Front matter (continued 5)

"The days passed in pleasant island fashion; the loading of the schooner went on; there was no mention of a change in plans. The chief came to take his daughter home, and when she had gone Terii spoke to me, not too convincingly, of his return to civilization. My trip to Rimarutu was a matter of pleasure alone; I was already planning to take this berth, and was not sorry when Terii announced one morning that we would sail north that afternoon. One seems perpetually saying good-by down here—these islands are havens of a brief call, of sad farewells, of lingering and regretful memory. Our parting from the people of Rimarutu was more than usually painful; they had hoped to the last that Terii would leave some word, some promise; but he remained silent, though I could see that the leave-taking was not without effect.

"Finally the last canoe put off for shore; the anchor came up, the motor started, and Terii steered across the lagoon for the pass. The sails were still furled, for there was a light head wind. I watched his face as he stood in silence at the wheel; there was a look in his eyes which made me sorry for the boy. We crossed the lagoon, glided past green islets, and drew abreast of the other village. The people lined the shore, fluttering handkerchiefs, shouting good wishes and farewells.

"Beyond the settlement the pass led out, blue and deep, between sunken piers of coral, where the surf thundered in patches of white. All at once the old mate sang out and pointed—a dot was on the water ahead of us, a swimmer moving out from land to cut us off. The son of Varana turned the wheel; the schooner swung inshore; I heard a quick command and felt the speed of the engine slacken.

"Terii was staring ahead with a strange intensity—instinct or premonition was at work. I looked again as we drew near; a cloud of dark hair floated behind the swimmer's head; it was a woman—Tehina! Terii sprang to the rail. A moment later she had been lifted over the side and was standing beside him in the cockpit, dripping, trembling a little with cold and fear, doing her best to smile. The mate was pulling at Terii's arm and pointing back toward the village. A whaleboat had put out from shore and was heading for us at the top speed of the rowers; it was the chief himself, I believe, who stood in the stern and whose shouts were beginning to reach our ears.

"At that moment Terii proved that he was his father's son. He glanced back once, and then, without the smallest interval of hesitation, his arm went about the wet shoulder of Tehina.

"'Full speed ahead,' he ordered in a cool voice."

Tari poured rum into my glass, and tilted the last of the bottle into his own. The schooner was taking it easily with her engine at half speed, riding a gentle swell. The ship's bell rang twice, paused, and rang again—a sharp and mellow sound. It was long past midnight.

"If you ever get down to Rimarutu," said Tari, as he rose to go on deck, "you will find Terii there—he bids fair to leave the island even less than Varana did."

CHAPTER XII

In the Cook Group

I was close to beginning this letter with a little fun at your expense; you would have been mystified—perhaps convinced that my haunted friends of Ahu Ahu were just a bit uncanny. It is really a pity not to do it! I should have begun with a vivid glimpse of a séance; the quiet moonlight outside, seen through an open door; the glimmer of a turned-down lamp in the house, revealing the rapt sightless face of the medium; the summoning of old Rakamoana from her sleeping place in the marae; the unnatural voice proclaiming the coming of the spirit.

Then I would have told how a message from the visitor was announced—for the strange white man vouched for by the mother of Apakura. "I see an island," the ghostly voice might have gone on—"a little land surrounding a great lagoon. It is Nukuhina, in the far-off Sea of Atolls. A schooner lies at anchor in the calm water off the settlement; she does not move, for the lagoon is very still. A boat is putting off for shore, and in the stern sits a dear friend of the white man—a slender man, who gazes eagerly toward the shore with dark eyes like the eyes of our people. A crowd is gathered on the beach; the girls carry gifts of necklaces and wreaths; and in the village the old women are preparing a feast. The man in the boat believes that this welcome is for the captain of the schooner, not knowing that this people was once a race of warriors, and that they are gathered to give him welcome—the first soldier from the army of France to visit their island since the war. The keel of the boat grates on the sand; a score of men seize her to pull her up; the women crowd about the stranger (Aué! They are good to look upon these girls of Nukuhina!), to throw their necklaces over his head and crown him with wreaths of flowers and shell. His face grows red; the old men smile; the girls laugh aloud. One, bolder than the rest, runs at him suddenly, puts her arms about him, and kisses him after the fashion of the white man. His face grows redder still; at that, the old men, too, laugh aloud. One after another, pushing and pulling to be first, the girls scramble to kiss him; he is overwhelmed, suffocated, and now his face is like fire, but he is not angry, for he smiles."

Well, what do you think of Ahu Ahu magic? I really ought to refrain from telling you the truth, which—like the stuff of most spirit messages—is simple, unexpected, and disillusioning. When we got to Avarua I found S—— there, over from Tahiti to buy cattle; before his departure the Alouette had turned up from the Paumotus, bringing word of your reception on Nukuhina.

I fancy you haven't had much time, in your progress through the Low Archipelago, for the pursuits of a landsman, so I'll give you an idea of how I've frittered away the days on Rarotonga.

Soon after our arrival there was a great stir over the coming of a shipload of parliamentary visitors from New Zealand, making a tour of the Cook Islands; a feast of welcome was to be given in Avarua, scores of pigs and hundreds of chickens were set aside for fattening, and the dancers of each village were to be seen rehearsing in the evenings. We drove to Avarua on the appointed day and found the government boat already anchored in the roadstead off the town—an anchorage dreaded by skippers, for unless the anchor strikes exactly on the summit of a sharp submerged peak, it will slide clean off soundings. Long before we reached the settlement the air had been vibrant with the sound of drums, the visitors were coming ashore, the dancing was in full swing.

The performance, of course, was a perfectly sophisticated one—like Papeete, Avarua is a small ocean metropolis, the capital of a group—but it interested me to see that the people, in spite of the efforts of the missionaries to make them ashamed of everything pertaining to heathen days, were not entirely without pride in the past. Each village was represented by a corps of dancers, men and women equally divided, and had its own drums and drummers, who furnished the sole music of the dance. The drums are of three varieties. The smallest are merely hollow sticks—six inches in diameter and a yard long—open on one side, and producing a loud, resonant click when struck with a bit of wood. There are others of medium size, standing on short legs and beaten with the hand, but the huge oldtime drums, suspended from the limbs of trees, interested me most of all. Imagine a five-foot section of the trunk of a big Barringtonia, carefully hollowed out and smoothed, with the skins of wild goats stretched over the ends, and sides decorated with outlandish painting.

The big drums are struck with the heel of the hand—with such furious energy that the drummer streams perspiration and is soon exhausted. The deep pulsing sound of them carries for miles in still air; sometimes at night, when there was dancing in the villages, I have heard it far and near, rising, falling, throbbing, from Arorangi, from Titikaveka, and from Ngatangiia, whence the ancients set out on their thousand-league voyages to the south.

I wish I could make you feel, as I have felt, the quality of this savage drumming. Monotonous and rhythmic sound, reduced almost to its simplest form, it is the ancestor of all music, toward which, perhaps, our modern dance music is a reversion. There is syncopation in it when the big drum halts at irregular intervals, and the time is carried by the clicking of hollow wood; but it is solemn and ominous—anything but the meretricious syncopation of ragtime. One feels in it an appeal to the primitive emotions, at once vague and charged with meaning; fear and madness are there, with cruelty, lust, triumph, and a savage melancholy.

Except in the case of the contingent from Manihiki—an atoll far off to the north—there was little variation in the dances, for which one can only say that they showed evidence of careful drilling. The women performed a variety of the dance common to all branches of their race**basically the same whether called hula, hura, or ura—but their motions were awkward and stiff, without the abandon and graceful movements of the arms to be seen in Hawaii or the Society Islands. The men, who carried long staves like spears, were freer in their motions, leaping, thrusting out their arms, and clattering their sticks in unison.

The costumes—unfortunately for the eye of a sensitive spectator—were slipped on over the wearer's best European clothes; a concession to the missionary point of view; but the beauty of some of the kilts, tunics and headdresses, and the trouble evidently taken in braiding them, showed that the Rarotongans have not wholly forgotten the past.

The dance was followed by speeches, and the speeches by a feast—all very conventional and uninteresting. I wonder if you are heartily fed up on baked pig. One needs a dash of Island blood to appreciate it after the twentieth time! Any other sort of meat would be welcome here where bully beef and pork are the staples. The need of a change of diet drives one to the lagoon; fishing becomes a practical as well as a sporting proposition.

During the proper phases of the moon we lead a most irregular life, for the hours from 3 to 5 A.M. are often the ones most profitable to spend on the reef, and the evenings are occupied with a search for hermit crabs. You have probably made the acquaintance of the hermit crab, but in case you have been too busy to give him the notice he deserves, I'll venture to dwell for a bit on his eccentricities. It was not a pure love of natural history that turned my attention to him; I have been obliged to study him—at least superficially—by the fact that he is the dainty preferred by all the fish of this lagoon, and his capture, therefore, an indispensable preliminary to every fishing expedition.

