I could not restrain an exclamation of amazement. "Vraiment?"

"Absolument," answered Pere Simeon. "Unbelievers might explain that waves swept the mare ashore, and that through some instinct she found her way along the beach or over the hills. But that she should come to the mission grounds, to the very spot where her home was to be, though she had never seen the islands before—no, my friend, not even the materialist could explain that as less than supernatural. I have sent the proofs to our order in Belgium. They will form part of the evidence that will one day be offered to bring about the canonization of Joan."

"And the procession, was it successful?" I inquired.

"Mais oui! It was magnificent. When it started there was a grand fanfare of trumpets, drums, fireworks, and guns. Never was there such a noise here since the days of battle between the whites and the natives. There were four choirs of fifty voices each, the natives from all these nearby islands, each with a common chant in French and particular himines in Marquesan. I walked first with the Blessed Sacrament; then came Captain Capriata with the banner of the mission, and then, proceeded by a choir, came the virgin on the white horse.

"She was all in silver armor, as was the mare. Two years before I had sent to France for the pasteboard and the silver paper, and had made the armor. The helmet was the piece de resistance. The girl wore it as the Maid herself, and sat the horse without faltering, despite the nonos and the heat. It was a wonderful day for Joan and for the Marquesas."

He sat for a moment lost in the vision.

"So it was all as you had planned?"

"Mon ami, it was not I, but Joan herself, to whom all honor belongs. There was a moment—Captain Capriata had taken absinthe with his morning popoi, and was unsteady. He stumbled. I called to him to breathe a prayer to his patron saint—he is of Ajaccio in Corsica—and to call upon Joan for aid. He straightened up at once, after one fall, and bore the white banner of the Maid in good style from the mission to the deserted inn by the leper-house.

"We had three superb feasts, one on each day of the fete. We had speeches and songs, three masses a day to accommodate all, four first communicants, and two marriages. I will tell you, though it may be denied by the commercial missionaries, that five protestants attended and recanted."

Pere Simeon's eyes flashed as he recalled those memorable days. He fell into a reverie, scratching his legs after the nonos and letting his cigarette go out.

I arose to depart. He must go to Huapu with the chief, who was again at the door,

"And did the fete help the parish?" I asked with that bromidic zeal to please that so often discloses the fly just when the ointment's smell is sweetest.

"Alas!" he replied, with a sorrowful shake of his beard. "Even the girl who had worn the white armor leaped from the mast of a ship to escape infamy and was drowned. Yet there was grandeur of sacrifice in that. But for the others, they die fast, too. Some day the priest will be alone here without a flock."

He picked up a garment or two, placed the Holy Sacrament with pious care in his breast, and we walked together through the mournful and decaying village, passing a few melancholy natives.

I said to Pere Simeon as he stepped into the canoe, "You are like a shepherd who pursues his sheep wherever they may wander, to gather them into the fold at last."

"C'est vrai," he smiled sadly. "The bishop himself had to go to Hiva-oa from here, because there were really not enough people left alive for the seat of his bishopric. At least, there will be some here when I die, for I am old. Ah, thirty years ago, when I came here, there were souls to be saved! Thousands of them. But I love the last one. There are still a hundred left on Huapu. There is work yet, for the devil grows more active yearly."



CHAPTER XXV

America's claim to the Marquesas; adventures of Captain Porter in 1812; war between Haapa and Tai-o-hae, and the conquest of Typee valley.

America might have been responsible for the death of the Marquesan race had not the young nation been engaged in a deadly struggle with Great Britain when an American naval captain, David Porter, seized Nuka-hiva. A hundred years ago the Stars and Stripes floated over the little hill above the bay, and American cannon upon it commanded the village of Tai-o-hae. Beneath the verdure is still buried the proclamation of Porter, with coins of the young republic, unless the natives dug up the bottle after the destruction of the last of Porter's forces. They witnessed the ceremony of its planting, which must have appeared to them a ritual to please the powerful gods of the whites. Unless respect for the tapu placed on the bottle by "Opotee" restrained them, they probably brought it to the light and examined the magic under its cork.

The adventures of Porter here were as strange and romantic as those of any of the hundreds of the gypsies of the sea who sailed this tropic and spilled the blood of a people unused to their ways and ignorant of their inventions and weapons of power.

Porter had left the United States in command of the frigate Essex, to destroy British shipping, capture British ships, and British sailors. Porter, son and nephew of American naval officers, destined to be foster-father of Farragut, the first American admiral, and father of the great Admiral Porter, was then in his early thirties and loved a fight. He harried the British in the Atlantic, doubled Cape Horn without orders, and did them evil on the high seas, and at last, with many prisoners and with prize crews aboard his captures, he made for the Marquesas to refresh his men, repair his ships, and get water, food, and wood for the voyage home.

In Tai-o-hae Bay he moored his fleet, and was met by flocks of friendly canoes and great numbers of the beautiful island women, who swam out to meet the strangers. Among them he found Wilson, an Englishman who had long been here and who was tattooed from head to foot. On first seeing this man Porter was strongly prejudiced against him, but found him extremely useful as an interpreter, and concluded that he was an inoffensive fellow whose only failing was a strong attachment to rum. With Wilson's eagerly offered help, Porter made friends with the people of Tai-o-hae, established a camp on shore, and set about revictualing his fleet.

The tribes of Tai-o-hae, or Tieuhoy, as Porter called it, were annoyed by the combative Hapaa tribe, or collection of tribes, which dwelt in a nearby valley, and these doughty warriors came within half a mile of the American camp, cut down the breadfruit trees, and made hideous gestures of derision at the white men. In response, Porter landed a six-pound gun, tremendously heavy, and said that if the Tai-o-hae tribe would carry it to the top of a high mountain overlooking the Hapaa valley, he would drive the Hapaas from the hills where they stood and threatened to descend.

To Porter's amazement, the Tai-o-hae men, surmounting incredible difficulties, laid the gun in position, and as the Hapaas scorned the futile-looking contrivance and declared that they would not make peace with the whites, Porter sent his first assistant with forty men, armed with muskets and accompanied by natives carrying these weapons and ammunition for the cannon.

The battle began with a great roar of exploding gunpowder, and from the ships the Americans saw their men driving from height to height the Hapaas, who fought as they retreated, daring the enemy to follow them. A friendly native bore the American flag and waved it in triumph as he skipped from crag to crag, well in the rear of the white men who pursued the fleeing enemy.

In the afternoon the victorious forces descended, carrying five dead. The Hapaas, fighting with stones flung from slings and with spears, had taken refuge, to the number of four or five thousand, in a fortress on the brow of a hill. Not one of them had been wounded, and from their impassable heights they threw down jeers and showers of stones upon the retiring Tai-o-haes and their white allies.

This was intolerable. On the second day, with augmented forces, the Americans stormed the height and took the fort, killing many Hapaas, who, knowing nothing of the effect of musket bullets, fought till dead. The wounded were dispatched with war-clubs by the Tai-o-haes, who dipped their spears in the blood. Wilson said the Tai-o-haes would eat the corpses. Porter, horrified, interrogated his allies, who denied any such horrid appetite, so that Porter was not sure what to believe.

The Hapaas were now become lovers of the whites, and sent a deputation to complain that the Taipis (Typees), in another valley, harrassed them and, being their traditional enemies, were contemplating raiding Hapaa Valley. The Typees were the most terrible of all the Nuka-hivans, with four thousand fighting men, with strongest fortifications and the most resolute hearts.

The Typees were informed that they must be peaceful, also that they must send many presents as proof of friendliness, or the white men would drive them from their valley. The Typees replied that if Porter were strong enough, he could come and take them. They said the Americans were white lizards; they could not climb the mountains without Marquesans to carry their guns, and yet they talked of chastising the Typees, who had never fled before an enemy and whose gods were unbeatable. They dared the white men to come among them.

At this juncture Porter faced treachery in his own camp. He had many English prisoners captured from British ships, and these made a plot to escape by poisoning the rum of the Americans. Porter learned of this, and finding an American sentry asleep he shot him with his own hand, and ordered every Englishman put in irons. He was also troubled by mutinies among his own men, who were loth to face any more battles, being contented as they were with plenty of drink, the best of food, and the passionate devotion of the native women, who thronged the camp day and night. With no light hand Porter put down revolt and mutiny, and prepared to begin war on the Typees.

