"The part of Christ is taken by a native called Lurau"
Marquesan mother and child
The simple white robe worn by Lurau is in good keeping with his part, but this can hardly be said of a very tangible halo that has apparently been cut from a square of shiny biscuit tin, a piece of literalness, however, in which the simple islanders seem to see no trace of incongruity. In fact, this item of make-up was added, it is said, at the suggestion of a native who, after one of the early performances of the Play, led the stage-manager to a coloured print in the mission chapel and pointed out that the stage Christ had no such "fire-face" as distinguished the one in the lithograph. He suggested obtaining the halo effect by having the actor wear a lot of little kukui nut torches in his hair, but the cautious fathers, while acknowledging the realistic possibilities of this expedient, decided on the jagged rim of bright biscuit tin as safer.
During the week of the Play, both on and off the stage, Lurau is quiet, dignified and a general paragon of virtue in every particular; afterwards—he is just like all the rest of his brothers and sisters of the Marquesas, prone to excesses. Lurau's post-Passion Play spree is listed with the hurricane season as one of the regular annual disturbances in those latitudes.
The second scene of the Play is that of the "Redemption of the Magdalen." The latter, dressed in a bright red holakau or wrapper—the symbol of her sinfulness—comes strolling in from the upstream side and discovers Christ resting on a niche of the rock which forms the back wall. Her repentance and forgiveness follow, after which Christ presents her with a pure white holakau which he chances to have tucked under his arm. She receives a blessing, trips off down stream, changes holakaus in the wink of an eye behind the friendly trunk of a bread-fruit tree, and the "curtain" follows her disappearance upstream in the trailing robe of white.
The Magdalen has been played by a different person almost every year. The one who took that part in the last presentation was, so Bruce Manners assured us, far better in the "red holakau" than in the "white holakau" part of her rôle, her work as a repentant sinner having been decidedly marred through a persistent tendency to ogle a group of young trading schooner officers who occupied a proscenium banyan.
For the "Supper" scene, no endeavour is made to reproduce a tableau patterned on the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Historic truthfulness is not attempted even to the extent of a table. A bountiful repast of bread-fruit, plantains, yams and coconuts is spread out upon a cover of banana leaves, and everybody sits down cross-legged and eats for fully ten minutes before a word is spoken. Supper over, the remnants are gathered up and thrown into the convenient Ta-roo-la, the waters of which carry them away in a jiffy. Then follows the washing of the feet of the disciples. Lurau wades over into the stream, seats himself on a convenient boulder, and as each of the disciples comes out in turn, gives both of the latter's feet a vigorous scrubbing with a brush of coco husk and a piece of soap. After receiving a blessing, the disciple heads for the bank, and as each lifts the skirt of his robe to clear the stream a well-defined "high-water mark," running in graceful undulations around his lower calf, is usually disclosed to the eyes of the audience.
The scene of "Christ Healing the Lepers" as presented at Uahuka is, perhaps, the most realistic tableau, in one particular at least, that is staged in any of the Passion Plays. Real lepers appear on the stage. In the early days of the Play these parts were taken by entirely whole and healthy people, but the missionaries were never able to persuade the natives that, with so many real lepers ready to hand, any make-believe in this particular need be indulged in. Finally several of the lepers themselves—Christian converts—came to the Fathers and asked what was the use of curing a lot of well people in the Play when there were so many sick ones about that really needed curing. This was hard to answer—to the satisfaction of the questioners—and the upshot of the matter was that a half dozen of the cases least liable to spread the dread disease were allowed upon the stage at the next performance. Following the week of the Play it is said that a very marked improvement was evident for several months in the condition of every one of the unfortunates that appeared during its continuance. Since that occasion the good missionaries have not had the heart to refuse the prayers of any of those who have come to them at Eastertide, until now it is necessary to divide them off into squads of a score or so each, and allow a different squad to appear each night. The government doctor at Uahuka claims that there has been a marked decrease in the leper mortality of the island since this strange practice has been inaugurated, and that no serious consequences have followed the extraordinary mixing of the sick and the well at this season. No unnecessary chances are taken, however, and the good Lurau who, in his rôle of Christ, is more exposed than any of the others, receives special attention after each performance in the shape of a formaldehyde fumigation at the hands of the doctor.
One of the most interesting characters in the Play is Judas. From the first it has been the aim of the Fathers to impress the natives as strongly as possible with the real goodness or badness of the various characters, and to this end, in the case of Judas, the natives who have played the rôle have been repeatedly taken, on a temporary reprieve, from the convict settlement. Judas has always been a bad man, actually as well as artistically, and it is recorded that no less than half a dozen of him have endeavoured to steal the thirty pieces of silver—in this case Mexican or Chilean dollars, which pass current in the island—with which he has been bribed. Of late years the thoughtful Fathers have removed this temptation by binding the bargain with a tinkling bagful of broken crockery.
The Judas of five or six years ago—one John Bascard, the half-caste son of an Australian trader and a native wife, who was serving a term for robbing a pearler—turned out almost as badly as his notorious original, for he looted the mission on the second night of the Play, rowed off with the Magdalen to a trading cutter anchored in the bay, surprised the solitary watchman, threw him overboard, and sailed the little boat off single-handed for the Paumotos, leaving the Play to limp on to a finish with half-trained understudies in two of the leading parts.
The part of Pontius Pilate has been played for nearly twenty years by an old chief—a quondam cannibal—named Rauga. His costume is a frogged military coat and a silk hat, the idea of the Fathers being to effect a combination that will make the deepest impression on the natives as symbolical of constituted power. The missionary and the French soldier are the two most august personages which their simple minds can conceive of, and the two most striking features of the costume of each, united upon one person, make an impression incomparably more profound than would a Roman toga topped off with an eagle-crowned helmet, or any of the other combinations that are worn by Pilate in the more pretentious Passion Plays. Rauga is inordinately proud of his part, and the honour of appearing in it has held him steadfastly Catholic in the face of active efforts by the Protestants to swing him, temporarily at least, over to their side.
