against swimming for fear of these monsters, but we were not disturbed. We looked into the dismal pit, Apo Taria, and tumbled rocks down it.

"It has no bottom," said Tiura. "We have sounded it with our longest ropes."

The sun was now climbing high, and we began the descent, moving at a fast pace, leaping, slipping and sliding, with the use of the rope, and arriving at the Chefferie a little after noon.

The long draft of a cocoanut, a full quart of delicious, cooling refreshment, and we were ready for the oysters and the fish and taro.



Chapter XIX

The Arioi, minstrels of the tropics—Lovaina tells of the infanticide—Theories of depopulation—Methods of the Arioi—Destroyed by missionaries.

Lovaina came out to Mataiea with the news and gossip of the capital. A wretched tragedy had shocked the community. Pepe, the woman of Tuatini, had buried her new-born infant alive in the garden of the house opposite the Tiare Hotel. Lovaina was full of the horror of it, but with a just appreciation of the crime as a happening worth telling. The chefferie was filled with aues.

"Aue!" cried Haamoura, the chief's wife.

"Aue!" said the chief, and Rupert Brooke, with whom I had been swimming.

"Aue!" exclaimed O'Laughlin Considine, the Irish poet of New Zealand, stout, bearded, crowned with a chaplet of sweet gardenias, and quoting verses in Maori, Gaelic, and English.

There were laments in Tahitian by all about, sorrow that the mother had so little loved her babe, that she had not brought it to Mataiea, where Tetuanui and Haamoura or any of us would have adopted it. And Lovaina said, in English for Considine, whom she had brought to Mataiea, and for Brooke:

"She had five children by that Tuatini. He is custom-officer at Makatea, phosphate island, near T'ytee. He been gone one year, an' she get very fat, but she don' say one thing. Then she get letter speakin' he come back nex' week. One ol' T'ytee woman she work for her to keep all chil'ren clean, an' eat, an' she notice two day ago one mornin' she more thin. She ask her, 'Where that babee?' She say the varua, a bad devil, take it. The ol' woman remember she hear little cry in night, an' when a girl live my hotel tell her she saw Pepe diggin' in garden, she talk and talk, an' by 'n' by police come, an' fin' babee under rose-bush. It dead, but Cassiou, he say, been breathe when bury, because have air in lung. Then gendarme take hol' Pepe, and she tell right out she 'fraid for her husban', an' when babee born she go in night an' dig hole an' plant her babee under rosebush. Now, maybe white people say that Pepe jus' like all T'ytee woman."

Lovaina wore a wine-colored peignoir, and in her red-brown hair many strands of the diaphanous reva-reva, delicate and beautiful, a beloved ornament taken from the young palm-leaf. O'Laughlin Considine and Brooke were much concerned for the unhappy mother, and asked how she was.

"She cut off her hair," answered Lovaina, "like I do when my l'i'l boy was killed in cyclone nineteen huner' six. It never grow good after like before." Her hair was quite two feet long and very luxuriant, and like all Tahitian hair, simply in two plaits.

Brooke expressed his curiosity over what Lovaina had said, "jus' like all T'ytee woman."

"Was that a custom of Tahiti mothers, to bury their babes alive at birth?" he asked.

Lovaina blushed.

"Better you ask Tetuanui 'bout them Arioi," she replied confusedly.

The chief pleaded that he could not explain such a complicated matter in French, and if he did, M. Considine would not understand that language. But with the question raised, the conversation continued about infanticide and depopulation. The chief quoted the death-sentence upon his race pronounced by the Tahitian prophets centuries ago:

"E tupu te fau, et toro te farero, e mou te taata!"

"The hibiscus shall grow, the coral spread, and man shall cease!"

"There were, according to Captain Cook, sixty or seventy thousand Tahitians on this island when the whites came," continued the chief, sadly. "That number may have been too great, for perhaps Tooti calculated the population of the whole island by the crowd that always followed him, but there were several score thousand. Now I can count the thousands on the fingers of one hand."