First he built a strong fort, assisted by the Tai-o-haes and Hapaas, and there he took possession of the Marquesas in the name of the United States. On November 19, 1813, the American flag was run up over the fort, a salute of seventeen guns was fired from the artillery mounted there and answered from the ships in the bay. Rum was freely distributed, and standing in a great concourse of wondering natives, with the Englishman, Wilson, at his side interpreting his words, Porter read the following proclamation:

It is hereby made known to the world that I, David Porter, a captain in the navy of the United States of America, now in command of the United States frigate Essex, have, on the part of the United States, taken possession of the island called by the natives Nooaheevah, generally known by the name of Sir Henry Martin's Island, but now called Madison's Island. That by the request and assistance of the friendly tribes residing in the valley of Tieuhoy, as well as of the tribes residing on the mountains, whom we have conquered and rendered tributary to our flag, I have caused the village of Madison to be built, consisting of six convenient houses, a rope-walk, bakery, and other appurtenances, and for the protection of the same, as well as for that of the friendly natives, I have constructed a fort calculated for mounting sixteen guns, whereon I have mounted four, and called the same Fort Madison.

Our rights to this island being founded on Priority of discovery, conquest, and possession, cannot be disputed. But the natives, to secure to themselves that friendly protection which their defenseless situation so much required, have requested to be admitted into the great American family, whose pure republican policy approaches so near their own. And in order to encourage these views to their own interest and happiness, as well as to render secure our claim to an island valuable on many considerations, I have taken on myself to promise them that they shall be so adopted; that our chief shall be their chief; and they have given assurances that such of their brethren as may hereafter visit them from the United States shall enjoy a welcome and hospitable reception among them and be furnished with whatever refreshments and supplies the island may afford; that they will protect them against all their enemies and as far as lies in their power prevent the subjects of Great Britain from coming among them until peace shall take place between the two nations.

There followed a list of the tribes from whom Porter had received presents, to the number of thirty-one tribes, and the document continued:

Influenced by considerations of humanity, which promise speedy civilization to a race of men who enjoy every mental and bodily endowment which nature can bestow, and which requires only art to perfect, as well as by views of policy, which secure to my country a fruitful and populous island possessing every advantage of security and supplies for ships, and which of all others is most happily situated as respects climate and local position, I do declare that I have, in the most solemn manner, under the American flag displayed in Fort Madison and in the presence of numerous witnesses, taken possession of the said island for the use of the United States.

To the guileless natives, made happy with rum, listening to the necessarily imperfect translation of these words, the ceremony may well have been a strange magic to unknown gods, but it is not difficult to imagine the feelings of Wilson, the tattooed Englishman, as he translated this proclamation giving the rich and happy islands to a country at war with his own. He listened and repeated, however, with patriotic protests unuttered, and prepared to assist Porter in his contemplated war against the Typees.

A week later one of the warships, with five boats and ten war-canoes, sailed for the Typee beach. Ten canoes of Hapaas joined them there. The tops of all the neighboring mountains were thronged with friendly warriors armed with clubs, spears, and slings, and altogether not less than five thousand men were in the forces under Porter, among them thirty-five Americans with guns, which he thought enough.

The Typees pelted them with stones as they sat at breakfast, and Porter sent a native ambassador, offering peace at the price of submission. He came back, running madly and bruised by his reception. Porter then ordered the advance.

The company advanced into the bushes, and were received by a veritable rain of stones and spears. Not an enemy was in sight. On all sides they heard the snapping sound of the slings, the whistling of the stones, the sibilant hiss of the spears that at every step fell in increasing numbers, but they could not see whence they came, and no whisper or rustle of underbrush revealed the lurking Typees.

They pushed on, hoping to get through the thicket, which Wilson had assured them was of no great extent. Lieutenant Down's leg was shattered by a stone, and Porter had to send a party with him to the rear. This left but twenty-four white men. The native allies did no fighting, but merely looked on. They were not going to make bitterer enemies of the Typees if the godlike whites could not whip them. The situation was desperate.

However, Porter chose to go on. They crossed a river, and in a jungle had to crawl on their hands and knees to make progress. They thought themselves happy to make their way through this, but immediately found themselves confronted by a high wall of rock, beyond which the enemy took their stand and showered down stones. The cartridges were almost exhausted. Porter sent four men to the ship for more, and, with three men knocked senseless by stones, was reduced to sixteen men.

There was nothing to do but run for safety, and pursued by the sneering foe, they gained the beach. Thence he sent another messenger to the Typees offering them another chance to surrender and pay tribute.

The Typees returned word that they "had driven the whites before them, that their guns missed fire often, that bullets were not as painful as stones or spears, that they had plenty of men to spare and the whites had not. They had counted the boats, knew the number they would carry, and laughed at the whites."

The Hapaas and other allies came down from the hills and began to discuss the victory of the Typees, with fear in their voices and a certain disdain of the whites. Porter ordered his men into the boats to return to the ship, but scarcely had they reached it when the Typees rushed on the Hapaas and drove them into the water. Porter returned to Tai-o-hae.

There he saw no alternative but to whip the Typees soundly. This time he determined to lack no force, and to go without allies. He selected two hundred men from his ships and prizes, and, with guides, upon a moonlight evening started to march overland to Typee Valley.

At midnight they heard the drums beating in Typee Valley. They had had a fearful march over mountain and dale and around yawning precipices. Silently they had struggled on, so as to give no hint of their intention to Typee sentinels or even to a Hapaa village. Numbers of the Tai-o-hae had followed them, but quietly, and these now told Porter that the songs floating up from the Typee settlements were rejoicings at their victory over the Whites and prayers to the gods to send rain to spoil the guns.

Porter was for descending at once, but the Tai-o-haes warned him that the path was so steep and dangerous that even in daylight it would take all their skill to go down it. To attempt it at night would be inviting death.

The Americans lay down to rest on this height, which commanded Typee Valley, and shortly rain began to fall in torrents. Cries of joy and praise to their gods arose from the Typees. Porter and his men, huddled in puddles, unable to find shelter, and fearful that every blast of the storm might hurl them from their slippery height, tried in vain to keep muskets and powder dry.

At daybreak they found half the ammunition useless, and themselves wearied, while the steepness of the track to the valley, and its treacherous condition after the rain made it wise to seek the Hapaas for rest and food. But, first, they fired a volley to let friendly tribes know they still had serviceable weapons, and as threat and warning to the Typees. They heard the echo in the blowing of war-conches, shouts of defiance, and the squealings of the pigs which the Typees began to catch for removal to the rear.

The Hapaas were none too pleasant to the whites, and had to be forced by threats to bringing and cooking hogs and breadfruit. All day the Americans rested and prepared their arms, at night they slept, and at the next daybreak they stood again to view the scene of their approaching battle.

The valley lay far below them, about nine miles in length and three in width, surrounded on every side, except at the beach, by lofty mountains. The upper part was bounded by a precipice many hundred feet in height, from which a handsome waterfall dropped and formed a meandering stream that found its outlet in the sea. Villages were scattered here and there, in the shade of luxuriant cocoanut- and breadfruit-groves; plantations were laid out in good order, enclosed within stone walls and carefully cultivated; roads hedged with bananas cut across the spread of green; everything spoke of industry, abundance, and happiness.

A large force of Typee warriors, gathered beside the river that glided near the foot of the mountain, dared the invaders to descend. In their rear was a fortified village, secured by strong stone walls. Nevertheless, the whites started down, and in a shower of stones captured the village, killed the chief Typee warrior, and chasing his men from wall to wall, slew all who did not escape. Few fled, however; they charged repeatedly, even to the very barrels of the muskets and pistols.

Porter realized that he would have to fight his way over every foot of the valley. He cautioned conservation of cartridges, and leaving two small parties behind to guard the wounded, he, with the main body, marched onward, followed by hordes of Tai-o-hae and Hapaa men, who dispatched the wounded Typees with stones and spears. They burned and destroyed ten villages one by one as they were reached, until the head of the valley was reached.

At the foot of the waterfall they turned and began the nine-mile tramp to the bay. Again they had to meet spear and stone as they burned temples and homes, great canoes, and wooden gods. Finally Porter attained the fort that had stopped him during the first fight, and found it a magnificent piece of construction, of great basaltic slabs, impregnable from the beach side. He saw that if he had tried that entrance to the valley again, he would have failed as before. Only heavy artillery could have conquered that mighty stronghold.

From the beach the Americans climbed by an easier ascent into the mountains, leaving a desolated valley behind them, and after feasting with the Hapaas, they marched back to Tai-o-hae almost dead with fatigue.

The Typees sued for peace, and when asked for four hundred hogs sent so many that Porter released five hundred after branding them. He had made peace between all the tribes; war was at an end; and with the island subdued, Porter sailed again to make war on British shipping.