There must be several varieties of hermit crab—I have counted three already: the ordinary small brown one called kakara, the huge red one found in deep water, and the black, hairy kind, whose pounded-up body is mixed with grated coconut to extract the oil. This latter is called unga; in the old days the lowest class of Rarotonga society was known by the same name—meaning, I suppose, that all of their property could be carried on their backs. The common variety is a good deal like the robber crab in habits; the natives go so far as to say that it is the same creature, in different stages of its existence. I doubt this theory, for while there are plenty of the little kakara on the volcanic islands, the robber crab is very rare; he lives on the atolls, and to my mind it is incredible that he should journey from island to island, through leagues of deep sea. Like his formidable relative, the kakara spends most of his time ashore, frequenting the bush along the water's edge, where he lies hidden throughout the day in a hole or under a pile of leaves. His first duty of the evening is a trip to salt water, for he seems to need a thorough wetting once in each twenty-four hours. After his bath he heads back for the bush to begin his nightly search for food—nearly any kind of edible refuse—a dead fish on the beach, the fallen fruit of a pandanus, a coconut, opened by rat or flying fox, and containing a few shreds of meat.

The size of the kakara can be judged from his shell, which may be as small as a thimble or as large as an orange. The creature inside is marvelously adapted to the life he leads. His soft and muscular body curls into the spiral of the shell and is securely anchored by a twist of the tail. The fore-end of the crab, which protrudes from the shell when he is in motion, reminds one of a tiny lobster; the same stalk eyes, the same legs, the same strong claws. When alarmed he snaps back into his mobile fortress, and you perceive that legs and claws fold into a flat armored barrier, sealing up perfectly the entrance of the shell. Sit still and watch him; presently the claws unfold cautiously and he emerges little by little, feelers waving and eyes peering about in a ludicrously apprehensive manner. Finally he gathers courage and starts off for the bush at his curious rolling gait.

One might suppose the hermit crab the least social of living tilings, but in reality he is gregarious and seems to enjoy the company of his friends. They wander in little bands; very often one finds two or three small ones perched on the back of a larger comrade and enjoying an effortless trip across the beach to the lagoon. One afternoon I came upon three of them traveling in single file; the last member of the party—a frail little chap—crunched under the heel of my boot before I saw him. I stopped a moment in regret and saw that the two other crabs were also stopping—warned, by I know not what obscure sense, that all was not well with their friend. They drew together as they halted, and went through a hasty and obviously anxious exchange of ideas—face to face, with feelers waving nervously. One was reminded irresistibly of a pair of fussy little old gentlemen, halted in the street to decide which should do an unpleasant errand. At length one of the two settled himself to wait, while the other faced about and shambled off briskly to the rear. A few seconds brought him to what was left of his unfortunate comrade; his eyes seemed to start from his head as he felt over the crushed wreck. A moment later he turned and hastened back even faster than he had come. His arrival had an air of palpitating excitement; I fancied I felt transmitted to me a tiny thrill of horror at the news about to be communicated. This time the four antennae fairly vibrated—I imagined the conversation going on an inch above the ground.

"My God!" announced the bearer of ill tidings, breathlessly. "Poor Bill is dead!"

"Bill dead!" exclaimed the other, shocked in spite of his incredulity; "but no, you must be wrong—what could have killed him?"

"I don't know; he's dead all the same—crushed and mangled—it upset me fearfully."

"Come, come—you've been seeing things; he must have taken a short cut to the beach."

"I tell you he's dead; come and have a look if you don't believe me." So off they went together for a look at the corpse, and I left them to mourn their friend—perhaps to eat him.

If you want to see a curious sight get a hermit crab some day and pick up half a dozen empty shells of the size to fit him. Lay the shells on the sand in a circle a few inches across, extract the crab without hurting him from his house, and set him down naked among the empty shells. To get him out, by the way, is not so easy as it sounds, but you can do it by taking hold of his claws and maintaining a steady, gentle pull; in time the muscles of his tail will tire and his grip relax. You will be amused when you see his first attempts to walk without his shell, which weighs three or four times as much as the tenant; it is precisely as a man might act, set down on some planet where gravity is weaker than on our earth. Naked, helpless, and worried—très, très inquiet—the crab makes a dash for one of the shells, gives it a hasty inspection with his feelers, finds something not quite right, and hobbles off to the next one. Perhaps this suits him. He faces about, in goes his tail to take a grip on the whorls, he snaps in and out a few times as if trying the strategic possibilities of the new quarters, and next moment you will see him ambling off blissfully toward the bush.

The chase of the hermit crab is tame sport, no doubt, but not entirely without interest. One evening we set out just after dark, bucket and torch in hand—not the old South Sea torch of coconut leaf, but the modern tube of galvanized iron, filled with kerosene and plugged with burlap, which acts as a wick. The high beach is best at this hour, for one's quarry is beginning to emerge from the bush for the evening dip, and those that have passed will leave spoor in the soft coral sand. Here is the track of a small one, winding toward the water in eccentric curves and zigzags; follow it and you find him, motionless in the torchlight, hoping to escape notice. He goes into the pail with a clang—you can hear his feet scratching vainly at the smooth sides. There were not many about on this stretch of beach; they are uncertain in their habits and seem to be great wanderers. Here is the track of a monster, broad and corrugated like the trail of a miniature Whippet Tank; the spoor leads to the lagoon—no signs of him at the water's edge—he has doubled back. Lift up that rotten coconut frond ... an unga, black, hairy, armed with a vicious pair of claws; you can hear him raging in the pail, a noise halfway between a whine and a growl—a crab with a voice!

A stroll of an hour or two along the btuch usually procures enough bait for a day's fishing, and one turns inland to follow the road home. Sometimes, when the new moon has set behind the Avarua peaks and thick darkness settles over the bush—when the surf murmurs almost maudibly in a stillness broken by the plunge of a fish in the lagoon, or the grating screech of a flying-fox, quarreling with his mates in the palm tops—one is not sorry when the lights of the plantation begin to glimmer through the trees.

We went to bed early that evening, for we had to be up long before daylight to catch the first of the flood tide, but these island nights are not meant for sleep—I was soon up again, to spend a couple of hours alone on the veranda. The feel of the air was like a caress; neither hot nor cold, and perfumed with the scents of strange flowers—waxen Tiaré Tahiti, sweet and heady frangipani, languorous Queen of the Night. In the mango tree behind the house a mynah twittered—a drowsy overture to one of their abrupt nocturnal choruses. They are quaint birds, the mynahs; introduced to the Islands many years ago, they have increased amazingly in this friendly environment, where they live in a state of half-domesticated familiarity with mankind. One sees them everywhere, hopping fearlessly about the streets of villages, fluttering to the table to finish the bread crumbs left after a meal, perched on the backs of cattle in the coconut groves. They are intensely gregarious, gathering in large flocks at sunset to roost in some thick-foliaged tree—orange, mango, or alligator pear. From time to time during the night, with an abruptness and perfect unison that make one suspect the presence of a feathered leader of the orchestra, the two or three hundred members of the colony burst into deafening song—a chorus which lasts perhaps twenty seconds, and stops as suddenly as it began.

At last I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned in; at intervals, before sleep came, I heard the far-off thud of a ripe coconut, or the faint slither and crash of an old frond, falling from a palm. We were awakened at three o'clock by the cook's announcement that coffee was ready; it is a pleasure to live where dressing is only a matter of slipping on a fresh singlet and hitching the pareu tight about one's waist. Each man carried a pair of old shoes, for even the leathery feet of a native must be protected before he ventures on the live coral. Half a dozen plantation boys followed us to the beach, along a path leading down an avenue of coconuts, the slender boles illuminated by the glare of torchlight. In five minutes we were under the dark ironwoods at the water's edge, where the canoes are hauled up; without waiting for us, the boys plunged into the lagoon—-half swimming, half wading toward the reef—torches held aloft in their left hands.

The tide was very low; we had only a short paddle to the shallow water on the inner side of the barrier. It was dead calm—ideal weather for the spear—but there had been a storm somewhere to the south; lines of tall glassy combers, faintly visible in the starlight, were curling with the splitting reports of field artillery—crashing down on the reef until the coral beneath us seemed to tremble at each shock. The eastern sky had not yet begun to pale—the constellations glimmered with the soft glow of the tropics: the Southern Cross, Orion, and the Pleiades.

When the water was only knee-deep we moored the canoe to a coral mushroom and went overboard in bare legs and tucked-up pareus. Wading slowly, about twenty feet apart—the lagoon so still and clear that it was not easy to tell where air ended and water began—nothing moving in the circle of torchlight could escape notice. It was necessary to watch the bottom and walk warily; the reef is a honeycomb of holes and passages through which the sea boils in at certain tides. Many of these holes, only a few feet in diameter at the surface, lead deep down and out into the caverns lining the edges of the pass—the haunts of octopus and the man-eating rock-cod called tonu. A faint ripple revealed a big blue parrot fish skulking in the shadow of a bowlder; one of the native boys slipped his spear close before he thrust with a skill that needs years to acquire. He killed the fish with a stab just where the head joins the body, and strung it on the strip of hibiscus bark at his waist.