We talked of the sweeping away of the people of the Marquesas Islands and of all the Polynesians. The Hawaiians are only twenty-two thousand. When the haole set foot on shore there, he counted four hundred thousand.

Time was when so great was the congestion in these islands, as in the Marquesas and Hawaii, that the priests and chiefs instituted devices for checking it. Infanticide seemed the easiest way to prevent hurtful increase. Stringent rules were made against large families. On some islands couples were limited to two children or only one, and all others born were killed immediately. Race suicide had here its simplest form. The Polynesian race must have grown to very great numbers on every island they settled from Samoa to Hawaii, and perhaps these numbers induced migrations. They doubtless grew to threatening swarms before they began checking the increase. Thomas Carver, professor of political economy at Harvard, says:

Even if the wants of the individual never expanded at all, it is quite obvious that an indefinite increase in the number of individuals in any locality would, sooner or later, result in scarcity and bring them into conflict with nature, and, therefore, into conflict with one another. That human populations are physiologically capable of indefinite increase, if time be allotted, is admitted, and must be admitted by any one who has given the slightest attention to the subject. Among the non-economizing animals and plants, it is not the limits of their procreative power but the limits of subsistence which determine their numbers. Neither is it lack of procreative power which limits numbers in the case of man, the economic animal. With him also it is a question of subsistence, but of subsistence according to some standard. Being gifted with economic foresight he will not multiply beyond the point where he can maintain that standard which he considers decent. But—and this is especially to be noted—so powerful are his procreative and domestic instincts that he will multiply up to the point where it is difficult to maintain whatever standard he has.

Instinct early taught society everywhere protection against the irksome condition of too many people and too little food. The old were killed or deserted in wanderings or migrations, and infanticide and abortion practised, as they are commonly in Africa to-day. Six-sevenths of India have for ages practised female infanticide, yet India increases two millions annually, and famine stalks year in and year out. Fifteen million Chinese are doomed to die of starvation in 1921, according to official statements.

Able-bodied adults in their prime bear the burdens of society everywhere. The elders and their children are a burden on them, especially in primitive society, where capital is not amassed, and food must be procured by some labor, either of the chase, fishing, or gathering fruits and herbs. Only advance in economic power has arrested infanticide. The Greeks thought it proper; the Romans, too. The early Teutons exposed babes. The Chinese have always done so.

Procreation, if not a dominant passion, would probably have ceased long ago, and the race perished. Individual and even national "race suicide" in France and New England indicated the possibilities of this tendency. The teachings of asceticism which had such power among Christians until the sixteenth century are again heard under a different guise in at least one of the modern cults most successful in the United States. Neo-Malthusianism is found exemplified in the two-child families of the nobles of France and Germany and the rich of New England. Parents want to do more for children, and so have fewer, and think proper contraception and even killing the foetus in its early stages. Modern medicine has aided this. Many women in many countries for ages have practised abortion in order not to spoil their bodies by child-bearing. To-day the demands of fashion and of social pleasures have caused large families to be considered even vulgar among the extremists in the mode. Organizations incited by the new feminism send heralds of contraception schemes on lecture tours to instruct the proletariat, and brave women to go to prison for giving the prescription. The well-to-do have always been cognizant of it.

The Tahitians have ever been adoring of little ones, and if their annals are stained by the blood of innumerable innocents murdered at birth, let it be remembered that it was a law, and not a choice of parents—a law induced by the sternest demands of social economy. Religion or the domination of priests commanded it. They obeyed, as Abraham did when he began to whet his knife for his son Isaac. To-day in Europe conditions prescribe conduct. Morality fades before race demands. Polygamy or promiscuity looms a possibility, and may yet have state and church sanction, as in Turkey.

In Tahiti, from time immemorial, as native annals went, there was a wondrous set of men and women called Arioi who killed all their children, and whose ways and pleasures recall the phallic worshipers of ancient Asian days. Forgotten now, with accounts radically differing as to its composition, its aims, and even its morals, a hundred romances and fables woven about its personnel, and many curious hazards upon its beginnings and secret purposes, the Arioi society constitutes a singular mystery, still of intense interest to the student of the cabalistic, though buried with these South Sea Greeks a century ago.