He left behind him three captured ships in charge of three officers and twenty men, with six prisoners of war, ordering them to remain five months and then go to Chile if no word came from him. Within a few days the natives began again to show the spirit of resistance and were brought to courtesy by a show of force. Then another difficulty arose. All but eight of the crew joined with the English prisoners in seizing the officers, and put Lieutenant Gamble, the commander, with four loyal seamen, adrift in a small boat, while the mutineers went to sea in one of the English ships.

The five men reached another of the ships in the bay, where they learned that Wilson had instigated the mutiny. The worst had not come, for very soon the natives, perhaps also urged on by the Englishman, murdered all the others but Gamble, one seaman, one midshipman, and five wounded men. Of the eight survivors, only one was acquainted with the management of a ship, and all were sufferings from wounds or disease. With these men Lieutenant Gamble put to sea.

After incredible hardship, he succeeded in reaching Hawaii, only to be captured by a British frigate which a few weeks earlier had assisted in the capture of the Essex and Captain Porter. The United States never ratified Porter's occupation of Nuka-hiva, and it was left for the French thirty years later to seize the group. At about the same time Herman Melville, an American sailor, ventured overland into Typee Valley, and was captured and treated as a royal guest by the Typee people. He lived there many months, and heard no whisper of the havoc wrought by his countrymen a little time before. The Typees had forgiven and forgotten it; he found them a happy, healthy, beautiful race, living peacefully and comfortably in their communistic society, coveting nothing from each other as there was plenty for all, eager to do honor to a strange guest who, they hoped, would teach them many useful things.



CHAPTER XXVI

A visit to Typee; story of the old man who returned too late.

I said, of course, that I must visit Typee, the scene of Porter's bloody raid and Herman Melville's exploits, and while I was making arrangements to get a horse in Tai-o-hae I met Haus Ramqe, supercargo of the schooner Moana, who related a story concerning the valley.

"I was working in the store of the Soceite Comerciale de l'Ocean in Tai-o-hae when the Tropic Bird, a San Francisco mail-schooner, arrived. That was ten years ago. An old man, an American, came into our place and asked the way to Typee.

"'Ah,' I said, 'you have been reading that book by Melville.' He made no reply, but asked me to escort him to the valley. We set out on horseback, and though he had not said that he had ever been in these islands before, I saw that he was strangely interested in the scenes we passed. He was rather feeble with age, and he grew so excited as we neared the valley that I asked him what he expected to see there.

"He stopped his horse, and hesitated in his reply. He was terribly agitated.

"'I lived in Typee once upon a time,' he said slowly. 'Could there by chance be a woman living there named Manu? That was a long time ago, and I was young. Still, I am here, and she may be, too.'

"I looked at him and could not tell him the truth. It was evident he had made no confidant of the captain or crew of the Tropic Bird, for they could have told him of the desolation in Typee. I hated, though, to have him plump right into the facts.

"'How many people were there in your day?' I asked him. He replied that there were many thousands.

"'I lived there three years,' he said. 'I had a sweetheart named Manu, and I married her in the Marquesan way. I was a runaway sailor, and one night on the beach I was captured and taken away on a ship. I have been captain of a great American liner for years, always meaning to come back, and putting it off from year to year. All my people are dead, and I thought I would come now and perhaps find her here and end my days. I have plenty of money.'

"He seemed childish to me—perhaps he really had lost mental poise by age. I hadn't the courage to tell him the truth. We came on it soon enough. You must see Typee to realize what people mean to a place.

"The nonos were simply hell, but as I had lived a good many years in Tai-o-hae I was hardened to them. The old man slapped at them occasionally, but made no complaint. He hardly seemed to feel them, or to realize what their numbers meant. It was when we pushed up the trail through the valley, and he saw only deserted paepaes, that he began to look frightened.

"'Are they all gone?' he inquired weakly.

"'No,' I said, 'there are fifteen or twenty here.' We came to a clearing and there found the remnant of the Typees. I questioned them, but none had ever heard of him. There had been many Manus,—the word means bird,—but as they were the last of the tribe, she must have been dead before they were born, and they no longer kept in their memories the names of the dead, since there were so many, and all would be dead soon.

"The American still understood enough Marquesan to understand their answers, and taking me by the arm he left the horses and led me up the valley till he came to a spot where there were fragments of an old paepae, buried in vines and torn apart by their roots.

"'We lived here,' he said, and then he sat on the forsaken stones and cried. He said that they had had two children, and he had been sure that at least he would find them alive. His misery made me feel bad, and the damned nonos, too, and I cried—I don't know how damn sentimental it was, but that was the way it affected me. The old chap seemed so alone in the world.

"'It is three miles from here to the beach,' he said, 'and I have seen men coming with their presents for the chief, walking a yard apart, and yet the line stretched all the way to the beach.'

"He could hardly ride back to Tai-o-hae, and he departed with the Tropic Bird without saying another word to any one."

Typee, they told me, was half way to Atiheu and a good four miles by horse. The road had been good when the people were many, and was still the main road of the island, leading through the Valley of Hapaa. My steed was borrowed of T'yonny Howard, who, though he owned a valley, poured cement for day's wages.

"What I do?" he asked, as if I held the answer. "Nobody to help me work there. I cannot make copra alone. Even here they bring men from other place do work. Marquesan die too fast."

If T'yonny revered his father's countrymen, his horse did not. These island horses are unhappy-looking skates, though good climbers and sliders.

"You don't need person go with you," said the son of the former living picture. "That horsey know. You stay by him."

The saddle must have been strange to the horsey, for uneasiness communicated itself from him to me as we set out, an uneasiness augmented to me by the incessant vicious pricks of the ever-present nonos.

The way led ever higher above the emerald bay of Tai-o-hae set in the jade of the forest, and valley after valley opened below as the trail edged upward on the face of sheer cliffs or crossed the little plateaus of their summits. Hapaa lay bathed in a purple mist that hid from me the mute tokens of depopulation; Hapaa that had given Porter its thousands of naked warriors, and that now was devoid of human beings.

Dipping slightly downward again, the trail lay on the rim of a deep declivity, a sunless gulf in which the tree-tops fell away in rank below rank into dim depths of mistiness. There was no sign of human passing on the vine-grown trail, a vague track through a melancholy wilderness that seemed to breathe death and decay. A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.

I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth. A vague momentary flash of horror came over me. Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a revenant from the bloody days of Nuka-hiva? In those wicked eyes I saw reflected the tales of transmigatory vengeance, from the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood to the ass that one becomes who kills a Brahman. I gave vent at the same second to a shriek of anguish and struck the animal upon the nose, the tenderest part of his anatomy within reach. He released my foot, whirled, cavorted, and, as I seized a tree fern on the bank, went heels over head over the cliff.

T'yonny had said to "stay by horsey," but he could not have foreseen the road he would take. I was sorry for him as I heard the reverberations of his crashing fall. No living thing could escape death in such a drop, for though the cliff down which he had disappeared was not absolutely perpendicular, it was nearly so. Peering over it, I could not see his corpse, for fern and tree-top hid all below. At least, I thought, he had surcease of all ills now. And so I descended the steep trail on foot—mostly on one foot—until I reached the vale of Typee.

I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the somber silence. The trail was through a thicket of ferns, trees, and wild flowers. The perfume of Hinano, of the vaovao, with its delicate blue flowers, and the vaipuhao, whose leaves are scented like violets, filled the heavy air, and I passed acres of kokou, which looks like tobacco, but has a yellow fruit of delicious odor. It was such a garden as the prince who woke the Sleeping Beauty penetrated to reach the palace where she lay entranced, and something of the same sense of dread magic lay upon it. Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.

The thin, sharp buzzing of the nonos was incessant. They had come when man departed; there were none when Porter devastated the valley, nor when Melville spent his happy months here thirty years later. One must move briskly to escape them now, and I was pushing through the bushes that strove to obliterate the trail when I came upon a native.

He was so old that he must have been a youth in the valley when it was visited by the American-liner captain as a boy. He was quite nude save for a ragged cincture, and his body had shrunk and puckered, and his skin had folded and discolored until he looked as if life had ebbed away from him and left him high and dry between the past and the hereafter. A ragged chin beard, ashen in hue, hung below his gaping, empty mouth. But there was a spirit in his bosom still, for upon his head he wore a circle of bright flowers to supplement the sparse locks.

His eyes were barely openable, and his face, indeed, his whole body, was a coppery green, the soot of the candlenut, black itself, but blue upon the flesh, having turned by age to a mottled and hideous color. Only the striking patterns, where they branched from the biceps to the chest, were plain.

That he had been one of the great of Nuka-hiva was certain; the fact was stamped indelibly upon his person, and though worn and faded to the ghastly green of old copper, it remained to proclaim his lineage and his rank.