These lagoons swarm with strange forms of life unknown in northern waters; until one learns one's way about there is a certain amount of danger in wading through the shallows along the reef. A sea scorpion passed close by us—a wicked-looking thing, all feelers and enormous fins; a touch of those spines would give you a nasty leg. An even more poisonous fish is found here—though fortunately not often: the noo, which lies buried in patches of coral sand. I have never seen one, and do not know its name in English, but the spines of its dorsal fin are said to be hollow like the fangs of a rattlesnake, and to inject a poison—when stepped on—that is apt to kill or cripple for life. The totara, or sea porcupine, is another odd creature, but not at all to be feared; at the approach of danger he blows himself up like a football, and once inflated, is proof against almost anything—I've seen a man hurl a heavy stone on one a dozen times without being able to burst him open. In a different way, the conger eels are nearly as hard to kill, particularly the big ones, which are no joke to handle when one is wading barelegged. One must be on the alert every moment—torch blazing, spear poised. One moment you jump on a mushroom of coral to avoid a pair of sea snakes, long, slender and spotted—active, fearless creatures whose bite is said to be a serious matter; a moment later you are slipping and scrambling at top speed to cut off some large fish, working his way through the shallows. One of the boys bagged a patuki—a young tonu; I was glad to have a look at the ugly little brute. He was only a foot long—a marvel of protective coloring, irregularly spotted and blotched so as to be nearly invisible against a background of coral. The size of the mouth, the power of the jaws, and the rows of cruel little teeth, convinced me that the full-grown fish must deserve the bad name given him by the pearl divers.

The light was gray and the cloud banks along the eastern horizon flushing pale rose when the boys extinguished their torches and set out across the lagoon, each one trailing a heavy string of fish. My host had had enough sport for once, but I love to be on the water at dawn, so when I had landed him I paddled out to the pass to fish for titiara. The current was slack and not a breath of wind stirred the lagoon. The light grew stronger; the contours of the island developed in sharp serrations against the sky; presently the sun rose.

I anchored the canoe in a fathom of water at the edge of the pass, allowing her to swing out over the depths. Through my water-glass I could examine the precipitous walls of the channel—fifty feet high, overhanging in places, seamed, pitted, broken by the dark mouths of caverns. Shoals of fish moved leisurely along the face of the coral—appearing and disappearing like nesting swallows, seen from a cliff-top: swinish parrot fish, bright blue and long as a man's arm; taputapu, spangled orange and black—stopping to nibble at the coral; slender pipefish; swift nanue; fish of extraordinary form and coloring—indescribable, perhaps undescribed. At last I saw what I was after—a school of titiara, working in from the sea.

I wonder if you know this fish; it is new to me, though I have been told that it exists in the northern Pacific. It is of the true game type—swift and rapacious—with the conformation of a mackerel, and related, I should say, to the pompano of American waters. The young ones, eight to ten inches long, and appearing at certain times of year, in great schools, are called aturi. When medium-sized—running from two pounds up to twelve—it is known as titiara in the Cook Islands; paihere in Tahiti and to the east. The fully grown fish, which attains a weight of a hundred pounds or more, is called urua. These different names for stages in the life of the same fish are interesting to me, for they illustrate the richness, in certain directions, of a language so poor in others. We have such terms in English, but they are rapidly becoming obsolete; I doubt, for example, if the average man at home knows that a young salmon is called a grilse, and a still younger one, a parr.

One's outfit for this kind of fishing consists of a pail of hermit crabs, a couple of stones for crushing them, a hundred feet of stout cotton line, a single hook on a length of piano wire, and several dozen pebbles, to be used as sinkers. First of all you smash the shells of a few crabs, tear off the soft bodies for bait, and crush the claws and legs to a paste. This chum is thrown overboard little by little to attrach the fish and keep them about the canoe. When a glance through the water-glass shows that the fish you want are gathered beneath you, a pebble is attached to the line by means of a special hitch, which can be undone by a jerk. Now you lower the line over the side until the bait is in the required position; a sharp pull frees the sinker, and you are ready for the first client. The theory of the detachable sinker is that it enables one to fish at a distance from the boat without having the hook rest on the bottom, where it is apt to foul in the coral.

On this occasion my sport was ruined by one of those tantalizing incidents which lend charm to every variety of angling. I had caught two fish and was lowering my line to try for a third, when the small fry gobbling my chum suddenly scattered and disappeared. Next moment a monstrous titiara—almost in the urua class—loomed up from the depths, seized my bait, and made off so fast that the line fairly scorched my fingers. My tackle was not designed for such game as this—there was nothing to do but try to play him; but when only a yard of line remained in my hands I was forced to check the rush. A powerful wrench, the line slackened dead, he was off, the light hook had snapped at the bend—and I had no other! The old, old story—it is never the fingerlings that get away.

Cut into filets and soaked for six hours in lime juice, my two fish made a raw hors d'oeuvre of the most delicate kind. I took a plate of it to the house of a neighbor who had asked me to dinner, and this old-timer in the South Seas pronounced it of the very first order. You would enjoy knowing him: he has been in this part of the world since the 'seventies—supercargo, skipper, trader on islands seldom visited even to-day. Now he is retired and lives on a small plantation which represents the savings of a lifetime. After dinner, as we sat on his wide veranda with pipes going and glasses on the table between us, he told me a tale so curious that I cannot resist repeating it to you—the story of an island far away to the north and west—an island I shall call Ariri.

Atolls are by nature lonely places, but of all atolls in the Pacific, Ariri is perhaps the loneliest—never visited, far off from any group, out of the paths of navigation. Not very many years ago Ariri was a bit of no man's land; though marked on the chart, its existence was ignored by the Powers—it had never been inhabited, no flag had ever been raised above its benches of dazzling coral sand. At that time, as for centuries before, the sea birds nested undisturbed on the islets within the reef, where all day long the water flashed blue in the sunlight and the trade wind hummed a song of loneliness among the palm tops.

Then a day came when two Frenchmen—shrewd traders and planters of coconuts in the Tuamotu—spoke of Ariri. Here was an island capable of an annual hundred tons of copra, and claimed by no man; they would plant it and reap the rewards of enterprise. The chief difficulty was to find a superintendent to take charge of the project; it needed a white man, but white men willing to undertake a task of such poignant loneliness were not to be found every day in Papeete. As it chanced, their man was at hand.

The natives called him Tino—perhaps his name had once been King. Years among the islands had obliterated whatever stamp of nationality he might have possessed; it was rumored that he was English by birth, and also that he had held a commission in the Confederate navy. Tall, strong, and of fine presence, with a full blond beard and eyes of reckless blue, a great singer and dancer—always the merriest at a feast and the idol of the women, a remarkable linguist and story-teller, drunken, brave, witty, and unprincipled—Tino was of a type which thrives in Polynesia.

When they offered him the position of superintendent at Ariri the two Frenchmen were not without misgivings. He was on the beach at the time, though the only sign of that condition was an unusual laxity in returning the favor when a friend invited him to drink. Tino had no money, but that was his sole limitation; each of a dozen native families vied for the honor of transferring his mat and camphorwood box to their house; when evening came he had his choice of a dozen invitations to dine, and a dozen girls competed for the joy of doing his laundry and making hats for him. But this easy-going philosophy and lack of worry over a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes of Papeete's business men were calculated to sow distrust. In the case of Ariri, however, it was difficult to see how he could go astray; there would be no liquor—they would see to that—and with no visitors and no means of leaving the island there seemed little chance of trouble. Tino was a famous handler of native labor.

The agreement was made and in due time a schooner sailed into the Ariri lagoon to land Tino and a score of Raiatea boys with their wives. The Frenchmen took care to leave no boat capable of putting out to sea, but as there were houses and sheds to build they left a considerable variety of tools and gear, in addition to a year's supply of medicine, food, and clothing. A day or two later the schooner sailed away.

The superintendent called his men together and appointed a foreman. The main island was to be cleared, rows staked out, and the nuts brought for seed to be planted in such a manner. Before this work began, a house was to be built for each family. That was all, except that Tino needed five men at once for special work of his own—let them be those most skilled in woodworking. With that he seems to have dismissed the business of planting coconuts from his mind.

There was a certain amount of hibiscus on the island, as well as the trees called tou and puka. In seven months' time, with the help of his men, Tino cut down trees, sawed out timbers and planking, and built a forty-foot cutter—sturdy, fast, and seaworthy. Her mast was the smoothed-down trunk of an old coconut palm; her sails a patchwork of varied fabrics; her cordage of cinnet, twisted and braided coconut fiber—the work of women, incredibly skillful and patient. For anchor, she carried a grooved coral bowlder, and her water tanks were five-gallon kerosene tins. At the end of the seventh month this improbable vessel was launched, rigged, and provisioned. Tino bade his men farewell and set sail—promising to return—to the westward, fearless and alone. His only instrument was a compass, and yet he made the passage to Fiji—twelve hundred miles—in fifteen days.

I forgot to say that before his departure he had ordered the top of a tall palm chopped off, and on this stout flagpole had hoisted a homemade edition of the Union Jack. In Fiji he wasted no time. At the office of the High Commissioner of the Pacific he announced that he had taken possession of Ariri in the name of the British Empire, and petitioned that a fifty years' lease of the island—at nominal rate—be given him. The request was granted; a few days later Tino was again at sea, still alone, and headed for his little kingdom.