The Arioi, in its time of divertisement, was a lodge of strolling players, musicians, poets, dancers, wrestlers, pantomimists, and clowns, the merry men and women of the Pacific tropics. They were the leaders in the worship of the gods, the makers and masters of the taboo, and when war or other necessity called them from pleasure or religion, the leaders in action and battle.

The ending of the celebrated order came about through the work of English Christian missionaries and the commercialized conditions accompanying the introduction among the Tahitians of European standards, inventions, customs, and prohibitions. The institution was of great age, without written chronicles, and, like all Polynesian history, obscured by the superstitions bred of oral descent.

"The Arioi have been in Tahiti as long as the Tahitians," said the old men to the first whites.

Of all the marvels of the South Seas unfolded by their discovery to Europeans, and their scrutiny by adventurers and scientists, none seems so striking and so provocative of curiosity as the finding in Tahiti of a sect thoroughly communistic in character, with many elements of refinement and genius, which obliterated the taboos against women, and though nominally for the worship of the generative powers of nature, mixed murder and minstrelsy in its rites and observance. For what wrote red the records of this society in the journals of the discoverers, missionaries, and early European dwellers in Tahiti, was the Arioi primary plank of membership—that no member should permit his or her child to live after birth. As at one time the Arioi society embraced a fifth of the population, and had unbounded influence and power, this stern rule of infanticide had to do with the depopulation of the island, or, rather, the prevention of overpopulation. Yet while the Arioi had existed as far back as their legends ran, Captain Cook, as said Tetuanui, estimated the Tahitians to number seventy thousand in 1769. The chronicles say that the bizarre order was rooted out a hundred years ago. There are barely five thousand living of this exquisite race, which the white had found without disease, happy, and radiantly healthy. Evidently the Arioi had merely preserved a supportable maximum of numbers, and it remained for civilization to doom the entire people.

The Arioi fathers and mothers strangled their children or buried them immediately after birth, for it was infamous to have them, and their existence in an Arioi family would have created as much consternation as in a Tibetan nunnery.

Infanticide in Tahiti and the surrounding islands was not confined to the Arioi. The first three children of all couples were usually destroyed, and twins were both killed. In the largest families more than two or three children were seldom spared, and as they were a prolific race, their not nursing the sacrificed innocents made for more frequent births. Four, six, or even ten children would be killed by one couple during their married life. Ellis, an English missionary, says that not fewer than two-thirds of all born were destroyed. This was the ordinary habit of the Tahitians. The Arioi spared not one.

Ellis wrote ninety years ago. He helped to disrupt the society. The confessions of scores of its former members were poured into his burning ears. In his unique book of his life in Tahiti, he described their dramas, pantomimes, and dances, their religious rituals and the extraordinary flights to which their merriment and ecstasy went. Says Ellis:

These, though the general amusements of the Ariois, were not the only purposes for which they were assembled. They included:

"All monstrous, all prodigious things."

And these were abominable, unutterable; in some of their meetings, they appear to have placed invention on the rack to discover the worst pollutions of which it was possible for man to be guilty, and to have striven to outdo each other in the most revolting practices. The mysteries of iniquity, and acts of more than bestial degradation, to which they were at times addicted, must remain in the darkness in which even they felt it sometimes expedient to conceal them. I will not do violence to my sensibilities or offend those of my readers, by details of conduct, which the mind cannot contemplate without pollution and pain.

In these pastimes, in their accompanying abominations, and the often-repeated practices of the most unrelenting, murderous cruelty, these wandering Ariois passed their lives, esteemed by the people as a superior order of beings, closely allied to the gods, and deriving from them direct sanction, not only for their abominations, but even for their heartless murders. Free from care or labor, they roved from island to island, supported by the chiefs and priests; and were often feasted with provisions plundered from the industrious husbandman, whose gardens were spoiled by the hands of lawless violence, to provide their entertainments, while his own family were not infrequently deprived thereby for a time, of the means of subsistence. Such was their life of luxurious and licentious indolence and crime.