"Kaoha te iki!" said this ancient, as he stood in the path.

"Kaoha e!" I saluted him.

"Puaka piki enata" he said further, and pointed down the trail.

What could he mean? Puaka is pig, piki is to mount or climb, and enata is man. A great white light beat about my brow. "The pig men climb?" Could he mean Rozinante, the steed to whom T'yonny had entrusted me, and who had so basely deserted his trust over a cliff?

I hurried on incredulous, and, in a clearing where there were three or four horses, beheld the suicide grazing upon the luscious grass. He had lost much cuticle, and the saddle was in shreds, but the puaka piki enata was evidently in fairly good health.

The old man had slowly followed me down the trail, and he stood within the doorway of a rude hut, blinking in the sun as he watched my movements. In the houses were altogether fewer than a dozen people. They sat by cocoanut-husk fires, the acrid smoke of which daunted the nonos.

The reason any human beings endure such tortures to remain in this gloomy, deserted spot can only be the affection the Marquesan has for his home. Not until epidemics have carried off all but one or two inhabitants in a valley can those remaining be persuaded to leave it.

This dozen of the Taipi clan are the remainder of the twenty Ramqe saw with the heartbroken American. They have clung to their lonely paepaes despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of the nonos. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruit, but they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the "Gospel of St. John" in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened, seeming to drink in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in the chanting monotone of their uta.

Nine miles in length is Typee, from a glorious cataract that leaps over the dark buttress wall where the mountain bounds the valley, to the blazing beach. And in all this extent of marvelously rich land, the one-time fondly cherished abode of the most valiant clan of the Marquesas, of thousands of men and women whose bodies were as beautiful as the models for the statues the Greeks made, whose hearts were generous, and whose minds were eager to learn all good things, there are now this wretched dozen too old or listless to gather their own food. In the ruins of a broken and abandoned paepae, in the shadow of an acre-covering banian, I smoked and asked myself what a Christ would think of the havoc wrought by men calling themselves Christians.



CHAPTER XXVII

Journey on the Roberta; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss paradise in the valley of Oomoa.

I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner Roberta, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession that did her honor. The Roberta was the only vessel in those waters and, sailing as she did at the whim of her captain and the necessities of trade, none knew when she might return to Nuka-hiva, so I could but accept the opportunity she offered of reaching the southern group of islands again, and trust to fortune or favor to return me to my own island of Hiva-oa.

The Roberta lay low in the water, not so heavily sparred as the Morning Star, or with her under-cut stern, but old and battered, built for the business of a thief-catcher, and with a history as scarred as her hull and as slippery as her decks. Was she not once the Herman, and before that something else, and yet earlier something else, built for the Russians to capture the artful poachers of the Smoky Sea? And later a poacher herself, and still later stealing men, a black-birder, seizing the unoffending natives of these South Seas and selling them into slavery of mine or plantation, of guano-heap and sickening alien clime. Her decks have run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old brass cannon on her deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a thousand deeds of murder and rapine.

I pulled myself aboard by a topping-lift, climbed upon the low cabin-house, and jumped down to the tiny poop where Jerome Capriata held the helm.

This Corsican, with his more than sixty years, most of them in these waters, was a Marquesan in his intuitive skill in handling his schooner in all weather, for knowing these islands by a glimpse of rock or tree, for landing and taking cargo in all seas. Old and worn, like the Roberta, he was known to all who ranged the southern ocean. What romances he had lived and seen were hidden in his grizzled bosom, for he said little, and nothing of himself.

The supercargo, Henry Lee, a Norwegian of twenty-five years, six of which he had passed among the islands, set out the rum and wine and a clay bottle of water. He introduced me to Pere Olivier, a priest of the mission, whose charge was in the island of Fatu-hiva. From him I learned that the Roberta was bound for Oomoa, a port of that Island.

That I had not been given the vaguest idea what our first landfall would be was indicative of the secrecy maintained by these traders in the competition for copra. The supply being limited, often it is the first vessel on the spot after a harvest that is able to buy it, and captains of schooners guard their movements as an army its own during a campaign. The traders trust one another as a cat with a mouse trusts another cat.

The priest was sitting on a ledge below the taffrail, and I spoke to him in Spanish, as I had heard it was his tongue. His buenos dias in reply was hearty, and his voice soft and rich. A handsome man was Padre Olivier, though in sad disorder. His black soutane, cut like the woolen gown of our grandmothers, was soaking wet, and his low rough shoes were muddy. A soiled bandana was about his head. His finely chiseled features, benign and intelligent, were framed by a snow-white beard, and his eyes, large and limpid, looked benevolence itself. He was all affability, and eager to talk about everything in the world.

The rain, which all day had been falling at intervals, began again, and as the Roberta entered the open sea, she began to kick up her heels. Our conversation languished. When the supercargo called us below for dinner, pride and not appetite made me go. The priest answered with a groan. Padre Olivier was prostrate on the deck, his noble head on a pillow, his one piece of luggage, embroidered with the monogram of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the needlework of the nuns of Atuona.

"I am seasick if I wade in the surf," said the priest, in mournful jest.

The Roberta's cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners, the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water, sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic. Capriata, Harry Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the Roberta pitched and rolled.



When the ragged cook brought the first dish, unmistakably a cat swimming in a liquid I could have sworn by my nose to be drippings from an ammonia tank, I protested a lack of hunger for any food. My ruse passed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of cockroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions from Lee. I did not wait to see them throwing the invaders from the battlements of the table into the moat of salt water and spilt wine below, but quickly, though feebly, climbed to the deck and laid myself beside Pere Olivier, nor could cries that the enemy had been defeated and that "only a few" were flying about, summon me below again.

Pere Olivier and I stayed prone all night in alternate pelting rain and flooding moonlight, as a fair wind bowled us along at six knots an hour. Padre Olivier, between naps, recited his rosary to take his mind from his woes. I could tell when he finished a decade by his involuntary start as he began a new one. I had no such comfort as beads and prayers, and the flight of those schooner griffins had struck me in the solar plexus of imagination.

"Accept them as stations of the cross," said the priest. "This life is but a step to heaven."

I replied with some comments indicating my belief that cockroaches belonged on a still lower rung, and going in an opposite direction.

"I know those blattes, those saligauds," he said with sympathy. "They are sent by Satan to provoke us to blasphemy. I never go below."

Those pests of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire possession of the Roberta.

The supercargo, Lee, was not to be blamed, for he told me that once he had taken time in port to capture by poisonous lures a number he calculated at eight thousand, and that within a month those who had escaped had repopulated the old schooner as before. Then he despaired, and let them have sway. To sleep or eat among them was not possible to me, and the voyage was a nightmare not relieved by an incident of the second night.

Capriata, whose feet were calloused from going bare for years, awoke from a deep slumber that had been aided by rum, to find that the cockroaches in his berth had eaten through the half inch or more of hard skin and had begun to devour his flesh. With blasphemous and blood-chilling yells he bounded on deck, where he sat treating the wounds and cursing unrestrainedly for some time before joining Pere Olivier and me in democratic slumber on the bare boards. Several weeks later his feet had not recovered from their envenomed sores.

When eight bells sounded the hour of four, I got upon my feet and in the mellow dawn saw a panorama of peak and precipice, dark and threatening, the coast of Fatu-hiva and the entrance to Oomoa Bay, the southernmost island of the Marquesas, and the harbor in which the first white men who saw the islands anchored over three hundred years ago.

Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered. Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less than three hundred. Consumption was first brought to the islands by one of these whalers, and made such alarming inroads on the people of Hanavave that most of the remainder forsook their homes and crossed to the island of Tahuata, to escape the devil the white man had let loose among them.

We sailed on very slowly after the mountains had robbed us of the breeze, and when daylight succeeded the false dawn, we dropped our mud hooks a thousand feet from the beach. On it we could see a little wooden church and two dwellings, dwarfed to miniature by the grim pinnacles of rock, crude replicas of the towers of the Alhambra, slender minarets beside the giant cliffs, which were clothed with creeping plants in places and in places bare as the sides of a living volcano.

The fantastic and majestic assemblage of rock shapes on the shores of Fatu-hiva appeared as if some Herculean sculptor with disordered brain and mighty hand had labored to reproduce the fearful chimeras of his dreams.

The priest and I, with the supercargo, went ashore in a boat at six o'clock, and reached a beach as smooth and inviting as that of Atuona. A canoe was waiting for Pere Olivier; he climbed into it at once, his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "Adios!" as his men paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear confessions.

Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.