The story is that he bought a sextant in Fiji, but at any rate, something went wrong and he was fifty days without a landfall. Think of this extraordinary man, drifting about alone in his absurd boat—careless, self-confident, and unworried! Even Captain Slocum, said to have navigated thousands of miles of ocean with no other chronometer than a Connecticut alarm clock, performed no madder feat. Tino fetched up at a big lagoon island, six or seven hundred miles out of his course. It is enough to say of his stop there that he spent a week and left, loaded down with provisions and drinking nuts, and accompanied by five of the younger and prettier girls of the village.

This time all went smoothly; the plural honeymoon party enjoyed a merry voyage to Ariri, where Tino established his large and amicable family, and proceeded to the less diverting business of planting coconuts. A year passed; a day came when the schooner from Tahiti rounded to in the lagoon and sent a boat ashore. Accompanied by his twenty men, Tino met the supercargo on the beach. Copra from the old trees? There was not much, but what there was belonged to him. This was a British island, and he was the lessee; here were the papers to prove it. He regretted that as the proprietor he could not allow strangers ashore—demoralize the labor, you know. The Frenchmen fumed, but they were too shrewd not to recognize defeat.

The years passed in peaceful and idyllic fashion; a score of Tino's half-savage offspring fished and swam and raced along the beach. Then one day Tino fell ill.

While he lay in bed, despondent, and brooding over the unfamiliar experience, a schooner entered the lagoon and dropped anchor opposite the settlement. Her boat—trim and smartly manned as a yacht's gig—brought ashore the first missionary to set foot on Ariri. Tino was difficult in the beginning, but the moment was perhaps the weakest of his life; when the missionary left he had married the sick man to Manini—his favorite wife—and received permission to install a native teacher for the children of the island.

It amuses me to think of Tino's recovery and probable regret over his weakness—the thing is so natural, so human; bodily illness and spiritual reform have always gone hand in hand. But his word had been given in good faith; he finished the church and schoolhouse he had promised, and in due time installed the teacher among his flock. The supreme irony of the affair comes at this point, for the native teacher, on the lookout for a flirtation, was indiscreet enough to select Manini as the object of his attentions, and ended by being caught with her under circumstances of the most delicate and compromising nature. As Tino said afterward:

"He had a score of women to choose from, beside four of mine who wouldn't have mattered—and then he picked on Manini! Why, damn it all! man, I was a bit fond of the old girl!"

The teacher paid dearly for his indiscretion. Tino lashed him to a post in the sun, where he would probably have died if the missionary schooner had not appeared just at that time. Cowed and whimpering, the culprit was thrown into a canoe by the indignant husband, who pushed off and paddled angrily alongside the schooner.

"Here's your bleeding missionary!" he roared out, as he hurled the struggling native into the lagoon. "I'm through with him—from now on this island will have to get along with me for teacher and missionary and king!"

That is all of the story, except that Tino died not long ago—happy, rich enough, and surrounded by a numerous tribe of grandchildren.

CHAPTER XIII

At the House of Tari

You will not find Ahu Ahu—under that name—on any chart, and it would be equally useless to search for Nukutere; yet both islands exist, and I like their ancient names better than the modern ones. Glance at your maps and you will see the eastern Pacific dotted with islands bearing names like Jarvis, Maiden, and Starbuck—names which suggest no more than the thought of some wandering skipper, immortalizing himself by adding new dangers to the chart. Then think of Nukutere—the immemorial name of an island known wherever the old Polynesians gathered to tell their tales; Nukutere: The Object of the War Fleet's Voyage ... it needs a dull imagination not to feel a stir.

It was on Nukutere that I found that curious fellow, Tari, at home. Friends often smile at my passion for wild fowl, yet I owe this peaceful adventure entirely to a duck. For several days I had been awaiting a chance to photograph the sky line of the island, and when, one afternoon, the clouds about the peaks dispersed, I put my camera into a small outrigger canoe and paddled down the lagoon, on the lookout for the viewpoint of greatest beauty. I had gone a number of miles and the sun was low when I found the view I wanted; though the silhouette of Nukutere was clear-cut, there were clouds in the west and the light was not strong enough for an instantaneous picture. The lagoon is narrow at this point; there was nothing to do but paddle out to the reef and set up my tripod in the shallow wash of the sea. In this manner I made ten exposures—pretty things they must have been, with the long evening shadows, the foreshore of dark bush beyond the water, the high profile of peaks and jagged ridges against the sky.

I folded the steel tripod and stowed the camera in its case; just as I pushed off to paddle back to the village I heard the whimper of a duck's wings in leisurely flight. I have a very fair acquaintance with the ducks of the northern hemisphere, which winter in considerable numbers in Hawaii and occasionally drift down as far as Penrhyn Island, nine degrees south of the equator; but though it must be well known in scientific quarters, the odd nonmigratory duck of the South Seas is a puzzle to me. It is an unsocial bird, this Polynesian cousin of the mallard; a lover of solitude, a haunter of thick woods and lonely valleys; though I have seen them many times in the distance. I have been unable to obtain a specimen so far. I used to wonder how they survived the swarms of bloodthirsty island rats until a friend wrote me from the Cook group: "On top of the razor-back ridge behind the plantation, the dogs put up a duck almost under our feet. I found the nest well hidden in the fern a beautifully constructed affair, edged with a coaming of down, curled inward. There were eight eggs, standing on end and arranged to occupy the least possible space. When the ducklings appear the old bird must carry them down one at a time—a thousand feet or more—to the swampy feeding grounds."

I could tell by the sound of its wings that the duck approaching me over the lagoon was closer than any I had seen; in my eagerness for a glimpse I forgot all about cameras and canoes. I flung myself around to look, intent and open-mouthed. Next moment the outrigger heaved up with the speed of a rolling porpoise, described a flashing arc through the air, and smacked heavily into the water closing over my head. It was a fast bit of comedy. The coral anchor and my tripod went to the bottom; I caught the camera instinctively and rose, sputtering, to the surface, where I managed to balance it on the flat bottom of the canoe. Then, as the water was not deep, and I had on nothing but a singlet and a pareu, I swam down to get the tripod, and started for shore, pushing the canoe before me. Ahead on the beach two girls and a boy were dancing and rolling in the sand; as the water left my ears I could hear their screams of joy. For the moment I found myself unable to join in the mirth. My thoughts dwelt on cameras and on a story I had heard the night before—how a fisherman, not far from where I was, had felt a tug at his waist as he swam with face submerged, watching the bottom, and turned to see a shark of imposing size nip off the largest fish on his string.

The closer sight of me seemed to redouble the appreciation of my audience, but it was not until I was splashing in the shallows that I was able to smile. Then I saw that the elder of the girls was Apakura, the wife of Tari. She had been washing clothes at the mouth of a little stream and came forward, bare-armed and smiling maliciously, to greet me.

"Ah, you have come to bathe in the sea," she said, as I took her hand, and at this enormous joke all three fell into such a convulsion of laughter that they were obliged to sink down on the sand once more. When she had caught her breath she turned to call her husband: "E Tari! E Tari e! Aere mai ikonei!" A moment later he stepped out of the bush, rubbing from his eyes the sleep of an afternoon nap, and I was shaking his hand.

I know Tari rather well, and have spent a good deal of time within a few miles of where he lives, yet I had been in his house only once before. This is characteristic of the islands. There is an agreeable indifference about the relations of white men down here, a careless friendliness I find pleasanter than the more strained and effusive sociality of civilized places. In every part of the world, of course, this tranquil simplicity—the essence of the finest manner—is to be found among the few who have studied the art of living, but the average one of us is neither sure enough of himself nor sufficiently indifferent to the opinion of others; handicapped by an abnormal sense of obligation, we permit ourselves both to bore and to be bored. In certain respects the native is a very well-bred man; perhaps the white intruder has caught something of his manner—or it may be that distance from home brings life into a truer focus; in any case, one deals with the white man of the islands without consciousness of an effort either to entertain or to impress. When you stop at the house of a strange planter he will offer you a whisky-and-soda—if you refuse, nothing more will be said of the matter. At home, with a parching throat, it is quite conceivable that you might tell your chance host not to bother, looking forward with hopeful hypocrisy to his persuasion and your own inevitable acceptance. I think I liked Tari the better for not having asked me to his house; now that hazard had brought me to the door, he made me feel that I was really welcome.

The house was set on a little rise of land, with a view of the lagoon at the end of an avenue of tall coconut palms. The broad veranda, set with steamer chairs and scarlet-bordered Aitutaki mats, gave on a garden of small flowering trees—"Frangipani," "Tiare Tahiti," "Maid of Moorea," "Queen of the Night." Tari showed me to a corner room, and mixed a rum punch while his wife put buttons on a fresh suit of drill.