The costume of John the Baptist is, as might be expected, that of a native novitiate—a black robe and a shovel hat. If Manners is to be believed, the unfortunate individual who was cast for that part a half dozen years back made a transient appearance in a somewhat modified garb. This was a "Brand-from-the-Burning" called Ma-woo, who had been converted a few months previously when the Fathers secured his parole from prison, where he had been serving a five-year sentence for illicit pearling. His most salient characteristic was an inordinate fondness for coco toddy, a circumstance which was taken advantage of by a couple of local traders to play a practical joke upon the missionaries, with whom their kind, in the Marquesas as elsewhere, have always been at open warfare. The present of a calabash of toddy to Ma-woo, with the promise of another later, putting him in a cheerfully obliging mood, he was rigged out in a ribbon-wide breech-clout, an old dress coat and a battered silk hat, and with a bulky volume of Sailing Directions under his arm was quietly conducted to the "stage entrance" of the banyan theatre just in time to respond to his "cue" in the John the Baptist tableau.
Manners gave me a photograph of unlucky Ma-woo, taken by one of the traders before they "sent him on his mission," and if it is really true, as is claimed, that John the Baptist appeared thus accoutred in his tableau in the Passion Play, one can easily believe our friend's assertion that two of the sisters fainted and that the Fathers caused the culprit to be thrown back into prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.
Ruth Ingalls, who has played the part of Mary, the Mother, for the last three years, is a half-white girl of unknown parentage. She is said to have a Junoesque figure, a face of rare beauty and a manner of real charm. She is about twenty-five years of age—fifteen years younger than Lurau, whose mother she is supposed to be in the Play—and has been directly under the care of the missionaries since the time when, a child of five, she was cast up on the beach of one of the Paumotos with the wreckage of a Tahitian trading schooner. She is supposed to be the illegitimate daughter of a French count—a fugitive from justice in Tahiti a quarter of a century ago—and the queen of the neighbouring island of Bora-Bora, a lady whose marital responsibilities appear to have rested as lightly upon her as blown foam upon the bosom of the Southeast Trade. But whatever her origin, Ruth Ingalls is, according to all accounts, a young person of unlimited balance and poise, has a good education, both as to languages and music, and is possessed of a quiet and modest disposition. She is, moreover, a good Christian in the highest sense of the name, and her work in the mission school has been of incalculable value to the Fathers. Her interpretation of the character of the Madonna is doubtless somewhat naïve, but is said, withal, to be surprisingly effective; her work in this part, indeed, being generally rated as the only thing in the Play worthy of the name of acting.
Mlle. Ingalls, it is claimed, is heart whole and fancy free, though they tell you in Papeete and Taio-haie that she has received offers of marriage from every bachelor missionary, sailor, official and trader that has ever come to Uahuka.
"Pontius Pilate has been played for twenty years by an
old chief—a quondam cannibal"
"Just in time to respond to his 'cue' in the John the
Baptist tableau"
TAIO-HAIE TO PAPEETE
Before leaving Nukahiva the four of us from the Lurline, under the guidance of our good friend McGrath, journeyed on pony-back across the island to visit Queen Mareu of Hatiheu. The road led over two 3,000-foot mountain passes and along the whole length of the incomparable Typee Valley, immortalized by Herman Melville, and though something like eight inches of rain fell during the nine hours we were in the saddle, there were ample intervals between cataclysms in which to glimpse the beauties by the way. Lovely as we had found Taio-haie and Typee, however, the glamour of their charms paled before the supreme grandeur of the bay of Hatiheu, the most sublime combination of mountain, vale, and sea that my eyes have ever rested on.
The cliff-girt bay of Hatiheu, like those others of Nature's superlatives, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi and the Himalayas from Darjeeling, is one of the kind of things that makes a man feel foolish to attempt to describe, and I pay my silent tribute in the thrill which never fails to stir my heart at the mention of the name. My photograph gives a suggestion—just a suggestion—of what a single coup d'œil reveals.
Hatiheu was McGrath's headquarters where, in addition to conducting a trading business with the natives, he appeared to act as a sort of "Lord Chamberlain" to the Queen. Her Highness seemed very fond of the attractive young Canadian, and told us that she never took action in important "affairs of state" without first securing his advice. His word appeared to be law in the village, and I never heard him give an order that was not instantly carried out. He told off a body servant to look after each of us during our visit to Hatiheu, the one allotted to Claribel being a grizzled old cannibal, with a black band like a highwayman's mask tattooed across his face, who gave her a stone knife which he swore he had himself used in carving "long-pig," and who wept disconsolately on her departure.
One morning McGrath took us down to the beach and showed us with justifiable pride a half-completed cutter—an open boat of about thirty feet in length designed to be rigged as a sloop—which he was building to use in picking up copra from other villages along the coast of the island. All of the wood used had been hewed from trees felled within a hundred feet of the beach, he told us, and all of the work was being done with his own hands. The Commodore discoursed learnedly on the lines and construction of the little craft, and the rest of us commended its builder for his industry and ingenuity. No one of us dreamed that we were looking at the frame of a boat which was destined shortly to make a voyage that must be rated for all time as one of the miracles of deep sea sailing.