After a considerable walk through a thrifty plantation, we were in front of a European house which gave signs of comfort and taste. At the head of a flight of stairs on the broad veranda was a man in gold-rimmed eye-glasses and a red breechclout. His well-shaped, bald head and punctilious manner would have commanded attention in any attire.

I was introduced to Monsieur Francois Grelet, a Swiss, who had lived here for more than twenty years, and who during that time had never been farther away than a few miles. Not even Tahiti had drawn him to it. Since he arrived, at the age of twenty-four years, he had dwelt contentedly in Oomoa.

After we had chatted for a few moments he invited me to be his guest. I thought of the Roberta and those two kinds of cockroaches, the Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by day respectively; I looked at Grelet's surroundings, and I accepted. While the Roberta gathered what copra she could and flitted, I became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me passage to my own island.

Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his home. With the Swiss farmer's love of order, he had neglected nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings.

"I learned agriculture and dairying on my father's farm in Switzerland," said Grelet. "At school I learned more of their theory, and when I had seen the gay cities of Europe, I went to the new world to live. I was first at Pecos City, New Mexico, where I had several hundred acres' of government land. I brought grape-vines from Fresno, in California, but the water was insufficient for the sterile soil, and I was forced to give up my land. From San Francisco I sailed on the brig Galilee for Tahiti. I have never finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left her and installed myself on the Eunice, a small trading-schooner, and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land and settled down here."

Grelet looked about him and smiled.

"It isn't bad, hein?"

It was not. From the little cove where his boat-house stood a road swept windingly to his house through a garden of luxuriant verdure. Mango and limes, breadfruit and cocoanut, pomme de Cythere, orange and papaws, banana and alligator-pear, candlenut and chestnut, mulberry and sandalwood, tou, the bastard ebony, and rosewood, the rose-apple with purple tasseled flowers and delicious fruit, the pistachio and the badamier, scores of shrubs and bushes and magnificent tree-ferns, all on a tangled sward of white spider-lilies, great, sweet-smelling plants, an acre of them, and with them other ferns of many kinds, and mosses, the nodding taro leaves and the ti, the leaves which the Fatu-hivans make into girdles and wreaths; all grew luxuriantly, friendly neighbors to the Swiss, set there by him or volunteering for service in the generous way of the tropics.

The lilies, oranges, and pandanus trees yielded food for the bees, whose thatched homes stood thick on the hillside above the house. Grelet was a skilled apiarist, and replenished his melliferous flocks by wild swarms enticed from the forests. The honey he strained and bottled, and it was sought of him by messengers from all the islands.

Orchard and garden beyond the house gave us Valencia and Mandarin oranges, lemons, feis, Guinea cherries, pineapples, Barbadoes cherries, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, watermelons, cantaloups, Chile peppers, and pumpkins. Watercress came fresh from the river.

Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a secluded valley to run wild. One of the cows was twenty-two years old, but daily gave brimming buckets of milk for our refreshment. Beef and fish, breadfruit and taro, good bread from American flour, rum, and wine both red and white, with bowls of milk and green cocoanuts, were always on the table, a box of cigars, packages of the veritable Scaferlati Superieur tobacco, and the Job papers, and a dozen pipes. No king could fare more royally than this Swiss, who during twenty years had never left the forgotten little island of Fatu-hiva.

His house, set in this bower of greenery, of flowers and perfumes, was airy and neat, whitewashed both inside and out, with a broad veranda painted black. Two bedrooms, a storeroom in which he sold his merchandise, and a workroom, sufficed for all his needs. The veranda was living-room and dining-room; raised ten feet from the earth on breadfruit-tree pillars placed on stone, it provided a roof for his forge, for his saddle-and-bridle room, and for the small kitchen.

The ceilings in the house were of wood, but on the veranda he had cleverly hung a canvas a foot below the roof. The air circulated above it, bellying it out like a sail and making the atmosphere cool. Under this was his dining-table, near a very handsome buffet, both made by Grelet of the false ebony, for he was a good carpenter as he was a crack boatsman, farmer, cowboy, and hunter. Here we sat over pipe and cigarette after dinner, wine at our elbows, the garden before us, and discussed many things.

Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers. He knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics. He could name the cabinets of Europe, the characters and records of their members, or discuss the quality of Caruso's voice as compared with Jean de Reszke's, though he had heard neither. Twenty-two years ago he had left everything called civilization, he had never been out of the Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which there was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was content.

"I have everything I want; I grow it or I make it. My horses and cattle roam the hills; if I want meat, beef or goat or pig, I go or I send a man to kill an animal and bring it to me. Fish are in the river and the bay; there is honey in the hives; fruit and vegetables in the garden, wood for my furniture, bark for the tanning of hides. I cure the leather for saddles or chair-seats with the bark of the rose-wood. Do you know why it is called rose-wood? I will show you. Its bark has the odor of roses when freshly cut. Yes, I have all that I want. What do I need from the great cities?"

He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed it meditatively.

"A man lives only a little while, hein? He should ask himself what he wants from life. He should look at the world as it is. These traders want money, buying and selling and cheating to get it. What is money compared to life? Their life goes in buying and selling and cheating. Life is made to be lived pleasantly. Me, I do what I want to do with mine, and I do it in a pleasant place."

His pipe went out while he gazed at the garden murmurous in the twilight. He knocked out the dottle, refilled the bowl and lighted the tobacco.

"You should have seen this island when I came. These natives die too fast. Ah, if I could only get labor, I could make this valley produce enough for ten thousand people. I could load the ships with copra and cotton and coffee."

He was twenty-two years and many thousands of miles from the great cities of Europe, but he voiced the wail of the successful man the world over. If he could get labor, he could turn it into building his dreams to reality, into filling his ships with his goods for his profit. But he had not the labor, for the fruits of a commercial civilization had killed the islanders who had had their own dreams, their own ships, and their own pleasures and profits in life.



CHAPTER XXVIII

Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the "survival of the fittest."

"I pictured myself cultivating many hundreds of acres when I first came here," said Grelet. "I laid out several plantations, and once shipped much coffee, as good, too, as any in the world. I gather enough now for my own use, and sell none. I grew cotton and cocoanuts on a large scale. I raise only a little now.

"There were hundreds of able-bodied men here then. I used to buy opium from the Chinese labor-contractors and from smugglers, and give it to my working people. A pill once a day would make the Marquesans hustle. But the government stopped it. They say that the book written by the Englishman, Stevenson, did it. We must find labor elsewhere soon, Chinese, perhaps. Those two Paumotans brought by Begole are a godsend to me. I wish some one would bring me a hundred."

The two Paumotan youths, Tennonoku and Kedeko-lio, lay motionless on the floor of the veranda twenty feet away. They had been sold to Grelet for a small sum by Begole, captain of a trading-schooner. In passing the Paumotan Islands, many hundred miles to the south, Begole had forgotten to leave at Pukatuhu, a small atoll, a few bags of flour he had promised to bring the chief on his next voyage, and the chief, seeing the schooner a mile away, had ordered these boys to swim to it and remind the skipper of his promise. Begole meanwhile had caught a wind, and the first he knew of the message was when the boys climbed aboard the schooner many miles to sea. He did not trouble to land them, but brought them on to the Marquesas and sold them to Grelet.

They spoke no Marquesan, and Grelet had difficulty in making them understand that they must labor for him, and in enforcing his orders, which they could not comprehend. There was little copra being made in the rainy weather, and they lay about the veranda or squatted on the paepae of the laborers' cookhouse, making a fire of cocoanut-husks twice a day to roast their breadfruit. Their savage hearts were ever in their own atoll, the home to which the native clings so passionately, and their eyes were dark with hopeless longing. No doubt they would die soon, as so many do when exiled, but Grelet's copra crop would profit first.

The dire lack of labor for copra-making, tree-planting, or any form of profitable activity is lamented by all white men in these depopulated islands. Average wages were sixty cents a day, but even a dollar failed to bring adequate relief. The Marquesan detests labor, which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white owners of plantations. Since every man had a piece of land that yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for the government in payment for taxes.

The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with the native. They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the Marquesan to procure a modicum of labor. They saw fortunes to be made if they could but whip a multitude of backs to bending for them, but they either could not or would not perceive the situation from the native's point of view.

In America I often heard men who were out of employment, particularly in bad seasons, in big cities or in mining camps, argue the right to work. They could not enforce this alleged natural right, and in their misery talked of the duty of society or the state in this direction. But they were obliged to content themselves with the thin alleviation of soup-kitchens, charity wood-yards, and other easers of hard times, and with threats of sabotage or other violence.