Dressed in his clothes, I strolled into the living room to wait while he was changing for dinner. The place was large, and one might have spent hours examining the things it contained—the fruit of twenty years in the South Seas. There were wreaths of bright-colored shell—the favorite parting gift of the islands—from the Paumotus, from Raiatea, from Aitutaki, and Mangaias. There were fans from Manihiki, woven in patterns of dyed pandanus, and Savage Island fans, decorated with human hair. Ranged on a series of shelves, I found a notable collection of penus—the taro-mashers of eastern Polynesia, implements in which the culture of each group expresses itself. I was able to recognize the pestle of Mangaia, eight-sided and carved with almost geometrical perfection from a stalactite of pink lime; the Marquesan penu of dark volcanic stone with its curious phallic handle; the implement of old Tahiti, gracefully designed and smoothly finished by a people far removed from savagery; the rare and beautiful penu of Maupiti—unobtainable to-day—perfect as though turned on a lathe, and adorned with a fantastic handle of ancient and forgotten significance. Mother-of-pearl bonito hooks from a dozen groups were there, and on a table I saw a rare Toki Tiki from Mangaia, an odd thing which, for want of a better name, might be called a Peace Adze. It is a slender little tower of carved wood, set with tiers of windows and surmounted by a stone adze head, lashed on with wrappings of sennit, above which extend a pair of pointed ears. The carving—in the close-grained yellow wood of the Pua—is exquisitely done; I recognized the standard patterns of the islands—-the Shark's Teeth, the Dropping Water, and the intricate Tiki Tangata. The significance of the Peace Adze was religious and ceremonial; the story goes that when, at the end of a period of fighting, two Mangaian clans decided to make peace, the adze played a leading part in the attendant ceremony. A handful of earth was dug up with its head to show that the ground might now be cultivated, and the people were told that they might come and go unmolested, freely as the air through the windowlike openings on its sides. Tari had real adzes as well—the tools with which trees were chopped down and canoes hollowed out—stone implements of a perfection I have never seen elsewhere, carved out of basaltic rock, hard and close as steel, smoothed by processes at which one can only guess, sharp and symmetrical as the product of modern machines.

The Marquesan curiosities interested me most of all—relics of those dark valleys which harbored the most strangely fascinating of all the island peoples. There were ornaments of old men's beards, arranged in little sennit-bound tufts, crinkled and yellowish white; beaked clubs of ironwood, elegantly carved and smooth with countless oilings; ear pendants cut in delicate filigree from the teeth of sperm whales; grotesque little wooden gods, monstrous and bizarre; ceremonial food bowls of Tamanu, adorned with the rich and graceful designs of a culture now forever gone. One felt that the spirits of forgotten artists hovered about the place, beckoning one back to days a century before Melville set foot in the valley of Taipi, to scenes of a strange beauty on which mankind will never look again. Some day—perhaps in a future less remote than we like to fancy—nature's careless hand may once more set the stage for a similar experiment, but the people sequestered in those gloomy islands will be of another blood, and the result can never be the same. The Marquesans themselves—if one is to believe the students of antique mankind—were the result of a racial retrogression; their continental forebears knew iron and pottery and the culture of rice—things lost in the eastward push which brought them to the Nine Islands of Iva.

One curious trinket—labeled "Fatu Hiva"—caught my eye; a squat little figure carved in a sawn-off length of yellow ivory. I examined it closely; it had the air of being at least a hundred years old, and the concentric rings of the section showed it to be the tooth or tusk of some large animal. Where could the Marquesan carver have obtained such a lump of ivory on which to exercise his skill? Could it be possible that this was the tusk of an elephant, carved not one hundred but many centuries ago, and preserved by the people of these distant islands—an immemorial relic of the days when their ancestors left Persia or the Indian hills? I looked again; it was large enough to be part of a small tusk, but the section was flatter than any elephant ivory I had seen. What could it be? Not the tooth of a hippopotamus—it was too large for that; not the sword of a narwhal, which shows a betraying spiral twist. Then I thought of a walrus tusk, and the story seemed clear. Seventy-five or a hundred years ago some whaling vessel, after a venture in the northern ice, must have sailed south and put in at Fatu Hiva for water or wood or fruit. They had killed walrus off Cape Lisburne or in the Kotzebue Sound and, as was the habit of whalers, some of the tusks had been kept for scrimshaw work. Knowing the Polynesian passion for ivory (in Tonga it was death for any but those of the highest rank to take the teeth of a stranded sperm whale) it is not difficult to imagine the rest—a lantern-jawed Yankee harpooner, perhaps, trading his walrus tusk for a canoeload of fruit or the favors of an exceptionally pretty girl.

I was examining a paddle from Manihiki—a graceful, narrow-bladed thing, carved out of porcupine wood and set with diamonds of mother-of-pearl—when Tari came in.

"A pretty paddle, isn't it?" he remarked. "You won't find a more curious one in the Pacific. Notice the way that reinforcing ridge runs down the blade from the haft? Everything has a meaning in primitive stuff of this sort; the original pattern from which this has descended probably came from a land of little trees, where the paddles had to be made in two pieces—blade lashed to handle. Look at the shape of it—more like a Zulu assegai than anything else; it is a weapon, primarily; a thrust of it would kill a naked man. The Manihiki people spend a lot of their time in canoes on the open sea—after bonito by day and flying-fish by night—and those waters swarm with sharks. They have developed their paddle into a weapon of defence. The Samoans carried a special shark club for the same purpose."

I asked his opinion on the disputed question of sharks—whether, in general, the shark is a real menace to the swimmer or the paddler of a small canoe.

"I've heard a lot of loose talk," he said; "how learned societies have offered rewards for a genuine instance of a shark attacking a man, but I have seen enough to know that there is no room for argument. Some idiot goes swimming off a vessel in shark-infested waters, and talks all the rest of his life, perhaps, of the silly fears of others—never realizing that he owes his life to the fact that none of the sharks about him chanced to be more than usually hungry. The really hungry shark is a ravening murderer—dangerous as a wounded buffalo, reckless as a mad dog.... I have seen one tear the paddle from the hand of a man beside me and sink its teeth, over and over again in a frenzy, in the bottom of a heavy canoe. How long do you suppose a swimmer would have lived? And it's not only the big sharks that are dangerous. I remember one day when a lot of us were bathing in Penrhyn lagoon. Suddenly one of the boys gave a shout and began to struggle with something in the waist-deep water—clouded with blood by the time I got there. A small tiger shark, scarcely a yard long, had gouged a piece of flesh out of his leg, and continued to attack until a big Kanaka seized it by the tail and waded to the beach, holding the devilish little brute, snapping its jaws and writhing frantically, at arm's length. As he reached the dry sand the native allowed his arm to relax for an instant; the shark set its teeth in his side and tore out a mouthful that nearly cost the man his life."

The voice of Apakura was summoning us to eat. "Kaikai!" she called: "Aere mai korua!" Tari's dining room was a section of the side veranda, screened off with lattices of bamboo, where we found a table set for two, fresh with flowers and damask. Apakura sat cross-legged on a mat near by; she was weaving a hat of native grass and looked up from her work now and then to speak to the girl who served us—admonishing, scolding, and joking in turn. Tari followed my glance, and smiled as he caught the eye of his wife.

"It probably strikes you as odd that she doesn't sit with us," he said to me. "I tried to get her into the way of it at first, but it's no good. For generations the women of her family have been forbidden to eat in the presence of men, and the old tapu dies hard. Then she hates chairs; when she sits with me she is wretchedly uncomfortable, and bolts her food in a scared kind of way that puts me off my feed. It is best to let them follow their own customs; she likes to sit on the floor there and order her cousin about; when we've finished they'll adjourn to the cook house for dinner and discuss you till your ears tingle. Housekeeping down here is a funny, haphazard business—hopeless if one demands what one had at home; easy and pleasant if one is willing to compromise a bit. To a man who understands the natives at all the servant question does not exist; they will jump at a chance to attach themselves to your household—the trouble is to keep them away. It isn't wages they are after; I pay these people nothing at all for cooking and washing and looking after the place. They like to be where tea and sugar and ship's biscuit are in plenty, and they like to be amused. An occasional stranger, coming and going like yourself, gives them no end of food for talk; I have a phonograph I let them play, and a seine I let them take out for a day's fishing now and then. Once a month, perhaps, I kill a pig and give a bit of a party, and once or twice in a year I get a bullock and let them invite all their relatives to a real umukai. In return for all this they look after my fifty acres of coconuts, make my copra, do my housework, cooking, and laundry, and provide me with all the native food I can use. It strikes me as a fair bargain, from my point of view, at least. It is understood that they are not to bother me; unless there is work to do or they want to see me they never set foot in the house.

"My greatest trouble has been to get some idea of regularity into their heads. These people cannot understand why we prefer to eat our dinner at the same hour every day. Where contact with the white man has not changed their habits, they eat whenever they are hungry—at midnight or at four in the morning, if they chance to be awake. Even here they can't understand my feelings when dinner is an hour or two late."