Our intercourse with Queen Mareu was somewhat restricted as a result of having to be carried on through the medium of an interpreter. We found her a most personable young lady of about twenty-five, with a striking face and figure and a glint of sombre fire slumbering in the depths of her dark eyes that indicated temper or temperament, and probably both. She had ascended the "throne" a year previously, after her father, the late King, had slipped on a ripe mango in endeavouring to elude the charge of a wild bull he was hunting. Her manifest determination to rule her home as well as her people was responsible, it was said, for the flight to Tahiti of her husband—a young half-caste of little account—a month or two later. Since then she had ruled alone. Of what mind she was in the matter of taking a "Prince Consort," we were unable to learn; but a tender light in the sloe eyes when "Lord Chamberlain" McGrath was about might have furnished a clue to the trend of her intentions. Whatever these might have been, however, Fate, as far as the near future was concerned, had other plans incubating for the slender, blue-eyed trader to whom every one that came in contact with him seemed to become so much attached.
The print holakau or Mother Hubbard wrapper—which descended upon the South Seas with the missionaries—would ordinarily hardly be rated as a regal garment; but Mareu, with the sweeping lines of her Dianesque figure softly outlined by the clinging calico, carried hers as if it was a Grecian robe, and was distinctly—well, I noted that even the Commodore was keeping his weather eye lifting whenever she hove above the horizon. But she was at her best when, in a bathing suit improvised from a pareo, she sported with the gay abandon of a porpoise in a natural pool of pink and blue coral where the beach curved up to the base of the great cliff, or, perched cross-legged in the stern of her little out-rigger canoe, sent that slender craft, a sliver of shining silver, speeding through the surf-swept mazes of the outer reef. She was indeed a consummate canoeist—quite the best I have ever seen—and in the light of subsequent events I have often recalled the words with which McGrath once referred to her skill with the paddle.
"Hatiheu, the most sublime combination of mountain, vale and sea that my eyes
have ever rested upon"
A Marquesan fisherman of Hatiheu
We watched from the thatched roofed veranda of McGrath's quarters one dewy-fresh morning when the whistling Trade had whipped up a more than usually stiff sea outside, the course of Mareu's canoe where, with Claribel as a passenger, she was shooting the breakers as they came booming in across the reef. Suddenly the even line of the horizon was blotted out by the loom of a roller of huge bulk and weight—"the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son," as the sailors call it when they don't use a stronger term.
"She'll hardly try that one," muttered McGrath decisively; "it's big enough to founder a war canoe." And then, as the helio flashes from the blade of a swiftly plied paddle told him his surmise was wrong, "Good God, there she goes!"
The canoe gathered momentum, hung for a few moments on the back of the mounting comber, and then "caught on" and commenced to race. Slowly the wave gathered itself together and, as the water shallowed above the edge of the reef, curled over and broke with a roar that rattled the glasses on the arms of our chairs. For an instant nothing was visible but foam and spray and tossing waters; then, clinging tenaciously to the comber's flying mane—as a panther, teeth in neck and safe from the animal's horns, rides the stag he has tackled—appeared the little canoe. On it darted like the flash of a sunbeam, a smoke of spray rising from its bows and the floundering out-rigger trailing like a broken wing. Twice or thrice, as the tossing waters gave way beneath the prow and the slender craft seemed on the point of "somersaulting" over the breaker's brink, there came the flash of a steadying paddle and the equilibrium was restored. Now the roughest of the ride was over and a swift dash of a hundred yards remained before still water was reached. Claribel, game but chastened, still lay low in an instinctive endeavour to keep the centre of gravity down near the keel where it belonged; but Mareu, mad with the ecstasy of swift motion, leapt up to a hair-poised balance and, swathed in sheets of flying spray, finished the run after the fashion of that other Venus who was born of the sea-foam where the breakers travailed on the Cyprean coast.
I saw the Commodore lower his glass with a gesture of relief where he had watched with the Mater from the veranda of the Queen's "palace," but McGrath was only smiling.
"If there was a reef and a surf hedging in the jaws of hell, that girl would try and shoot the passage with never a thought for what she was going into beyond," he said evenly as he watched her beach the canoe and help Claribel to alight.
Absorbed in his thoughts, but still with his eye on the girl, McGrath poured himself another glass of absinthe. Disdaining the aid of a couple of her boat-pullers, she dumped the water from the canoe and hauled it up to its shelter of thatch above high-tide mark; then, like a spaniel that has finished its swim, she gave herself a vigorous shake, so that her wealth of glistening blue-black hair came tumbling down and swathed her spray-wet body to the knees.
"And by God!—" McGrath gave vocal expression to the thoughts that were in his eyes—"with Mareu at the paddle I'd run the jaws of hell myself!"
I had no inkling at the time of the struggle that was going on in the man's heart, but later events, coupled with a recollection of those sudden passionate words, brought me to something of an understanding.
On the last day of our visit to Hatiheu the Queen gave a great feast to all of her subjects, the members of our party being the guests of honour. The food consisted of the usual run of Marquesan delicacies, but the piece de resistance was the great bull secured on the wild cattle hunt which McGrath finally succeeded in arranging at the last moment. It was cooked whole in a huge underground oven lined with stones, from which it was drawn in a condition to suit the taste of an epicure. Like the Mexican barbecue, this method of cooking results in meat that is delicious enough to counteract the dis-appetizing effects of the disgusting methods of handling it. McGrath kept a careful eye on the toddy calabashes, so that the feast, as Marquesan feasts go, was a very prim and proper affair. Claribel, who was in splendid voice, sang several English and Hawaiian songs, and finally, the Marseillaise, from the "palace" veranda. The latter, with which many of the natives appeared to be familiar, was received with tumultuous applause.
