AT SEA FROM SAMOA TO TAHITI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later Byron:

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

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

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

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

February 12th.

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