Yet each Arioi had his own wife, also a member of the society. Improper conduct toward an Arioi's wife by an Arioi was punished often by death. To a woman such membership meant a singular freedom from the tabus, prohibitions, that had forbidden her eating with men, tasting pig, and other delicacies. She became the equal and companion of these most interesting of her race, and talent in herself received due honor. She sacrificed her children for a career, as is done to-day less bloodily.

Believers in the immortality of the soul, the Arioi imagined a heaven suited to their own wishes. They called it Rohutu noa-noa, or Fragrant Paradise. In it all were in the first flush of virility, and enjoyed the good things promised the faithful by Mohammed. The road to this abode of houris and roasted pig was not to be trod in sackcloth or in ashes, but in wreaths and with gaily colored bodies. To the sound of drums and of flutes they were to dance and sing for the honor of their merry god, Oro, and after a lifetime of joy and license, of denial of nothing, unless it hurt their order, they were to die to an eternity of celestial riot.

As old as the gods was the society of the Arioi, said the Tahitians. Oro, the chief god, took a human wife, and descended on a rainbow to her home. He spent his nights with her, and every morning returned to the heavens. Two of his younger brothers searched for him, and lacking wedding presents, one transformed himself into a pig and a bunch of red feathers. The other presented these, and though they remained with the wedded pair, the brother took back his own form. Oro, to reward them, made them gods and Arioi. Ever after a pig and red feathers were offerings to the idol of Oro by the Arioi. The brothers formed the society and named the charter members of it in different islands, and by these names those holding their offices were known until they were abolished.

When called together by their chief, the members of the order made a round of visits throughout the archipelago, in as many as seventy great canoes, carrying with them their costumes and musical instruments and their servants. They were usually welcomed enthusiastically at their landing, and pigs, fruits, and kava prepared for their delectation. They were gorgeous-looking performers in their pantomimes, for besides tattooing, which marked their rank, they were decorated with charcoal and the scarlet dye mati, and wore girdles of yellow ti-leaves, or vests of ripe, golden plantain-leaves. Their heads were wreathed in the yellow and red leaves of the hutu, and perhaps behind an ear they wore a flower of brilliant hue.

They had seven ranks, like the chairs of a secret order in Europe or in the United States nowadays. The first, the highest, was the Avae parai, painted leg. The Arioi of this class was tattooed solidly from the knees down. The second, Otiore, had both arms tattooed; the third, Harotea, both sides of the body; the fourth, Hua, marked shoulders; the fifth, Atoro, a small stripe on the left side; the sixth, Ohemara, a small circle around each ankle, and the seventh, Poo, were uninked. They were the neophytes, and had to do the heavy work of the order, though servants, not members, termed fauaunau, were part of the corps. These were sworn not to have any offspring.

The Arioi kept the records of the Tahitian nation. In their plays they reenacted all the chief events in the history of the race, and as there was no written account, these dramas were, with the legends and stories they recited, the perpetuation of their archives and chronicles. They were apt in travesty and satire. They ridiculed the priests and current events, and by their wit made half the people love them and half fear them. A manager directed all their performances. They aimed at perfect rhythm in their chants and dances, and grace and often sheer fun in their pantomimes. Some were wrestlers, but boxing they left for others. As with the Marquesans to-day, they had a fugleman, or leader, in all songs, who introduced the subject in a prologue, and occasionally gave the cue to a change.

No man could reach high rank with them except by histrionic ability and a strict compliance with their rules. Exceptions to the first requirement might be found in the great chiefs. A candidate came before the lodge in gala fashion, painted, wreathed, and laughing. Leaping into their circle, he joined madly in the rout, and thus made known his desire for admittance. If worthy, he became a servant, and only after proving by a long novitiate his qualities was he given the lowest rank. Then he received the name by which he would be known in the society. He swore to kill his children, if he had any, and crooking his left arm, he struck it with his right hand, and repeated the oath:

"The mountain above, the sacred mountain; the floor beneath Tamapua, projecting point of the sea; Manunu, of majestic forehead; Teariitarai, the splendor in the sky; I am of the mountain huruhuru." He spoke his Arioi name, and snatched the covering of the chief woman present.