At the Queen's command a bevy of very comely misses from the mission school started a himine or hymn, to the tune of a couple of tom-toms and a concertina. Others joined in, and by imperceptible degrees the air was changed until, almost before we knew what had happened, it had become a rollicking hula. The frantic protests of the Mother Superior passed unnoticed in the excitement, and not until that outraged individual had seized one of the recalcitrants (who, yielding to the delirious abandon of the seductive air, had begun to dance), and led her off by the ear was she able to re-establish her authority. The indignant Mareu, who had no love for the missionaries and who said she was just getting in a mood to dance herself, promptly declared in favour of bringing the spirited little singers back by force and letting the festivities go on; but the diplomatic McGrath, scenting "civil war" in the kingdom of Hatiheu, suggested that, as we all were to start at daybreak for the long ride back to Taio-haie, it might be well to turn in and get a few hours' sleep. The Queen continued obdurate and would probably have carried her point had not a heavy squall come roaring in from the ocean and driven the whole company to shelter.
My opportunities for studying the hula in Nukahiva, which was once famous as the home of the greatest dancers in the South Pacific, were so limited that it would be presumptuous of me to dogmatise. I might record the impression, however, that it is a spirited and soul-stirring performance, and has this in common with modern "ragging" and "jazzing" and "shimmy-ing," that it leaves nothing to the imagination on the points to which it is endeavouring to give expression. For this reason, if for no other, it may be worth preserving against the time when the Pampas, the Sahara and the Barbary Coast of California are incapable longer of giving a wriggle or a "writhe" sufficiently suggestive to stir the jaded soul of Society. Pulses that have long refused to throb a beat faster in the tangle of the "tango," may yet have the life to quicken in the sensuous abandon of the Marquesan hula. And in fancy cannot one hear it all over again? "The 'Hatiheu Hug' and the 'Taio-haie Throttle'—who says they're disgusting? If one wants to dance them disgustingly, of course—" How long will it be, I wonder?
Queen Mareu and her retinue, Her Highness in a flowing habit of print and tapa and sitting an imported French side-saddle, accompanied us back to Taio-haie, and on the evening preceding our departure came off to the yacht for dinner and fireworks. Queen Taone of Anaho, who chanced to be visiting in Taio-haie, was another of the distinguished guests on this occasion. Besides royalty, invitations had been sent to every one of foreign blood on the island, and all, with the exception of John Hilyard, the tattooed man, had responded. French officialdom, brave in gold lace and with straggles of orders across its breasts, was out en masse; three of the genial Fathers from the Catholic mission, one of whom entertained us with several selections from "Faust," "Carmen" and "Trovatore," sung in a magnificent tenor, also honoured us with their presence, as did four officers from trading schooners in the harbour, two of whom were in pajamas and barefooted. Cramer, the German trader, was choking till his eyes bulged in the uniform of an officer of a Prussian cavalry regiment which he had worn as a slender youth, ten years before. McGrath put us all to shame by appearing in a dress suit, the fine cut of which puzzled me not a little until, later in the evening when he had thrown it aside in my cabin, I noticed a tab with "Poole" upon it on the inside of the collar.
Entertaining royalty is ordinarily a thing not lightly to be courted, but one has to get used to it in the South Pacific and after a while comes to take it quite as a matter of course. The principal accessories required are a phonograph or a music box, a cabin-ful of plate glass mirrors, plenty of cool drinks, a few cases of fireworks, unlimited bolts of print and an inexhaustible supply of barrels of salt beef and boxes of canned salmon. These items, properly used, will insure social success to the veriest tyro. In those calid latitudes, where everything else appears more or less en deshabille, court etiquette is also stripped of its surplus frills and, save for occasional disconcerting surprises, contains little to baffle the uninitiated.
Queen Mareu had dined with foreigners many times before and her manners were impeccable. Her Highness, Teona, had enjoyed fewer advantages than her sister sovereign of Hatiheu, but even she—except for a little bad luck in inhaling some champagne which she was endeavouring to make run down her throat and thereby inducing coughing fits which nothing but rolling on the carpet seemed to have any efficacy in checking—deported herself most creditably. She was, to be sure, irresistibly attracted by the agreeable salty taste of a long lock of her foretop which got into the soup in the opening round, so that she returned to it in all of the intervals between the courses which followed, and the careless informality of her action in emptying the contents of the bowl of lump sugar into the bosom of her holakau might have been greeted with raised eyebrows at Newport, or Cowes, or Cannes, but the quiet, unconscious dignity of it all proved that she was at least "to the manor born" in the South Pacific and quite disarmed criticism.
Dinner over, Queen Mareu retired to a reclining chair by the taffrail and sat apart, moody and distrait, all of the evening, not any too pleased, apparently, to have her handsome "Lord Chamberlain" so much monopolized by the visitors. Queen Teona, on the other hand, glad of the chance to become the centre of interest, was all smiles and animation. Seated at ease on the rail of the cockpit, with one dainty brown foot thrust through the spokes of the wheel and the other polishing the brass binnacle, she related—through Cramer as interpreter—stories which she had heard from her grandfather of the time when Nukahiva was the rendezvous of the Pacific whaling fleet, tales only less terrible than those of the days when the buccaneers held high revel in the old cannibal feast ground at Hatiheu; recitals, in fact, which I rather fancy the shrewd Teuton toned down considerably in translation.
At little tables on the quarter deck the French officers mixed cool green drinks from specially-provided bottles of absinthe, and in the cabin, bowed over a chart, the trading captains gave the Commodore careful directions for threading the passages of the treacherous Paumotos. On the forward deck Their Highnesses' retinues fraternized with the Lurline's crew over a case of Yankee beer, now the sailors raising their voices in a chantey, now the natives in a himine, and now both together in indiscriminate "chantey-himines" and "himine-chanteys."