The cousin of Apakura took away the remnants of a dish of raw fish and brought us a platter heaped with roast breadfruit, taro, yams, and sweet potatoes, served with a pitcher of tai akari—the sea water and coconut sauce, worthy of a place on any table. It is only the uncivilized white who turns up his nose at native food; the island's vegetables are both wholesome and delicious, and cannot be cooked better than in a Maori oven. A certain amount of European food is necessary to health, but the sallow, provincial white man, who takes a sort of racial pride in living on the contents of tins, need not be surprised that the climate of the islands does not agree with him. It is the same type, usually with no other cause for pride than the fact that he chanced to be born white, whose voice is most frequently heard declaiming on the subject of color. Everywhere in the islands, of course, the color line exists—a subtle barrier between the races, not to be crossed with impunity; but the better sort of white man is ready to admit that God, who presumably made him, also made the native, and made of the Polynesian a rather fine piece of work. Tari had stepped across with eyes open, counting the cost, realizing all that he must relinquish. He is not a man to make such a decision lightly; in his case the step meant severing the last material tie with home, giving up forever the Englishman's dreams of white children and an old age in the pleasant English countryside. His children—if children came to him—would have skins tinted by a hundred generations of hot sunlight, and look at him with strange, dark eyes, liquid and shy—the eyes of an elder race, begotten when the world was young. His old age would be spent on this remote and forgotten bit of land, immensely isolated from the ancestral background to which most men return at last. As the shadows gathered in the evening of his life there would be long days of reading and reflection—stretched in a steamer chair on this same veranda, while the trade hummed through the palm tops and the sea rumbled softly on the reef. At night, lying wakeful as old men do, in a hush broken only by the murmur of a lonely sea, his thoughts would wander back—a little sadly, as the thoughts of an old man must—along a hundred winding paths of memory, through scenes wild and lovely, savage, stern, and gay. Dimly out of the past would appear the faces of men and women—long since dead and already only vaguely remembered—the companions of his youth, once individually vibrant with the current of life, now moldering alike in forgotten graves. They would be a strangely assorted company, Tari's ghosts: men of all the races, scholars, soldiers, sportsmen, skippers of trading vessels, pearl divers of the atolls, nurses of the Red Cross, Englishwomen of his own station in life, dark-eyed daughters of the islands, with shining hair and the beauty of sleek, wild creatures—bewitching and soulless, half bold and half afraid. Whether for good or ill, wisely or unwisely, as the case might be, no man could say that Tari had not lived; I wondered what the verdict would be when, in the days to come, he cast up the balance of his life....

Apakura ceased her plaiting and began to measure off the narrow braid, delicately woven in a pattern of black and white, which would eventually be sewn in spirals to make a hat—my hat, by the way, for it had been promised to me weeks before. One fathom, two fathoms, three fathoms—another two fathoms were needed, work for the odd moments of a month. Some day—in an uncertain future and on a distant island, perhaps—the cabin boy of a schooner would step ashore and present me with a box containing this same hat, superbly new, decorated with a gay puggree and lined with satin bearing my initials in silk. Meanwhile, though I would have given much for a new hat, there was nothing to do but wait. Like other things of native make, a hat cannot be bought with money; the process of manufacture is too laborious to be other than a matter of good will. Think of the work that goes into one of these hats. First of all—far off in the mountains—the stalks of aeho (Erianthus floridulus) must be gathered. These are split when thoroughly dry, and the two halves scraped thin as paper before being split again into tiny strips of fiber less than a sixteenth of an inch wide. A certain amount of the aeho, depending on the pattern to be woven, must now be dyed—usually black or in a shade of brown. From a dozen to twenty of these strands—dyed and undyed—are plaited into the flexible braid of which the hat is built up—a task requiring extraordinary patience and skill. Such hats are made only for relatives and close friends; if an unmarried girl gives one to a man the gift has the same significance as the pair of earrings he would give in return. When a native boy appears with a new and gorgeous hat, the origin of which is veiled in doubt, village gossip hums until the truth is known; even the classic sewing circle of New England can show no faster or more efficient work than these artless brown women, standing knee deep in the waters of some dashing stream, prattling, laughing, shattering the reputations of absent sisters, as they pound and wring the soapy clothes.

When dinner was over and Tari was filling his pipe in the living room I took up the lamp for a glance at the titles on his shelves of books. Side by side with the transactions of the Polynesian Society and the modern works of S. Percy Smith and McMillan Brown, I found Mariner's Tonga, Abraham Fornander's Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migration, Lieut. William Bligh's Voyage to the South Seas for the Purpose of Conveying the Bread-fruit Tree to the West Indies, in His Majesty's Ship the "Bounty," and the Polynesian Researches of William Ellis. I took down a volume of Ellis; Tari crossed the room to glance over my shoulder at the quaint title page—it was evident that he loved his books.

"Tahiti was the most interesting of all the islands," he said, as we sat down, "and the best accounts of old Tahiti are those of Bligh and Ellis. Bligh wrote from the standpoint of a worldly man and, though he was unable to speak the language fluently and stopped only a few months on the island, he has left an extraordinarily vivid and detailed picture of the native life before European religion and trade began their work of change. Ellis was a missionary of the finest sort—broad-minded as religious men go, inspired by the purest of motives, a close and sympathetic observer, and able to appreciate much of the beauty and interest of the old life. If you believe that one branch of mankind is justified in almost forcibly spreading its religion among the other races, and that trade should follow the Bible, you will enjoy every page of Ellis. His point of view concerning temporal matters is summed up in this volume, at the end of a chapter on Hawaii. Here it is: 'Their intercourse with foreigners has taught many of the chiefs to prefer a bedstead to the ground, and a mattress to a mat; to sit on a chair, eat at a table, use a knife and fork, etc. This we think advantageous, not only to those who visit them for purposes of commerce, but to the natives themselves, as it increases their wants, and consequently stimulates to industry.' There you hear the voice of the mechanical age, which began a hundred years ago and ended—I rather fancy—when we fired the last shots of the war. Increase their wants, advertise, speed up production—whatever the impalpable cost, make the way smooth for the swift wheels of progress—those are the germs of a disease from which the world may need another century to recover. But the change in these islands was only the insignificant corollary of a greater change throughout the world; Ellis and his kind were no more than the inevitable instruments of a harsh Providence.

"Ellis's book was published in eighteen thirty-one. During the eighty-nine years that have passed since that date we have seized the islands and profited largely by them—as coaling stations, as naval bases, as sources of valuable raw material, as markets for our surplus manufactured goods. What have we done for the natives in return? Instead of the industrious, piously happy, and increasing communities foreseen by the missionaries as the result of their efforts, one finds a depressed and dying people, robbed of their old beliefs and secretly skeptical of the new. We who conduct our wars in so humane and chivalrous a spirit have taught them to abolish human sacrifice and to stop the savage fighting which horrified the first messengers of Christianity, but, in the case of the islands of which Ellis wrote, the benefits of civilization end here. Infanticide is now a punishable crime and rarely practiced, but perhaps it is as well to have children and to kill a certain number of them, as to be rendered sterile by imported disease. After all, infanticide, repulsive though it may be, is only a primitive form of the birth control which is making its appearance in Europe and America, as the continents—the white man's islands—approach the limit of population.

"As for true religious faith of the kind which the missionaries sincerely hoped to instill, that plays in the life of the Kanaka a part of about the same importance as in the life of the average white man. Don't think I am cynical in saying this—I respect and envy men who possess real faith; they are the ones by whom every great task is accomplished. But the religion of the native is less than skin deep; his observance of the Sabbath day a survival of the old tapu; his churchgoing and singing of hymns—satisfying the social instinct, the love of gossip, the desire to be seen in fine clothes—replace the old-time dance, wrestling matches, and exhibitions of the areoi. You have seen something of the outer islands, where the people are half savage even to-day, still swayed by what we call heathen superstition. Now consider Tahiti, where the people for more than a hundred years have been subjected to exhortations of an intensity almost unparalleled. If it is possible to inject our religion into their blood, it must have been accomplished in Tahiti, but in my opinion the efforts of three generations of missionaries have produced a result surprisingly small on this island—the most civilized of the South Pacific—where heathen superstition is far from dead to-day.

"Before the schooners took to Penrhyn Lagoon we used to spend the hurricane season in Papeete; I never cared much for towns; I usually put in the time wandering about the more remote districts. Civilization has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti. Men who wear trousers and go to church by day would fear to sleep at night unless a lamp burned in the house to repel the varua ino and ghastly tupapau of their ancestors. If a girl falls ill the native doctor—a lineal descendant of the heathen priest—is called in. 'What have you done during the past week?' he asks.... 'You spoke harshly to that old woman? Ah, I knew there was a cause!' He administers a remedy in the form of a certain bath or a sprinkling with the water of a young coconut, and takes his leave. If the girl recovers it is a remarkable instance of the doctor's skill; if she dies it is proof that her offense was too grave to be remedied. Perhaps a ghost walks and the native doctor is again consulted. 'It is your wife who comes to trouble you at night? How was she buried?' Eventually the grave is opened and the body found to be lying face down; when turned on her back and again covered with earth the lady is content, and ceases her disreputable prowlings.

"I am not convinced that all of these things are absurdity.... I told you, when we were on the schooner, about some of my curious experiences in this group. There are happenings fully as strange on Tahiti and Moorea. You must have heard of what the natives call varua ino—a vague variety of devil, a sort of earth spirit, quite unhuman and intensely malignant. The people are not fond of discussing this subject, and their beliefs have become so tangled that it is impossible to get a straightforward story, but as nearly as I can make out, numbers of these varua ino are thought to lie in wait wherever a man or woman is dying, struggling fiercely with one another in their effort to catch and devour the departing human soul. If the spirit makes its escape the first time the ravening watchers do not give up hope, but linger about the body, to which the soul is apt to return from time to time during the day or two following death. The human soul, at this stage, is considered nearly as malignant and dangerous as the varua ino—you can see what a garbled business it is. Sometimes an earth spirit enters the corrupted body and walks abroad at night. On one subject the natives all agree: the struggles of the preying spirits and the human soul are apt to be marked by splashes and pools of blood—whose blood I have never learned to my satisfaction.