Here in the islands, where work is offered to unwilling natives, the employers curse their lack of power to drive them to the copra forests, the kilns and boats. Thus, as in highly civilized countries we maintain that a man has no inherent or legal right to work, in these islands the employer has no weapon by which to enforce toil. But had the whites the power to order all to do their bidding, they would create a system of peonage as in Mexico.

An acquaintance of mine in these seas took part in, and profited largely by, the removal to a distant place of the entire population of an island on which the people had led the usual life of the Polynesian. He and his associates sold three hundred men to plantation labor, which they hated and to which they were unaccustomed. Within a year two hundred and fifty of them had died as fast as disease could sap their grief-stricken bodies. Their former home, which they died longing to see again, was made a feeding-place for sheep. The merchants reaped a double toll. They were paid well for delivering the owners of the land to the plantations, and in addition they got the land.

Now, my acquaintance is a man of university education, a quoter of Haeckel and Darwin, with "survival of the fittest" as his guiding motto since his Jena days. Says he, quoting a Scotchman:

"Tone it down as you will, the fact remains that Darwinism regards animals as going up-stairs, in a struggle for individual ends, often on the corpses of their fellows, often by a blood-and-iron competition, often by a strange mixture of blood and cunning, in which each looks out for himself and extinction besets the hindmost."

Further says my stern acquaintance, specially when in his cups:

"The whole system of life-development is that of the lower providing food for the higher in ever-expanding circles of organic existence, from protozoea to steers, from the black African to the educated and employing man. We build on the ribs of the steers, and on the backs of the lower grade of human."

Scientific books have taken the place of the Bible as a quotation-treasury of proof for whatever their reader most desires to prove. Now I am no scientist and take, indeed, only the casual interest of the average man in the facts and theories of science. But it appears to me that in his theory of the survival of the fittest my acquaintance curiously overlooks the question of man's own survival as a species.

If we are to base our actions upon this cold-blooded and inhuman view of the universe, let us consider that universe as in fact inhuman, and having no concern for man except as a species of animal very possibly doomed to extinction, as many other species of animal have been doomed in the past, unless he proves his fitness to survive not as an individual, but as a species.

Now man is a gregarious animal; he lives in herds. The characteristic of the herd is that within it the law of survival of the fittest almost ceases to operate. The value of a herd is that its members protect each other instead of preying upon each other. Nor, in what we are pleased to call the animal kingdom, do herds of the same species prey upon each other. They rather unite for the protection of their weaker members.

So far as I am informed, mankind is the only herd of which this is not true. Cattle and horses unite in protecting the young and feeble; sheep huddle together against cold and wolves; bees and ants work only for the welfare of the swarm, which is the welfare of all. This, we are told, is the reason these forms of life have survived. But ship officers beat sailors because sailors have no firearms and fear charges of mutiny. Policemen club prisoners who are poorly dressed. Employees make profits from the toil of children. Strong nations prey on weak peoples, and the white man kills the white man and the black and brown and yellow man in mine, plantation, and forest the world over.

He defends this murder of his own kind by the pat phrase "survival of the fittest." But man is not a solitary animal, he is a herd animal, and within the herd nature's definition of fitness does not apply. The herd is a refuge against the law of tooth and fang. Importing within the herd his own interpretation of that law, man is destroying the strength of his shelter. By so much as one man preys upon or debases another man, he weakens the strength of the man-herd. And for man it is the herd, not the individual, that must meet that stern law of "the survival of the fittest" on the vast impersonal arena of the universe.

"Bully 'Ayes was the man to make the Kanakas work!" said Lying Bill Pincher. "I used to be on Penryn Island and that was 'is old 'ang-out. 'Ayes was a pleasant man to meet. 'E was 'orspitable as a 'ungry shark to a swimming missionary. Bald he was as a bloomin' crab, stout and smiling.

"'E 'ad two white wives a-setting in his cabin on the schooner, and they called it the parlor. Smart wimmen they was, and saved 'is life for 'im more 'n once. 'E 'd get a couple of chiefs on board by deceiving 'em with rum, and hold 'em until 'is bloomin' schooner was chock-a-block with copra. The 'ole island would be working itself to death to free the chiefs. Then when 'e 'ad got the copra, 'e 'd steal a 'undred or two Kanakas and sell 'em in South America.

"'E was smart, and yet 'e got 'is'n. 'Is mate seen him coming over the side with blood in his eye, and batted 'im on 'is conch as 'is leg swung over the schooner's bul'ark. 'Ayes dropped with 'is knife between 'is teeth and 'is pistols in both 'ands.

"'E'd murdered 'undreds of white and brown and black men, and 'e was smart, and 'e got away with it. But 'e made the mistake of not having made a friend of 'is right 'and man."



CHAPTER XXIX

The white man who danced in Oomoa Valley; a wild-boar hunt in the hills; the feast of the triumphant hunters and a dance in honor of Grelet.

Grelet had gone in a whale-boat to Oia, a dozen miles away, to collect copra, and I was left with an empty day to fill as I chose. The house, the garden, and the unexplored recesses of Oomoa Valley were mine, with whatever they might afford of entertainment or adventure. Every new day, wherever spent, is an adventure, but when to the enigmatic morning is added the zest of a strange place, it must be a dull man who does not thrill to it.

I began the day by bathing in the river with the year-old Tamaiti, Grelet's child. Her mother was Hinatiaiani, a laughing, beautiful girl of sixteen years, and the two were cared for by Pae, a woman of forty, ugly and childless. Hinatiaiani was her adopted daughter, and Pae had been sorely angered when Grelet, whose companion she had been for eighteen years, took the girl. But with the birth of Tamaiti, Pae became reconciled, and looked after the welfare of the infant more than the volatile young mother.

Tamaiti had never had a garment upon her sturdy small body, and looked a plump cherub as she played about the veranda, crawling in the puddles when the rain drove across the floor.

"The infant has never been sick," Grelet had said. "One afternoon I was starting for the river to bathe, when that girl was making herself a bed of cocoanut-leaves under the house. She said she expected the baby, as, when she climbed a cocoanut-tree a moment earlier, she had felt a movement. She would not lie in a bed, but, like her mother before her, must make her a nest of cocoanut-leaves. When I returned from my bath, Tamaiti was born. She was chopping wood next day—the mother, I mean."

Though scarcely a twelve-month old, the baby swam like a frog in the clear water of the river, gurgling at intervals scraps of what must have been Marquesan baby-talk, unintelligible to me, but showing plainly her enjoyment. Something of European caution, however, still remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up the dripping little body and carried her up the garden path to the house when I returned for breakfast. Pae received her with no concern, and gave her a piece of cocoanut to suck. I saw the infant, clutching it in one hand, toddling and stumbling river-ward again when after breakfast I set out for a walk up Oomoa Valley.

Oomoa was far wilder than Atuona, more lonely, with hundreds of vacant paepaes. Miles of land, once cultivated, had been taken again by the jungle, as estates lapsed to nature after thousands of years of man. Still, even far from the houses, delicate trees had preserved themselves in some mysterious way, and oranges and limes offered themselves to me in the thickets.

The river that emptied into the bay below Grelet's plantation flowed down the valley from the heights, and beside it ran the trail, a road for half a mile, then a track growing fainter with every mile, hardly distinguishable from the tangle of trees and bushes on either side. Here and there I saw a native house built of bamboo and matting, very simple shelters with an open space for a doorway, but wholesome, clean, and, to me, beautiful. I met no one, and most of the huts were on the other side of the river, but from one nearer the track a voice called to me, "Kaoha! Manihii, a tata mai! Greeting, stranger, come to us!"

The hut, which, by measurement, was ten feet by six, held six women and girls, all lying at ease on piles of mats. It was a rendezvous of gossips, a place for siestas and scandal. One had seen and hailed me, and when I came to their paepae, they all filed out and surrounded me, gently and politely, but curiously. Obviously they had seen few whites.

The six were from thirteen to twenty years of age, four of them strikingly beautiful, with the grace of wild animals and the bright, soft eyes of children. Smiling and eager to be better acquainted with me, they examined my puttees of spiral wool, my pongee shirt, and khaki riding-breeches, the heavy seams of which they felt and discussed. They discovered a tiny rip, and the eldest insisted that I take off the breeches while she sewed it.

As this was my one chance to prevent the rip growing into a gulf that would ultimately swallow the trousers, I permitted the stitch in time, and having nothing in my pockets for reward, I danced a jig. I cannot dance a step or sing a note correctly, but in this archipelago I had won inter-island fame as a dancer of strange and amusing measures, and a singer of the queer songs of the whites.