In the whole cruise's necklace of tropical nights that one shines forth with a sparkle all its own. As the afterglow faded above the opaque mass of cliffs behind the village, the trade-wind shifted slightly and came to us across the blossom-clothed spurs to the southeast, suffusing, as with a draught of incense from the open door of an Eastern temple, the whole hollow of the bay in the drowsy perfume of the yellow cassi. As the purple shadows banked deeper on the ebony water and night crept out from the black valleys of the mountains lights began twinkling here and there in the bush, and presently the lines of the verandas of the official residence were picked out in rows of coloured lanterns. The surf broke uproariously along the shore in bursts of phosphorescent flame, and in its pauses the barbaric cadences of himines and hulas floated out to us across the star-paved surface of the bay. On this, though they seemed to tickle the royal fancies, the fireworks broke somewhat in the nature of an anti-climax.
To the good Teona's passion for "seeing the wheels go round" was due the fact that the fireworks tickled something besides her royal fancy. She had been permitted to pull the lanyard of the signal gun for half a dozen salutes, to put the match to several kicking rockets, and had just touched off her second fistful of Roman candles when the trouble occurred. The paper tubes were popping forth their multi-coloured contents in blazing showers when Her Highness, her face ashine with perspiration and pleasure, reversed them in an ill-advised attempt to see where the bright little balls came from.
In an instant a good half dozen or more of the purple pellets had popped into the neck of the unlucky queen's voluminous holakau, seeking extinguishment somewhere in the oil-glistening reaches of Her Highness' plump shoulders. That the sufferer raked, as with a gatling gun, the rest of the party with her sputtering candles in the pain and consternation of the first touch of the burning balls of calcium is hardly to be wondered at under the circumstances; and it only made the more admirable the manner in which she pulled herself together and tossed the spitting fire-sticks overboard before dignifiedly retiring down the gangway to bathe her burns in salt water. Later in the evening she rose to another trying emergency with equal aplomb in seizing an erupting ginger ale bottle from one of her befuddled hand-maidens and smothering it in the latter's flowered pareo in order to save the dignity and the gold-laced uniform of the Residente who, being corpulent, had become temporarily wedged in his deck chair and was unable to dodge the sizzling amber jet. This, I may mention, was only the forerunner of many trying experiences that were in store for us as the result of the violent unrest that enters into the contents of a bottle of champagne or mineral water that is carried in imperfectly protected lockers on tropical seas.
At noon, on the 15th of April, the Nukahiva, a French schooner of about seventy tons—the "greyhound" of the Marquesan trading fleet—hove up anchor and got under weigh for the entrance with the courteously avowed intention of showing us the way to Tahiti.
"Venez nous voir en arrivant a Papeete!" her captain shouted as she came up past us and went about; and "Merci—avec plasir!" we faltered back as we waved him a vigorous au revoir with our napkins from the companionway.
At one o'clock we were under weigh ourselves, beating out against such baffling puffs of the trade-wind as found their way to the inner bay. Sailing within four points of the wind in the smooth water of the narrow passage, by two o'clock Lurline had overcome the hour's lead of the Nukahiva, and a few minutes later passed ahead and well to the windward of her through the "Sentinels."
A number of our newly-made friends had come down to the beach to wave us bon voyage, but the one to whom our glasses turned the oftenest was a white clad figure that had stood immovable under the shade of a coco palm while the yacht was in sight and which, as the southerly "Sentinel" began to blot our tower of sail, had sunk down into a dejected heap upon the coral clinkers. The memories and the thoughts of the "Outside World" which our coming had conjured up for McGrath, the man who was trying to forget the "Outside World," had proved almost too much for him.
That pathetic little white heap on the beach of Taio-haie was the last we ever saw of the young trader who had done so much to make our visit to Nukahiva a memorable one, and whom we had all come to like so well. Some weeks later, in Tahiti, I received a letter from Cramer telling how McGrath, accompanied by a single native boy and with a pitifully small stock of provisions, had been blown off to sea during a storm in the little cutter he was building when we were at Hatiheu, and had been given up for lost. And it was as lost that we mourned our good friend during all the rest of the cruise and for many months afterward until, one day, came the following letter, written from Tahiti: (I give the essential parts of it verbatim for the especial benefit of those yachtsmen who are prone to feel themselves the victims of hard luck at having to spend a summer night out of port in a snug, decked-over forty-footer.)
"I have had a rather exciting time of it for the last six months, having been blown away from the Marquesas group in the little boat which I was building when you called at the islands. It was owing to the unshipping of the rudder, and as the boat had an overhanging stern it was impossible for us to re-ship it for four days, owing to the heavy sea. We had no oars with which to guide the boat, otherwise I might have fetched the lee of Nukahiva. We were more than two hundred miles west of the group when we finally succeeded in getting the rudder repaired, and had but a gallon of water left. As it then fell calm I decided to run for Caroline, with the breeze and strong current in our favour, and made the island O.K. within an hour of the time I calculated. To say that I had a hell of a time is putting it mildly. After trying twice to make Tahiti, and running into a southeast gale each time, I ran for Samoa, and the last five days of the run had the full force of the hurricane which swept the whole of the South Pacific from June 12th to 18th. It was so fierce that the Sierra—a 6,300-ton steamer of the American-Australian Line—was blown away from the Samoas and could not effect an entrance. Several vessels were piled up in the neighbourhood of Samoa, and many dismasted; yet my boy and I lived it out in a perfectly open boat.
"We were blown away on the 7th of May, and made Tutuila on the 18th of June, after having sailed more than 3,000 miles. The boat filled once, twelve miles from Pago Pago, and almost sank, but we threw everything overboard to lighten her, baled her out, and then slashed her through it with reefed foresail. She was the finest sea boat that ever split a wave, and at Samoa beat a twenty-tone schooner seventeen hours in a gale of wind from Savaii to Apia—a dead beat of sixty miles."