"A friend of mine—an educated and skeptical Englishman, in whose word I have the utmost confidence—was the witness of one of these blood-splashing affairs. He lived on Moorea, just across from Tahiti; Haapiti was the village, I think. One afternoon he whistled to his fox terrier and strolled to a near-by house, where the body of a native (an old fellow he had liked) lay in state, surrounded by mourning relatives. As he stood on the veranda the dog began to growl furiously, and at the same moment the oldest man present—a sort of doctor and authority on spiritual matters—shouted out suddenly that everyone must leave the house. The native explained afterward that he had caught a glimpse of something like a small comet—a shapeless and luminous body, trailing a fiery tail—rushing horizontally toward the rear of the building. The people gathered outside in a bit of a panic; the fox terrier seemed to have gone mad on the porch—alternately cowing and leaping forward with frenzied growls toward some invisible thing. All at once there was a great racket of overturned furniture inside the house, and next moment the Englishman saw gouts of what looked like blood splashing over the outer wall and the floor of the veranda. The dog was covered—it was a week before his coat was clean. The net result of the affair was that the veranda needed a cleaning, a couple of tables were overturned, and the body of the old man considerably disturbed; but its most curious feature is the fact that my friend—suspecting native trickery and the desire to impress a white man—took a specimen of the blood across to Papeete, where he got the hospital people to examine it. It was human blood beyond a doubt. What do you make of that?

"The other evening, when I was having a yarn with Apakura, she told me about another kind of varua ino, who figures as the villain in the tale of a Polynesian Cinderella. It may interest you. A great many years ago, on Ahu Ahu, there was a man named Tautu—one of Apakura's family—a renowned fighting man, who dabbled in sorcery when there were no wars to be fought. Tall, handsome, and famous, it was no wonder that Tautu was pursued by all the island girls—scheming sisters, in particular, who went so far as to build a hut near where he lived. Hoping to catch the eye of the hero, they took their finest ornaments and robes of tapa and went to live in the hut, accompanied by their little sister, Titiara, who was to act as a drudge about the house. Young Titiara had no designs on Tautu, and she possessed no finery to make herself beautiful in his eyes, but one day, when she was gathering wood in the bush, he chanced to pass. Stopping to speak with her, he was struck with her goodness and beauty, and from that time the two met every day in the forest. The older sisters, meanwhile, were the victims of a mischievous earth spirit which haunted the vicinity and visited them in the guise of Tautu. They were triumphant—when it was known that they had won the warrior's favors all their friends would be wild with jealousy; they could not resist preening themselves before their little sister. 'Tautu loves us,' they told her; 'he comes every day when you are off gathering wood.' 'But that is impossible,' said Titiara, 'for Tautu is my lover; he meets me each day in the forest.' The older girls laughed scornfully at this, but Titiara said no more until she met her lover in the evening. When she told him what her sisters had said, he laughed. 'It is a varua ino,' he informed her, 'a mischievous spirit whose true appearance is that of a hideous old man. To-morrow I will prove to your sisters that it is not I who visit them.' That night Tautu sat up late, weaving a magic net of hibiscus bark—a net which had the property of causing a spirit to assume its true shape. Next afternoon Tautu and Titiara stole up to the house where the spirit, in the form of a splendid warrior, was talking and laughing with the two sisters. Tautu cast the net; next moment the spirit was howling and struggling in the magic meshes, unable to escape, moaning as it shriveled and changed to the appearance of an old man, gray-bearded, trembling, and hideous. The two sisters shrank back in loathing and mortification, while Tautu told them that he had chosen Titiara to be his wife."

As he finished his story Tari rose, crossed the room to a bookshelf, and returned to hand me a volume bound in worn yellow leather.

"I'm going to turn in now," he remarked; "we'll go fishing in the morning if you will plan to stop over. Take this to your room if you are not sleepy; it is worth running over—Bligh's account of the voyage of the Bounty, published at Dublin in seventeen ninety-two."

Propped up in bed, with a lamp burning on the table beside me, I opened Bligh's quaint and earnest account of his voyage. The mutiny, the commander's passage in an open boat from Tonga to Timor, and the settlement of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island have been made familiar by a voluminous and sentimental literature, but I had never before come across the story of Bligh's residence among the natives of Tahiti, one hundred and thirty-two years ago.

More than any other Eastern island, perhaps, Tahiti was the cradle of the oceanic race; called the Lap of God by Kamapiikai, the fabled Hawaiian voyager, who discovered, in the southern group, the fountain of eternal youth. Knowing something of the island as it is to-day, I had listened with interest when Tari remarked, "Civilization has barely scratched the inner life of Tahiti." Bligh was a close observer, blessed with insight and a pleasant sense of humor; at the time of his visit the people were untouched by European influence. It is interesting to check his observations against what any traveler may see nowadays—to judge for oneself how deeply the civilization of Europe has been able to modify the peculiarities of Polynesian character.

The family of Pomare, of which the chief Tu (called Otoo by Cook, Tinah by Bligh) was the founder, owed its rise to power largely to the friendship of the English. Bligh often entertained Tinah and his wife, Iddeah, on board the Bounty—they must have been amusing parties. "Tinah was fed by one of his attendants, who sat by him for that purpose ... and I must do him the justice to say he kept his attendant constantly employed: there was, indeed, little reason to complain of want of appetite in any of my guests. As the women are not allowed to eat in presence of the men, Iddeah dined with some of her companions about an hour afterward, in private, except that her husband, Tinah, favored them with his company and seemed to have entirely forgotten that he had already dined." In his rambles about the island Bligh noticed precisely what strikes one to-day: "In any house that we wished to enter we always experienced a kind reception and without officiousness. The Otaheiteans have the most perfect easiness of manners, equally free from forwardness and formality. When they offer refreshments, if they are not accepted, they do not think of offering them the second time; for they have not the least idea of that ceremonious kind of refusal which expects a second invitation." Bligh was not deceived, like the French philosophers who read Bougainville's account of Tahiti, and rhapsodized about the beauty of a life free from all restraint; he remarked the deep-rooted system of class inherent in the island race, a system of which the outward marks are gone, but which is far from dead to-day. "Among people so free from ostentation as the Otaheiteans, and whose manners are so simple and natural, the strictness with which the punctilios of rank are observed is surprising. I know not if any action, however meritorious, can elevate a man above the class in which he was born, unless he were to acquire sufficient power to confer dignity on himself. If any woman of the inferior classes has a child by an Earee it is not suffered to live."

Bligh's observations on the gay and humorous character of the people and their extraordinary levity might have been written yesterday. "Some of my constant visitors had observed that we always drank His Majesty's health as soon as the cloth was removed; but they were by this time become so fond of wine that they would frequently remind me of the health in the middle of dinner by calling out, 'King George Earee no Brittanee'; and would banter me if the glass was not filled to the brim. Nothing could exceed the mirth and jollity of these people when they met on board." One day Tinah told Bligh of an island "to the eastward of Otaheite four or five days' sail, and that there were large animals upon it with eight legs. The truth of this account he very strenuously insisted upon and wished me to go thither with him. I was at a loss to know whether or not Tinah himself gave credit to this whimsical and fabulous account; for though they have credulity sufficient to believe anything, however improbable, they are at the same time so much addicted to that species of wit which we call humbug that it is frequently difficult to distinguish whether they are in jest or in earnest." On another occasion, while walking near a place of burial, Bligh was "surprised by a sudden outcry of grief. As I expressed a desire to see the distressed person, Tinah took me to the place, where I found a number of women, one of whom was the mother of a young female child that lay dead. On seeing us their mourning not only immediately ceased, but, to my astonishment, they all burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, and, while we remained, appeared much diverted at our visit. I told Tinah the woman had no sorrow for her child, otherwise her grief would not have so easily subsided, on which he jocosely told her to cry again: they did not, however, resume their mourning in our presence. This strange behavior would incline us to think them hard-hearted and unfeeling did we not know that they are fond parents and, in general, very affectionate: it is therefore to be ascribed to their extreme levity of disposition; and it is probable that death does not appear to them with so many terrors as it does to people of a more serious cast."

When the surgeon of the Bounty died and was buried ashore "some of the chiefs were very inquisitive about what was to be done with the surgeon's cabin, on account of apparitions. They said when a man died in Otaheite and was carried to the Tupapow that as soon as night came he was surrounded by spirits, and if any person went there by himself they would devour him: therefore they said that not less than two people together should go into the surgeon's cabin for some time." I thought of Tari and his tales of the varuo ino ... four generations of schools and churches have failed to work a metamorphosis.

I read on till drowsiness overcame me and the pages blurred before my eyes. It was late and the night was very calm; a vagrant night breeze, wandering down from the mountains, rustled gently among the fronds of the old palms around the house. When the rustling ceased—so faint as to be almost inaudible—I could hear the far-off whisper of the sea. The world about me was asleep; I roused myself with an effort, adjusted the mosquito net, and blew out the lamp.