Occasionally there might be persons or districts that felt themselves unwilling or too poor to entertain the Arioi. These had many devices to overcome such obstacles. They would surround a child and pretend to raise him to kingly rank, and then demand from his parents suitable presents for such a distinction.

At death there were rites for the Arioi apart from those for others. They paid the priest of Romotane, who kept the key of their paradise, to admit the decedent to Rohutu noa-noa in the reva or clouds above the mountain of Temehani unauna, in the island of Raiatea. The ordinary people could seldom afford the fees demanded by the priest, and had to be satisfied with a denial of this Mussulman Eden reserved for the festive and devil-may-care Arioi, as ordinary people perforce abstain from intoxicants in America while the rich drink their fill. The historian Lecky says:

It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian Fathers that concupiscence, or the sensual passion, was the "original sin" of human nature; and it must be owned that the progress of knowledge, which is usually extremely opposed to the ascetic theory of life, concurs with the theological view, in showing the natural force of this appetite to be far greater than the well-being of man requires. The writings of Malthus have proved, what the Greek moralists appear in a considerable degree to have seen, that its normal and temperate exercise would produce, if universal, the utmost calamities to the world, and that, while nature seems, in the most unequivocal manner, to urge the human race to early marriages, the first condition of an advancing civilization is to restrain or diminish them.

Conceive the state of Tahiti, where, as through all Polynesia, the girls have their fling at promiscuity from puberty to the late teens or early twenties, when an immense and increasing population compelled the thinking men to devise a remedy for the starvation which in times of drought or comparative failure of the feis or breadfruit or a scarcity of fish menaced the nation! That the cruel remedy of infanticide was chosen may be laid to ignorance of foeticidal methods, and the indisposition of the languorous women to suffer pain or to risk their own lives or health.

Lecky says that however much moralists may enforce the obligation of extra-matrimonial purity, this obligation has never been even approximately regarded. One could hardly expect from the heathen Tahitians moral restraint. Malthus, a Christian clergyman, did not until the second edition of his book add that to vice and misery as checks of nature to an increase of humans faster than the means of subsistence. Nor have most Christian or civilized nations made such a check effectual.

The ever-dominant and only inherent impulse in all living beings, including man, is the will to remain alive—the will, that is, to attain power over those forces which make life difficult or impossible.

All schemes of morality are nothing more than efforts to put into permanent codes the expedients found useful by some given race in the course of its successful endeavors to remain alive.

Did not Zarathustra so philosophize, and is not the national trend in Europe exalting his theory? With the difference that nationalism takes the place of individualism in the scheme of survival and a better place in the sun is the legend on the banners.

Unable to find enemies to keep their numbers down, exempt from the epidemics and endemics of Europe and Asia, unacquainted with the contraceptives known until recently only by our rich, but now preached by organized societies to the humblest, the Tahitian, Marquesan, and Hawaiian came to consider the blotting out of lives just begun worthy deeds.

"The only good Indian is a dead Indian," was our own cynical Western maxim when life and opportunity to lay by for the future meant ceaseless struggle with the dispossessed.

We, in situations of dire necessity, eat our own fellows. We have done it at sea and on land. We eat their flesh when shipwreck or isolation urges survival. We let children die by the myriad for lack of proper care and sustenance, and kill them in factories and tenements to gain luxuries for ourselves. One justification for slavery was that it gave leisure for culture to the slave-owners, and that Southern chivalry and the charm of Southern womanhood outweighed the fettered black bodies and souls in the scale of achievement.

The Tahitian did the best he could, and the Arioi set the example in a total observance not to be demanded or expected of the mass. It is related that if the child cried before destruction, it was spared, for they had not the heart to kill it. If Arioi, the parents must have given it away or otherwise avoided the opprobrium.