McGrath's letter went on to tell of how he had sold his little cutter in Samoa, journeyed to Sydney by steamer, travelled for some months in Australasia, and was finally in Tahiti en voyage to his old post in the Marquesas. Subsequent letters received by the Commodore from Tahiti were calculated to cast considerable doubt on McGrath's story of having been blown away from Nukahiva in a storm, and hinted at shortages of accounts and other things. It is quite possible these charges are true—it will make no difference with our memory of the man if they are—but if they are, the question that suggests itself is, "Why did McGrath, after successfully reaching Australia, come back again to the Marquesas?" At last accounts he was back under the shadow of the great cliffs of Hatiheu where, I sincerely hope, his high-strung spirit has ceased to be troubled by the conflicting impulses to which he was a prey during the final days of our visit to Nukahiva. The story of McGrath cannot be told yet, for the reason that one of the strangest of its drama is still unplayed; when it is written, if ever, I have gleaned just enough of what has gone before to know that the record will be one of the most remarkable that has ever been given to the world.
Of McGrath's voyage in an open boat from the Marquesas to Samoa, I will comment here no more than to say that, whether he was cast away or deliberately embarked upon it, it has gone on record as one of the most remarkable achievements of its kind in marine history. The Lurline encountered, between Samoa and Fiji, the same hurricane which McGrath refers to in his letter, and when I describe that stupendous disturbance as it appeared to us on one of the staunchest ninety-footers ever built, I will also call attention to the fact that, five hundred miles to the northeast, a white man and a Marquesan boy, half dead from lack of food and sleep, were pointing up the prow of a pitiful little thirty-foot open cutter to the same mountainous seas and roaring winds.
Clearing the harbour of Taio-haie, sheets were slacked off and, with a strong beam wind, we bowled away on a S.W. ½ S. course at a gait which presaged a lively passage if it could be kept up. At 3:15 we took our departure with the conspicuous Cape Maartens bearing N.E. and an unnamed point on the west end of the island N. by W. At this time the Nukahiva was already hull down astern.
Encouraged by the first prospect of a steady and favourable slant of wind since we left San Pedro, a good spread of sail was hoisted, which, as the barometer was high and the sky unthreatening, it was hoped could be carried all night. The sea was light, and in a gushingly fresh wind the yacht reeled off ten and eleven knots an hour all through the first watch. The breeze fell lighter after midnight, however, and squalls in the morning and early forenoon made it impossible to carry the light sails, considering which the run of 195 miles for the twenty-two hours ending at noon of the 16th was very creditable work.
By the afternoon of the 16th we were clear of the treacherous squall belt around the islands, and the strong, steady Trade from the E.S.E. drove the yacht along at an almost undeviating speed, the log varying scarcely two-tenths from ten knots for any hour. Toward evening the benefit of a strengthening wind was offset by a rising sea, and through the latter hours of the night we proceeded under shortened sail. At daybreak the light sails were clapped on again and for several hours of the forenoon but a shade under eleven knots was averaged. At noon the dead-reckoning showed close to 230 miles logged in the last twenty-four hours, and when the position by observation was figured it appeared that a favourable set of current had added enough to this to bring the day's run up to an even 240 miles. The temperature of the air was 86° this day—the highest recorded during the voyage—and that of the water was 82°.
At four o'clock on the afternoon of the 17th a ragtag of fringe was reported off to the S.S.W., and word went around that we were sighting the first of the dread Paumotos. This group—often down on the charts as the Tuamotu, Low or Dangerous Archipelago,—is a cluster of a hundred or more coral atolls covering several degrees of both latitude and longitude of the extreme southwest corner of Polynesia. They are noted for their treacherous currents and terrific hurricanes, and are reputed to have had more schooners piled up on their white coral beaches than any other half dozen groups in the South Pacific. The name is a byword for all that is bad with every skipper who has sailed among them, and "Aussi sâle que dans ces maudits Paumotos" is the last degree of superlative in describing desperate navigating conditions. Of harbours there is none save the lagoons of the atolls themselves, and the entrances to these are so narrow and so beset by currents that the passage of them is almost impossible except at the turn of the tide, and is highly dangerous even then. Once inside the lagoon, however, the protection from everything but hurricanes is perfect.
The average life of a trading or pearling schooner in the Paumotos is but four or five years, and so notoriously world-wide is their reputation as a marine graveyard that neither in Europe, Australia nor America can a ship be insured that is plying in their trade. It is even the custom to insert in the policy of a vessel running to adjacent islands a clause declaring that no insurance will be paid should the ship, by any chance, be lost in the Paumotos.
The island we had sighted turned out to be Ahii, one of the largest of the group, and by five o'clock it had grown from a colourless horizontal blur to a solid wall of white and brown and green, where the snowy beach ran up to the dark boles of the coco palms, and these in turn ran out in fringes of lacquered verdancy. At a distance of half a mile our course was altered slightly to parallel that of the shore line, and in a rapidly smoothing sea, but with an unabated breeze, we began running down the low, even leeward coast of the strange island. From the deck only the coco palm barrier, a tossing mass of up-ended feather dusters, met the eye to windward, but from the shrouds, through rifts in the line, could be seen great green gashes of the smooth lagoon. Farther still, in blended brown and olive, the windward rim of the island stood out sharply against a vivid turquoise ribbon of open sea, itself defined against a dusky mass of cumulo-nimbus that was rolling in before the Trade from the southeast.
Here followed a spell of the prettiest sailing that the good Lurline, sapient of the seas of many latitudes, ever did, or probably ever will do. We were sufficiently close to the steep-to lee shore of the great atoll to be sailing in a sea as smooth as the land-locked lagoon itself, yet at the same time were far enough beyond the barrier of the coco palms still to enjoy the full force of a moderately strong and remarkably steady breeze. We were anxious not to get too far in among the islands during the night, and for this reason no light sails were set; yet under mainsail, foresail, forestay-sail and jib the log was shortly spinning up mile after mile with six minutes and less of interval between each bell.