Chapter XIII tailpiece

CHAPTER XIV

In the Valley of Vaitia

It is not easy to analyze the magic which cozens every traveler into believing that he is the first to see Tahiti with clear eyes—one feels that it is made up of nature in a mood of unearthly loveliness; of a sense of ancient and unalterable life; of a realization that strange beliefs persist under a semblance of Christianity; of the lure of a race whose confidence the white man can never fully gain. The mail steamers, the wireless, the traders, the scattering of French officials—these things are a mere play of shadows on the surface. Even the churches, I was tempted to say; but the church plays more than a shadowy part in the life of the native, whose religion, at the present day, is a singular blending of Christian doctrine and old heathen belief. The Tahitian reads his Bible (he has no other book) and sings loudly every Sunday in church; but the dead are still things of horror in his mind; sorcerers—masquerading as doctors—still carry on a brisk trade; and Tautau, the Great-headed, is still a living presence in the valley of Punaruu.

When the people of the Society Islands accepted Christianity a century ago they did so with reservations of which the missionaries, perhaps, were not aware. Here and there, as at Faatoai on Moorea, there was a burning of idols, but a great mass of material—old gods and heathen weapons—was stored in secure hiding places among the hills. To-day, after three generations of increasing European influence, hundreds of natives know of these caves and repair to them for purposes of their own, yet a white man might spend his life on Tahiti without a glimpse of a cinnet-bound orooro or a slender ironwood spear.

My friend Airima is typical. The widow of a Yankee skipper, the owner of a neat wooden villa in Papeete, where she appears regularly, on her way to church, in shoes, stockings, and a black-silk gown, she finds it necessary, from time to time, to cast off the unnatural manners of Europe and live as she was meant to live; to be herself, an elderly and delightful savage. When the mood comes she closes the villa in Papeete, gathers the willing members of her family, and repairs to her native house, far off on the peninsula of Taiarapu.

The house of Airima stands on the river bank, shaded by a pair of mango trees, dark green and immemorially old. The roof is thatched with braided fronds of coconut; breezes play through the lofty single room, bare of furniture and floored with mats spread on white coral gravel, leveled and packed. Past the veranda, on which the family sleeps through the warm hours of the day, the river flows out gently to the sea; a broad, still water, deep and glassy clear, peopled with darting shoals of fish—mullet, young pampano, and nato, the trout of the South Seas. Opposite the river mouth the reef is broken by a pass, through which the steady lines of combers sweep in to crash and tumble on the bar. Morning and afternoon the breakers are alive with naked children, shouting and glistening brown in the sunlight as they ride the waves.

Inland, the valley marking the river's course is lost in a maze of broken and fantastic peaks; seaward, bordering the green and blue of the lagoon, the snowy line of the reef stretches off endlessly; and beyond a three-league expanse of bright sea the headlands of Tahiti Nui rise in vast, swelling curves, up and up to the perpetual clouds which veil the heights. Under a bright sun at midday, when the palm tops toss to the trade which paints the lagoon—in the deep passes and over the patches of sandy bottom—with ruffled sapphire and emerald, and sets the whitecaps to dancing beyond the reef, or in the calm of night, with the moon hanging low over pinnacles of basalt—when the polished surface of the lagoon is broken by the plunge and swirl of heavy fish, and native songs, rising and falling in savage cadences, float out across the water—it is a place not easily forgotten.

It was still dark when we rose—Maruae and I; the brothers of Maruae had returned from the reef, and the ovens behind the cook house were smoking, for in these places the hour of the day's first meal is set by the return of the fishermen. I took one shuddering plunge into the river, dressed myself in a shirt, a waistcloth, and a pair of hobnailed boots, and squatted with the rest to consume a fresh-caught mackerel and a section of breadfruit, dipped in the common bowl of sauce.

Maruae sucked his fingers and stood up, calling to the dogs. Airima glanced at me over the back of a large fish she was gnawing, holding it with both hands. "Go, you two," she said. "You stay," replied Maruae, as he turned to take the path to the mountains. The oceanic tongue possesses no other words of parting.

We followed the river across the flatlands of the coast. Dawn was flushing in the east; the profile of lofty ridges, fern clad and incredibly serrated, grew sharp against the sky. The mynahs were awakening; from the thick foliage of orange and mango trees came their extraordinary morning chorus—a thousand voices, whistling, screaming, and chattering that it was time the assembly broke up for the foraging of another day. In one place, where a turn of the path brought us suddenly to the edge of a still reach of water, a pair of native ducks (Anas superciliosa) rose vertically on beating wings and sped off over the palm tops. A little farther on, where volcanic bowlders began to appear through the alluvial soil and the river leaped and foamed over the first rapids, a family of Tahitian jungle fowl, led by a splendid burnished cock, sprang out of the grass and streamed away, in easy, rapid flight, toward the hills. The dogs bounded forward and stopped, whining as they watched the wild chickens dwindle to speeding dots.

The groves of coconut palms and open pasture land were behind us now; the valley was narrowing, hemmed in by thousand-foot cliffs to which a tangle of vegetation clung. The river had become a torrent, boiling and waist deep—plunging over cataracts, roaring down dark rapids under a roof of matted trees: giant hibiscus a yard through, too remote to tempt the ax of the canoe builder; candle nut, Barringtonia, and mapé, the island chestnut, with boles like fluted columns of a temple. The trail wound back and forth, across the river, over the trunks of fallen trees, around masses of rock tumbled from the cliffs above, mounting higher and higher into the heart of the island. Once, as we stopped to rest, I looked back and caught a glimpse of the sea—a wedge of blue, far behind us and below. The dogs had begun to range ahead, for they knew that any moment we might start a sounder of wild pig. I was growing tired—it was not easy to follow Maruae at his own gait. He walked with the rapid, springy tread of a mountain man; when he stooped to clear a low-branching limb or lopped off a section of creeper with an easy swing of his machete I admired the play of muscles on his back, rippling powerfully under the smooth, brown skin. Silken and unblemished—unless it be by scars—the skin of these people is not like ours, but softer and closer in texture; seeming, like marble, to glimmer with reflected light.

The gorge grew narrower; we rounded a buttress of jointed basalt and came suddenly into the light and open of a lonely valley. A quarter of a mile wide and twice as long, set high above the sea, and hemmed in by untrodden ridges, it lay here uninhabited and forgotten, in a silence broken only by the roar of savage cataracts and the far-off bellowing of wild bulls. Yet man had been here. Along the base of the cliffs we found the terraced stone of his dwellings, the blocks of volcanic rock pried apart by the roots of huge old trees.

Maruae was squatting on his heels beside me, contemplating in silence these relics of an older time. Finally he turned his head. "Those stones are very old," he remarked; "they have been here always, since the beginning. Men placed them there and men slept on them, but not the men of my people." My thoughts dwelt on the old idle tales I had heard—of the Lizard men, of the dark-skinned aborigines, the Manahune, said to have been in possession of the land when the eyes of Polynesian voyagers first rested on cloudy Orofena. There were other tales, too, of a later day; of a tribe of men dwelling in the valleys, neither tasting fish nor setting foot on the beach except when, at certain intervals, they were permitted to come down to worship by the sea. Even to-day it needs no effort of the imagination to see two distinct types among the island people: men and women of the kind one considers typically Polynesian—tall, clean limbed, and light brown, with clear, dark eyes, straight or waving hair, and heads not differing greatly from the heads of Europeans; and another kind, of a negroid or Melanesian cast—short, squat, and many shades darker in complexion, thick-lipped and apish, with muddy eyes, kinky hair, and flattened, undeveloped heads. And, strangely enough, after more than a century of missions and leveling foreign influence, the dark and awkward people seem still to fill the humbler walks of life—they are the servants and dependents, the feeders of pigs, the carriers of wood and water. Great stature, physical beauty, and light complexion are still the hall marks of aristocratic birth. Writing of the islands a hundred years ago, old Ellis, the often-quoted, closest observer of them all, remarked: "It is a singular fact in the physiology of the inhabitants of this part of the world that the chiefs, and persons of hereditary rank and influence of the islands, are, almost without exception, as much superior to the peasantry or common people in stateliness, dignified deportment, and physical strength as they are in rank and circumstances, although they are not elected to their station on account of their personal endowments, but derive their rank and elevation from their ancestry. This is the case with most of the groups of the Pacific, but peculiarly so in Tahiti and the adjacent isles. The father of the late king was six feet four inches high; Pomare was six feet two. The present king of Raiatea is equally tall.... Their limbs are generally well formed, and the whole figure is proportioned to their height, which renders the difference between the rulers and their subjects so striking that Bougainville and some others have supposed they were a distinct race, the descendants of a superior people, who at a remote period had conquered the aborigines and perpetuated their supremacy." There is a curious inconsistency in the matter of complexion, for in the old days a dark skin was considered the sign of a strong, warlike, and masterly man. Ellis records an extract from an old song: "If dark be the complexion of the mother, the son will sound the conch shell"; and yet, on the same page, he observes that "the majority of the reigning family in Raiatea are not darker than the inhabitants of some parts of southern Europe."