Another explanation of the bloody oath of the Arioi might be found in an effort of the princes of Tahiti to prevent in this manner the excessive growth of the Arii, or noble caste. The Arioi society was founded by princes and led by them, but that they sought to break down the power of the nobles is evidenced by their admitting virtually all castes to it, thus making it a privileged democracy, in which birthrights had not the sway they had outside it, but in which the chap who could fight and dance, sing, and tell good stories might climb from lowly position to honor and popularity, and in which a clever woman could make her mark.

The early missionaries who had to combat the influence of the Arioi may have exaggerated its baseness. In their unsophisticated minds, unprepared by reading or experience for comparisons, most of them sailing directly from English divinity schools or small bucolic pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarianism of as much consequence as morals, and vastly more important than health or earthly happiness. They believed in diabolical possession, and were prone to magnify the wickedness of the heathen, as one does hard tasks. When Christianity had power in Tahiti, the bored natives were sometimes scourged into church, and fines and imprisonment for lack of devotion were imposed by the native courts. Often self-sacrificing, the missionaries felt it was for the natives' eternal walfare, and that souls might be saved even by compulsion. The Arioi society melted under a changed control and Christian precepts.

Livingstone in the wilds of primeval Africa, making few converts, but giving his life to noble effort, meditated often upon the success of the missionaries in the South Seas—a success perhaps magnified by the society which financed and cheered the restless men whom it sent to Tahiti. Livingstone in his darker moments, consoling himself with the accounts of these achievements in the missionary annals, doubted his own efficacy against the deep depravity and heathenism of his black flock. The fact unknown to him was that the missionaries in Polynesia preached and prayed, doctored and taught, ten years before they made a single convert. It was not until they bagged the king that a pawn was taken by the whites from the adversaries' stubborn game. The genius of these strugglers against an apparent impregnable seat of wickedness was patience, "the passion of great hearts."

But conquering once politically, the missionaries found their task all but too easy to suit militant Christians. As the converted drunkard and burglar at a slum pentecost pour out their stories of weakness and crime, so these Arioi, glorying in their being washed white as snow, recited to hymning congregations confessions that made the offenses of the Marquis de Sade or Jack the Ripper fade into peccadilloes.

Christian says:

Their Hevas or dramatic entertainments, pageants and tableaus, of varying degrees of grossness, similar to the more elaborate and polished products of the early Javanese and Peruvian drama ... one cannot help fancying must be all pieces out of the same puzzle ... I have with some pains discovered the origin of the name "Arioi." It throws a lurid light on the character of some of the Asiatic explorers who must have visited this part of the Eastern Pacific prior to the Europeans. In Maori the word Karioi means debauched, profligate, good-for-nothing. In Raratonga [an island near Tahiti] the adjective appears as Kariei. These are probably slightly worn down forms of the Persian Khara-bati, which has precisely the same significance as the foregoing. One is forced to the conclusion that the Arabian Nights stories of the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor were founded on a bed-rock of solid fact, and that Persian and Arab merchants, pirates and slave-traders, must have penetrated into these far-off waters, and brought their vile, effeminate luxury and shameful customs with them from Asia, of which transplanted iniquity, the parent soil half-forgotten, this word, like several others connected with revelry and vice, like a text in scarlet lettering, survives to this day.

The first Jesuit missionaries to the Caroline Islands found there an organization with privileges and somewhat the same objects as the Arioi, which was called Uritoi. As "t" is a letter often omitted or altered in these island tongues, it is not hard by leaving it out to find a likeness in the names Arioi and Urioi. The Carolines and Tahiti are thousands of miles apart, and not inhabited by the same race.

Ellis was a missionary incapable by education, experience, and temperament of appreciation of the artistic life of the Arioi. He would have chased the faun into seclusion until he could clothe him in English trousers, and would have rendered the Venus of Milo into bits. Despite an honest love for mankind and considerable discernment, he saw nothing in the Arioi but a logical and diabolical condition of paganism. Artistry he did not rank high, nor, to find a reason for the Arioi, did he go back of Satan's ceaseless seeking whom he may devour.

Bovis, a Frenchman, world traveled, having seen perhaps the frescos of Pompeii, and familiar with the histories of old Egypt, India, Greece, Persia, and Rome, knew that Sodom and Gomorrah had their replicas in all times, and that often such conduct as that of the Arioi was associated among ancient or primitive peoples with artistic and interesting manifestations.