Recalling the cake-walks, sand-sifting, pigeon-winging, and Juba-patting of the south, the sailor's hornpipe, the sword-dance of the Scotch, and the metropolitan version of the tango, I did my best, while the thrilled air of Oomoa Valley echoed these words, yelled to my fullest lung capacity:

"There was an old soldier and he had a wooden leg, And he had no tobacco, so tobacco did he beg. Said the soldier to the sailor, 'Will you give me a chew?' Said the sailor to the soldier, 'I'll be damned if I do! Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks, And you'll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box.'"

Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the paepae of the six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my disordered trousers. They laughed till they fell back on the rocks, they lifted the ends of their pareus to wipe their eyes, and they demanded an encore, which I obligingly gave them in a song I had kept in mind since boyhood. It was about a young man who took his girl to a fancy ball, and afterward to a restaurant, and though he had but fifty cents and she said she was not hungry, she ate the menu from raw oysters to pousse-cafe, and turned it over for more.

It went with a Kerry jig that my grandfather used to do, and if grandfather, with his rare ability, ever drew more uproarious applause than I, it must have been a red-letter day for him, even in Ireland. My hearers screamed in an agony of delight, and others dwelling far away, or passing laden with breadfruit and bananas, gathered while I chortled and leaped, and made the mountain-side ring with Marquesan bravos.

With difficulty I made my escape, but my success pursued me. "Menike haka!" came the cry from each house I passed, for the news had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come on the Roberta, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.

As in the old days of war or other crisis, the cry had been raised, and was echoed from all directions, and from hut to cocoanut-tree to crag the call was heard, growing fainter and more feeble, dying gradually from point to point, echoing farther and yet farther in the distance. This was the ancient telegraph-system of the islanders, by which an item of information sped in a moment to the most remote edges of the valley. Unwittingly, in my gratitude, I had raised it, and now I pursued my way in the glare of a pitiless publicity.

I was met almost immediately by a score of men and women who had left the gathering of fruit or the duties of the household to greet me. Fafo, the leader, besought me earnestly to accompany them to a neighboring paepae and dance for them.

He had the finest eyes I have ever seen in a man's head, dark brown, almond-shaped, large and lustrous, wells of melancholy. There was something exquisite about the young man, his lemon-colored skin, his delicate hands and feet, his slender, though strong, body, and his regular, brilliant teeth. Some Spanish don had bred him, or some moody Italian with music in his soul, for he was a Latin in face and figure. His eyes had that wistfulness as they sought mine which the Tahitians have put well in one of their picture-words, ano-ano'uri, "the yearning, sorrowful gaze of a dog watching his master at dinner."

A belated shrinking from renown, however, made me reject his pleas, and perceiving a pool near at hand, I softened refusal by a suggestion that we bathe. The pool, I learned, was famous in the valley, for one could swim forty feet in it, and on the other side the hill rose straight, with banana-trees overhanging the water forty feet above. We climbed this rocky face and dived into the water again and again, rejoicing in its coolness and in that sheer pagan delight of the dive, when in the air man becomes all animal, freed from every restraint and denied every safeguard save the strength of his own muscle and nerve.

We saw at last, on the edge of the bank, one of Grelet's dogs, whining for attention. He was badly wounded in two places, blood dripped on the rocks from open cuts three inches long, and one paw hung helpless, while with eager cries and beseeching looks he urged us to avenge him in his private feud with a boar. Assured of our interest, he stayed not to be comforted or cured, but hobbled eagerly up the trail, begging us with whines to accompany him.

Five men and several other dogs followed the wounded hound, and I went with them. The Marquesans had war-clubs and long knives like undersized machetes. Every Islander carries such a knife for cutting underbrush or cocoanut-stems, and usually it is his only tool for building native houses, so that he becomes very expert with it, as the Filipino with his bolo or the Cuban with his machete.

For several hours we climbed the slopes, until we came upon a narrow trail cut in the side of a cliff, a path perhaps two feet wide, with sheer wall of rock above and abrupt precipice below. On this the chief hunter stationed himself and two men while the others scouted below. This leader was a man of sixty, tattooed from toes to scalp on one side only, so that he was queerly parti-colored, and capping this odd figure, he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. He motioned to me to take my place in a niche of the cliff, where I could stand and sweep the trail with my eyes, secure from assault. He had given directions to the others and intended to provide for me a rare sight, and to gain for himself a trifle of the glory that had been his as a young man in wars against neighboring valleys.

For an hour we waited and smoked, hearing from time to time the clamor of men and dogs in the thickets below. The common way of hunting boars, said the chief, was to chase them through the woods and kill them by throwing tomahawks at them. This method allows the hunter to have a tree always within a short run, and about these trees he dodges when pursued, or if too closely pressed, climbs one. It is dangerous sport, as only a cool and experienced man can drive a knife into a vital part of a boar in full career, and no wound in non-vital parts will cause the desperate beast even to falter.

Gradually the cries of the men and the barking of the dogs grew nearer, and suddenly, bursting from the bushes some distance down the trail, we saw ten bristling hogs. They had been driven upward until they reached the artificial shelf, and behind them hounds and hunters cut off all escape.

"Apau! Aia oe a!" shouted the rear-guard as the boars took the trail. "Lo! Prepare to strike!"

The three slayers gripped their clubs and braced their feet. I was above the chief, who was the last of the trio. Where he planted his feet, the path was most narrow, so that two could not pass. His knife was in his pareu, which, to leave his legs unhampered, he had rolled and tucked in until it was no more than a G-string. His muscles were like the cordage of the faufee—the vine that strangles—and his chest like a great buckler, half blue and half copper.

"Peo! Pepo! Huepe! Huope!" yelled the scouts, in the "tally-ho!" cry of Marquesan, and the boars struck the trail with hatred hot in their eyes and with gnashing tusks.

The three slayers were five hundred feet apart. The first struck at all ten, as singly they rushed past him. Three he stopped. The second man laid prostrate four. The three remaining were, naturally, the fittest. They were huge, hideous, snarling beasts, bared teeth gleaming in a slather of foam, eyes bloodshot and vicious. The old chief saw them coming; he saw, too, that I had shrunk to a plaster on the wall while he faced the danger like a warrior in the spear-test of their old warfare.

"Aia! Aia!" he said to encourage me. His club of ironwood, its edge sharp and toothed, he grasped with both hands; he widened his foothold and threw his body forward to withstand a shock. He calculated to an inch the arrival of the first boar, and swung his u'u on its head with precision. The boar crumpled up and fell down the hillside. The second he struck as unerringly, but the third he chose to kill with his knife.



He laid down the u'u and drew the knife with one motion, and as the powerful brute rushed at him, stepped aside in the split second between his gauge of its position and its leap. His knife was thrust straight out. It met the boar with perfect and delicate accuracy. The beast fell, quivered a moment, and lay still.

It was a perfection of butchery, for one slash of those tusks, ripping the chief's legs, and he would have been down, crashing over the cliff, and dead. I was almost in chants of admiration for his nerve and accuracy.

"Ah, if this had been war, and these had been enemies!"

The dead boars were slung on poles, but a half dozen had to be left on branches of trees for the morrow, and it was late in the day when we reached Grelet's house for the feast.

Pae, the elder woman of the household, received us joyously. In the master's absence she had become a different being from the sulky, contrary one I had seen while he was at home. Usually she and Hinatiaiani, the mother of the baby, ate their food squatting beside the cook-house; they rarely came upon the veranda, never sat upon a chair, and never were asked to our table. Now they were in complete possession of the house and Pae was transformed into a jolly soul, her kinsfolk about her on the veranda and the bottles emptying fast. She celebrated our arrival with the boars by bringing out two quarts of creme de menthe and a bottle of absinthe, so that the mice with the big cat away played an uncorking air right merrily.

All was now a bustle of preparation for the feast. While many prepared the earth-oven for the pig, the head cook made fire in their primitive way, using the fire-plough of purau-wood braced against a pillar of the veranda. Meantime the oven was dug, sides and bottom lined with stones, and sticks piled within it for the fire. A top layer of stones was placed on the flames and when it had grown red-hot, the pig was pulled and hauled over it until the bristles were removed. The carcass was then carried to the river, the intestines removed, and inside and outside thoroughly washed in a place where the current was strong.

The oven was made ready for its reception by removing the upper layer of stones and the fire, and placing banana-leaves all about the bottom and sides, in which the pig, his own interior filled with hot stones wrapped in leaves, was placed, with native sweet-potatoes and yams beside him. More leaves covered all, and another layer of red hot stones. A surface of dirt sealed the oven.