The wind was on the port beam, and blowing so smoothly that the yacht, unshaken by the lift or slap of waves, held to her even heel as though chocked over in the ways. Of pitch or roll or shiver there was no sign, and for all the motion but that swift, undeviating forward glide, she might have been frozen up in a fresh water lake. She simply shore her way through the water as a draper's clerk runs his unworked scissors down a length of silk.
At dinner in the cabin the unprecedented stillness was almost oppressive. The familiar creaking of the inlaying on the mainmast at the head of the table was no longer heard, nor the crash of waves and the rattle of spray to windward, nor the shrill of spinning sheaves and the rat-a-tat of the foresheet block on the deck. The only sounds were unwonted ones—the tick of the cabin clock, the rattle of pans in the galley, the not over-elegant flow of post-prandial conversation in the forecastle, and running through all, the hissing rush of the water along the sides.
The sun had set while we were at dinner, and the afterglow, in swift tropic transitions, had flamed and faded and flamed again, and was fading out for the last time as we came on deck. The sea to the west still glimmered here and there in patches of dull rose from the reflections of a few still-lighted tufts of cirrus cloud. North and south it was darkly purple, shading to a misty slatiness where water and sky merged in banks of low-hanging strati, and east to the island it lay dead and opaque, save for the spots where it was pricked into life by the images of the brightening stars. Overhead the Pleiades and Orion's Belt and Sirius, the Dog Star, were turning from pale yellow to orange, and from orange to lambent gold; to the north the Big Dipper, half submerged in the sea, was tipping up slowly to pour out its nocturnal libation to its stately vis-à-vis, the Southern Cross. And under it all, swiftly, silently, mysteriously as the Flying Dutchman, her track marked for a mile astern by a comet-like wake of vivid gold, Lurline went slipping down the lee of the long atoll at an easy, even, effortless ten knots an hour.
Presently, just as twilight was giving way to full darkness, a red light was reported crossing our bows, and we shortly made out a two-masted schooner beating in toward the entrance to the lagoon, nearly opposite to which we were then sailing. Several times across the still water came the strangely mixed jumble of French and Kanaka and English orders, mingling with the creak of booms as she was put about, and finally the voice of the skipper cursing fluently because the tide was running faster in the passage than was to his apparent taste. Then a great yellow moon got up and sat upon the farther fringe of the lagoon, and back and forth across the face of it we watched the little schooner beat in safely through the narrow passage. As she left the moon path a bonfire sprang into life somewhere upon the inner beach, and through the serried ranks of the coco palms we saw her pink sails crumple up as halyards were let go, while the sharp staccato of a chain running through a hawse pipe floating down the wind told that she had won her anchorage.
At nine o'clock it was decided to pass to the west of the island of Rangaroa, instead of to the east as had been our intention, and to this end the course was altered to W. by S. To minimize the chance of overrunning our reckoning in the treacherous currents and thereby piling up the yacht on the beach of Tikehau which lay beyond Rangaroa, foresail and jib were furled, only the mainsail and forestay-sail remaining set. Even under this greatly reduced sail seven knots an hour were averaged all night, daybreak finding us off the northwest corner of Rangaroa. Down the lee of this island—under sailing conditions only less perfect than those of the previous evening—we ran all the forenoon of the 18th, sinking its southwest corner early in the afternoon, just as we raised a peak of the combined coral and volcanic island of Makatea.
Makatea is famous as having been the rendezvous of the notorious Marquesan half-caste, Boraki, quite the most picturesque pirate who ever operated in that corner of the South Pacific. The story of the retributive justice which overtook Boraki while endeavouring to cut out and capture a missionary schooner sent to conciliate and convert him is one of the most amazing yarns ever told, and the antithetic variations of it that come from the opposite poles of "traderdom" and "missiondom" are alone worth journeying to the South Seas to listen to. I shall endeavour, later, to set down the account we heard—from the lips of one of the principal actors in the remarkable drama—on a memorable evening when the yacht lay at anchor in Suva Bay, Fiji.
As day broke on the 19th the mist-wreathed peak of Orohena, the backbone of Tahiti, took form a point or two off the port bow, and a little later the jumbled skyline of Moorea began to appear in a similar position to starboard. The sun rose gorgeously behind a flank of the larger island, the blazing southeast setting off in marvellous silhouette the matchless "Diadem," the crown jewel of all Tahiti's beauty. "The Diadem" is the name given to a row of little peaks occupying the divide between the two great volcanoes that dominate the east and west ends of the island. They are so symmetrically and evenly set that the most unimaginative cannot fail to see their resemblance to the points of a king's crown, a likeness all the more striking when each point is tipped with gold and the whole surmounted with a halo of light from the rising sun.
At seven o'clock the tall, white pillar of the Point Venus Light—so called because Captain Cook took his observations of the transit of the planet Venus from this promontory on June 3rd, 1769—could be discerned towering above the coco palms that engulfed its base, and an hour later it was abeam, with the bay of Papeete opening up beyond. This name, meaning "Basket of Water," gives a comprehensive description of Tahiti's chief harbour. The bay itself is but half land-locked by the mainland, but across what would otherwise be a comparatively open roadstead runs a partially submerged reef, which, except for the narrowest of passages, completely cuts it off from the sea. Inside is a mile of deep water and a shore so bold-to that the trading schooners tie up to the trees and load from and discharge to the bank.
At 8:30 we were off the entrance, and, as the sailing directions were plain and the marks unmistakable, the Commodore decided to go in without a pilot. The wind, which we had carried on our port quarter since daybreak, was brought up abeam as we altered our course and headed into the passage. It blew strongly and steadily, and to the nine or ten-knot gait at which it was driving us was added the four or five-knot run of a flood tide. The yacht raced through the passage, as the Port Captain shortly tried to tell us in broken English, "like ze diable try catch her," and during all of our stay in the island we were constantly called upon to deny the persistent rumour that she was equipped with power. Several who witnessed our entrance from the shore even went so far as to aver that they distinctly saw blue smoke trailing off astern, a phenomenon which never came nearer to explanation than when Gus, a big Swede of the mate's watch who was at the wheel on the occasion in question, admitted that he did "sware a leetle when she go joost lak hell" out of sheer excitement.