He searched the memories of the old men and women for other things than abominations, and gave the Arioi a good name for possession of many excellent qualities and for a rare development of histrionic ability. But more than being mere mimes and dancers, the Arioi were the warriors, the knights of that day and place, the men-at-arms, the chosen companions of the king and chiefs, and in general the bravest and most cultivated of the Tahitians. They were an extended round-table for pleasure in peace and for counsel and deeds of derring-do in war. The society was a nursery of chivalry, a company which recruited, but did not reproduce themselves. They had a solid basis, and lasted long because the society kept out of politics.

The members never forgot the duty due their chiefs. They accompanied them in their enterprises, and they killed their fellow-members in the enemy's camp, as Masons fought Masons in the American Civil War and in the wars of Europe. In peace they were epicures. They consorted together only for pleasure and comfort in their reunions. The Arioi made their order no stepping-stone to power or office, but in it swam in sensuous luxury, each giving his talents to please his fellows and to add luster to his society.

To the English missionaries who converted the Tahitians to the Christian faith the Arioi adherent was the chief barrier, the fiercest opponent, and, when won over, the most enthusiastic neophyte. In that is found the secret of the society's strength. It embraced all the imaginative, active, ambitious Tahitians, to whom it gave opportunities to display varied talents, to form close friendships, to rise in rank, to meet on evener terms those more aristocratic in degree, and, above all, to change the monotony of their existence by eating, drinking, and being merry in company, and all at the expense of the other fellow. But—and the more you study the Polynesian, the subtler are his strange laws and taboos—the main provision in the Arioi constitution was undoubtedly conceived in the desire to prevent over-population.

Pepe, the woman of Tuatini, had returned to the ways of the Arioi because her husband had adopted the white convention of jealousy and monogamy. Only Tahitians like Tetuanui now knew anything about the order, and so many generations had they been taught shame of it that the very name was unspoken, as that of the mistletoe god was among the Druids after St. Patrick had accomplished his mission in Ireland.



Chapter XX

Rupert Brooke and I discuss Tahiti—We go to a wedding feast—How the cloth was spread—What we ate and drank—A Gargantuan feeder—Songs and dances of passion—The royal feast at Tetuanui's—I leave for Vairao—Butscher and the Lermontoffs.

At Mataiea weeks passed without incident other than those of the peaceful, pleasant round of walking, swimming, fishing, thinking, and refreshing slumber. My mind dismissed the cares of the mainland, and the interests thrust upon me there—business, convention, the happenings throughout the world. I achieved to a degree the state in which body and spirit were pliant instruments for the simple needs and indulgences of my being, and my mind, relieved of the cark of custom in advanced communities, considered, and clarified as never before, the values of life. It was as if one who had been confined indoors for years at a task supervised by critical guardians was moved to a beautiful garden with only laughing children for playmates and a kindly nature alone for contemplation and guide.

Brooke, who was busied an hour or two a day at poems and letters, and was physically active most of the time, spoke of this with me. There were few whites in Tahiti outside Papeete except in the suburbs. The French in the time of Louis le Debonnaire and of all that period thought nature unbeautiful. The nation has ever been afraid of it, but let natural thoughts be freely spoken and written, and natural acts be less censured than elsewhere. Even in late years their conception of nature has been that of the painter Corot, delicate, tender, and sad; not free and primitive. They had possessed Tahiti scores of years, and yet one hardly saw a Frenchman, and never a Frenchwoman, in the districts. The French seldom ever ventured in the sea or the stream or to the reef. Other Europeans and Americans found those interesting, at least, a little. Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf of the chefferie. The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun. We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means fair, and at the titles given Tahiti by visitors: the New Cytherea by Bougainville, a russet Ireland by McBirney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa and Aph-Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers and loved the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us. Brooke, as we paddled over the dimpled lagoon, quoted the Greek for an apt description, the innumerable laughter of the waves. Brooke had been in Samoa, and was about to leave for England after several months in Tahiti. He wrote home that he had found the most ideal place in the world to work and live in. On the wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, "The Great Lover," "Tiare Tahiti," and "Retrospect." He could understand the Polynesian, and he loved the race, and hated the necessity of a near departure. Their communism in work he praised daily, their singing at their tasks, and their wearing of flowers. We had in common admiration of those qualities and a fervor for the sun. For his Greek I gave him St. Francis's canticle, which begins:

Laudate sie, mi signore, cum tuote le tue creature, Spetialmente messer lo frate sole.