A young dog was also part of the fare, and was cooked in the same manner as the pig. The Marquesans are fond of dogs. This particular one had been brought to this valley from another and was not on friendly terms with any of his butchers. In fact, his death was due more to revenge than to hunger for his flesh. He had bitten the leg of a man who lived in the upper part of Oomoa, and when this man came limping to the banquet, he brought the biter as his contribution.

Those who would turn up their noses at Towser must hear Captain Cook, who was himself slain and dismembered in Hawaii:

"The flesh of the South Sea Dog is a meat not to be despised. It is next to our English Lamb."

Personally I am willing to let it be next to lamb at every meal, and I shall always take its neighbor, but it argues a narrow taste not to concede that the dishes of our foreign friends may have a relish all their own. Dog has been a Maori tidbit for thousands of years. It was introduced into New Zealand from these islands. The aborigines had a fierce, undomesticated dog, which they hunted for its flesh. It was a sort of fox, but disappeared before the Polynesians reached the islands.

All Polynesians have liked dogs, liked them as pets, as they do to-day, and liked them as grub. If one asks how one can pet Fido Monday and eat him Tuesday, I will reply that we, the highest types of civilization, pet calves and lambs, chickens and rabbits, and find them not a whit the less toothsome. The Marquesan loves his pig as we love our dog, cuddles him, calls him fond names, believes that he goes to heaven,—and nevertheless roasts him for dinner.

The yams, potatoes, breadfruit, and other accompaniments of the dog, pig, and chicken were all ready at six o'clock, when cries of delight summoned us idlers. The earth had been cleared from the oven, the leaves removed, and the pig was lifted into the air, cooked to a turn, succulent, steaming, delicious. The feast was spread in a clearing, so that the sun, sinking slowly in the west, might filter his rays through the lofty trees and leave us brightened by his presence, but cool in the shadows. For me a Roman couch of mats was spread, while the natives squatted in the comfort of men whose legs are natural.

The women waited upon us, passing all the food in leaves, in cleanly fashion. Pae herself, though hostess, could not eat till all the men were satisfied, for the tapu still holds, though without authority. Knives nor forks hindered our free onslaught upon the edibles, and there were cocoanut-shells beside each of us for washing our hands between courses, a usual custom.

Piahi, the native chestnuts shelled and cooked in cocoanut-milk, were an appetizer, followed by small fish, which we ate raw after soaking them in lime juice. There is no dish that the white man so soon learns to crave and so long remembers when departed. Some of the guests did not like the sauce, but took their small fish by the tail, dripping with salt water, and ate it as one might eat celery, bones, and all.

With the main course were served dried squid and porpoise, and fresh flying-fish and bonito and shrimp. The feast was complete with mangoes, oranges, and pineapples, also bananas ripened in the expeditious way of the Marquesas. They bury them in a deep hole lined with cracked candlenuts and grass and cover all with earth. In several days—and they know the right time to an hour—the bananas are dug up, yellow and sweet.



Pae furnished a limited quantity of rum for the fete, and a cocoanut-shell filled with namu was passed about. Every one was already enthusiastic, and after several drinks of the powerful sugar-distillation pipes were lit and palaver began. I had to tell stories of my strange country, of the things called cities, large villages without a river through them, so big that they held tini tini tini tini mano mano mano mano people, with single houses in which more people worked than there were in all the islands. Such a house might be higher than three or four cocoanut trees stood one on the other, and no one walked up-stairs, but rode in boxes lifted by ropes.

"How many men to a rope?" asked Pae.

The old men told me about their battles, much as at a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic the veterans fight again the Civil war. One man, whose tattooing striped his body like the blue bands of a convict's suit, said that it was the custom on Fatu-hiva for the leader or chief on each side to challenge the enemy champion.

"Our army stood thirty or forty feet away from the other army," said he, "and our chief stood still while the other threw his spear. If it struck our chief, at once the warriors rushed into battle; if it missed, our chief had the right to go close to the other and thrust a spear through his heart. The other stood firm and proud. He smiled with scorn. He looked on the spear when it was raised, and he did not tremble. But sometimes he was saved by his courage, for our chief after looking at him with terrible eyes, said, 'O man of heart, go your way, and never dare again to fight such a great warrior as I!'

"That ended the war. The other chief was ashamed, and led his men down to their own valley. But if our chief had killed him, then there was war; at once we struck with the u'u and ran forward with our spears. These battles gave many names to children, names remembering the death or wounding of the glorious deeds of the warriors. To await calmly the spear of the other chief, the head raised, the eyes never winking, to look at the spear as at a welcome gift—that was what our chiefs must do. Death was not so terrible, but to leave one's body in the hands of the foe, to be eaten, to know that one's skull would be hung in a tree, and one's bones made into tattoo needles or fish-hooks—! Toomanu!

"We are not the men we were. We do not eat the 'Long Pig' any more, but we have not the courage, the skill, or the strength. When the spears were thrown, and each man had but one, then the fight was with the u'u, hand to hand and eye to eye. That was a fight of men! The gun is the weapon of cowards. It is the gun that fights, not the man.

"Our last fight we brought back four bodies. Meat spoils quickly. We had our feast right here where we sit now."

Excited barking of the dogs announced the arrival of Grelet with several men. They had rowed all the way to Oia and had sailed back, arriving by chance in time to share the abundance of our feast. After the twelve-mile pull in the blazing sun and the toilsome journey back by night this feast was their reward, and all their pay.

Pae, reduced once more to sullen servitude, poured the rum, generous portions of it in cocoanut-shells, which the newcomers emptied as they ate, hastening soon to join the other guests on the broad veranda, where late at night a chant began.

Half a dozen men, tattooed from toes to waist and some to the roots of their hair, sat on a mat on the floor, all naked except for their pareus, the red and yellow of which shone in the light of the oil-lamps in brightening contrast to brown skins and dark blue ink. One was far gone with fefe, his legs almost as large as those of an elephant. He was a grotesque in hideous green. The blue of the candlenut-ink, in bizzare designs upon body and legs, had turned a scaly greenish hue from age and kava excesses. Revealed in the yellow light, he was like a ghastly bronze monstrosity that had known the weathering of a century.

He was the leader of the chant and, like all the others, had drunk plenty of Grelet's rum. The pipe was passing, and Grelet took his pull at it in the circle. The chant was of the adventures of the day. The hunters and specially Namu Ou Mio, the slayer of the three boars, told of the deed of prowess on the cliff-side, while the others sang of their journey and the sea. Squatting on the mat, they bent and swayed in pantomime, telling the tales, lifting their voices in praises of their own deeds and of the virtues of Grelet.

That thrifty Swiss, in red breech-clout and spectacles, the lamplight shining on his bald head, sat in the midst of them, familiar by a score of years with their chants. Pae filled the pipe and the bowls and joined in the chorus, while the Paumotan boys, in a shadowy recess, sipped their rum and rolled their eyes in astonished appreciation of the first joviality of their lives. When the leader began the ancient cannibal chant, the song of war and of feasting at the High Place, the tattooed men forgot even the rum. The nights of riot after return from the battle, the fighting qualities of their fathers, the cheer of the fires, the heat of the ovens, and the baking of the "Long Pig," and the hours when the most beautiful girls danced naked to win the acclaim of the multitude and to honor their parents; all these they celebrated. The leader gave the first line in a dramatic tone, and the others chanted the chorus. Most of the verses they knew by rote, but there were improvisations that brought applause from all.

At midnight the man with the elephantiasis removed his pareu to free his enormous legs for dancing, and he and the others, their hands joined, moved ponderously in a tripping circle before the couch on which I lay. The chant was now a recital of my merits, the chief of which was that I was a friend of Grelet, that mighty man wiser than Iholomoni (Solomon), with more wives than that great king, and stronger heart to chase the wild bull. He steers a whale-boat with a finger, but no wave can tear the helm from his grasp. Long has he been in Oomoa, just and brave and generous has he been, and his rum is the best that is made in the far island of Tahiti.

So passed the night and the rum, in a pandemonium of voices, gyrating tattooed bodies, flashes of red and yellow and blue pareus, rolling eyes, curls of smoke drifting under the gently moving canvas ceiling, while from the garden came the scent of innumerable dewy flowers; and at intervals in the chanting I heard from the darkness of the bay the sound of a conch-shell blown on some wayfaring boat.

I dozed, and wakened to see Grelet asleep. Pae was still filling the emptied cocoanut-shells, and the swollen green man postured before me like some horrid figment of a dream. I roused myself again. Pae had locked up the song-maker, and all the tattooed men slumbered where they sat, the Paumotan boys with sunbonnets tied about their heads lay in their corner, dreaming, perhaps, of their loved home on Pukaruha. I woke again to find the garden green and still in the gray morning, and the veranda vacant.