Praised be my Lord, with all his creatures, and especially our brother the Sun, our sister the Moon, our brother the Wind, our sister Water, who is very serviceable unto us and humble and chaste and clean; our brother Fire, our mother Earth, and last of all for our sister Death.

We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales. Man originated on the seashore, and many of the most primitive habits of humans, as well as their bodily differences from the apes, came from their early life there. Man pushed back from the salt water slowly.

The official affairs of the chefferie, beyond the repair of roads and bridges, were few. Crime among Tahitians being almost unknown, the chief's duties as magistrate were negligible, and the family uttered many aues when I related to them the conditions of our countries, with murders, assaults, burglaries and rapine as daily news. The French law required a civil ritual for marriage, and Tetuanui tied the legal knots in his district. I was at the chefferie when a union was performed. The bride and groom were of the middle class of prosperous landholders. They arrived in an automobile wonderfully adorned with flowers, with great bouquets of roses and ferns on the lamps. They were accompanied by cars and carriages filled with their families and friends. The bride was in a white-lace dress from Paris, with veil and orange-blossoms, and the groom in a heavy black frock-coat over white drill trousers with lemon-colored, tight shoes; both looking very ill at ease and hot. The father of the groom must have us to the church and to the wedding feast, so Brooke and I rode in a cart, I on the mother's lap, and the poet on the knees of the father. The jollity of the arearea was already apparent, and the father vainly whipped his horse to outspeed the automobile. All the vehicles raced along the road and into the yard of the Protestant church of Mataiea at top gait.

It was the season of assemblage of the manu patia, the wasps brought from abroad, and quite ten thousand were clustered on the church ceiling, while thousands more patrolled the air just over our heads, courting and quarreling, buzzing and alighting on our heads and necks. The preacher in a knee-length Prince Albert of black wool, opened so that I saw he had nothing but an undershirt beneath, recited the ceremony and addressed the couple. He took a ring from his trousers-pocket, unwrapping and opening its box. A bridesmaid in a rose-colored satin gown had taken off the bride's glove, and the pastor put the ring upon her finger. A number of young men acted as aids and witnesses, and all who stood were pounced upon by the wasps. They betrayed no evidence of nervousness, but at the installation of the ring, the groom, with a desperate motion, tore off his stiff collar and bared his robust neck. He did not replace it that day. The bride's mother wept upon my shoulder throughout the quarter of an hour. Not a trace was indicated of the old wedding customs of the Tahitians, as Christianity had effaced them rigorously, and though the Tahitians had had plenty of ceremonies for all public acts, as had the Greeks and Romans, many had been forgotten under the scourge of orthodoxy before any white wrote freely of the island. They are lost to record with the old language.

After the rite, all made a dash for their equipages, and raced for the bride's home, where, as customary, the fete champetre was given. Again on mama's lap, and Brooke on papa's, both ample, we hurried, the bon pere not averse to taking a wheel off the bridal party's motor-car. With cries of delight we drove into a great cocoanut-grove, and a thousand feet back from the Broom Road emerged into a sunlit, but shady, clearing. Huro! the banquet was already being spread. From different parts of the plantation men came bearing huge platters of roasted pig, chicken, taro, breadfruit, and feis, with bamboo tubes of the taiaro sauce like the reeds of a great pipe-organ. Caldrons of shrimp, crabs, prawns, and lobsters bubbled, and monstrous heaps of tiny oysters were being opened. Fresh fruit was in rich hoards: bananas, oranges, custard-apples, papayas, pomegranates, mangoes, and guavas.