We anchored a couple of cable's lengths off the British Consulate, having made the 800 miles from Nukahiva in a little over three and three-quarters days, eleven hours of which were run under mainsail and forestay-sail only in the lee of Rangaroa. The best previous record was between four and five days.
CIRCLING TAHITI
The island of Tahiti has been the best known, or rather the most talked-about, point in the South Pacific since those latitudes were added to the mapped sections of the world. From the time that the much-maundered-over mutiny of the Bounty furnished the theme for Byron's "Island," and later events conspired to produce Hermann Melville's charming "Omoo" and Pierre Loti's idyllic "Rarahue," down to the more numerous but less finished efforts of recent years, Tahiti has been the inspiration for more literary endeavour, good and bad, than all the rest of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia combined. Undoubtedly it has had more than its share of publicity—latterly, largely because it is so easily and comfortably reached from both America and Australia—but the fact remains that it is uniquely—if not quite unmixedly—charming, and that it is perhaps better fitted to minister to the creature comforts of the visitor than any other of its sister islands of the South Pacific.
Civilization in the form of the galvanized iron roof, the glass window, the missionary, the holakau or Mother Hubbard wrapper and the whisky bottle has thrown its coldly corrective influence over the native life of Tahiti; but if it is the Kanaka in his pristine purity that one is seeking, Moorea and Bora-Bora—both in the Society Group—and the Paumotos and Marquesas are close at hand, and any of these the venturesome may reach by trading schooner, even if he is not so fortunate as to have a yacht at his disposal.
Chief item in the visitor's program in Tahiti—after he has called on the Governor, appeared at the Club and spent a small sack of Chilean pesos to see a hula which has been so completely "expurgated and legalized" as to make a Maypole dance on the green in his old home appear Bacchanalian by comparison—is the hundred-mile drive around the island. The roads are bad over half the way and the vehicles all the way, but the ride unfolds such an unending panorama of sea, surf and lagoon; of beach and reef; of mountain, cliff and crag; of torrent, cascade and waterfall, and of reckless, riotous, onrushing tropical vegetation as can be found along few, if any, similar stretches of road elsewhere in the world. Our drive, in the company of the American Consul, William Doty, and his sister, on which we were entertained each day by a different district chief with specially-arranged surf-rides, feasts, dances and himines, was one unbroken succession of new and delightful sensations.
At Tautira, the village second in importance to Papeete, we were the guest for three days of the suave and dignified old Ori, a chief who was once the host of the Stevensons for many weeks, and who, on occasion, fairly bubbled with piquant anecdotes of the great novelist. Returning down the leeward side of the island, we spent a day and a night with the wealthy Teta-nui in a big, comfortable two-story house which might have passed for a Southern plantation home of the ante-bellum days, and also found time to accept a luncheon invitation from the scholarly Tau-te Salmon, relation of the late King Pomare, university man and, on the occasion of his visits abroad, the fêted guest of Washington, London and Paris.
Tahitian driving comes pretty near to being the most reckless thing of the kind in my experience. It really isn't driving at all; "herding" is a more appropriate term. If your vehicle has more than one seat there will be three or four horses to haul it, driven "spike" in the former case, by twos in the latter. These animals are attached to the rig by traces that run to their collars, which, with the reins, constitute all there is to the harness. There is nothing in the nature of breeching for holding back, and, as the vehicle never has a brake, there is no way the wheel horses can save their heels but by beating it down the hills. A good driver will handle two horses unaided; beyond that number a boy is required upon the back of each additional one. With your driver and post boys wearing each a gaudy hibiscus or tiaré behind his ear, with their braided whips cracking merrily at everything from stray dogs and blossoms to the horses' ears and each other, and with all of them raising their voices in himine after himine with the indefatigability of a frog-pond chorus, your progress, on the score of picturesqueness at least, has no odds to ask of a Roman Triumph.
We decided to make the circuit by starting to windward and taking the roughest part of the road first. In a mile or two the last straggling Papeetan suburb had been left behind, the tall pillar of the Point Venus lighthouse was passed, and the road, plunging into the half-light of the jungle, became a grassy track. Here and there were breaks in the encompassing walls of verdure, and through them we had transient glimpses of the landscape—"that smiling Tahitian landscape where the weeds laugh at the idea of road boundaries; where the sea, disdaining regular shoreline, straggles aimlessly among its hundred islets; where the mountains flaunt all known laws of natural architecture and the wind disdains regular blasts; where the sun, as careless as the rest, shines one moment above the palm fronds as clear as frosted silver, and the next hides completely behind the lowering mask of a black cloud—a kingdom of laissez-faire."
In the seventy-five miles from Papeete to Tautira by the windward route there is an average of more than one stream for every mile, and not a single bridge in the whole distance. As this side of the island has an inch or more of rain daily for most of the year, it may be understood that many of the streams are formidable torrents and by no means easily forded. The approved way of crossing, especially if you have a spirited driver and horses and are not without spirit yourself, is to join your Jehu and the postillions in their cannibal war-whoops and endeavour to take the obstacle like a water-jump in a steeple-chase. Now and then—just often enough to keep you from becoming discouraged and adopting more conservative tactics—your outfit, smothered in flying gravel and sun-kissed spray, reaches the farther bank and goes reeling on its course; usually a wheel hits a boulder and you stop short; and here is where the synthetically constructed harnesses—bits of old straps, wire, tough strands of liana and vegetable fibre—vindicate their existence.
Nothing short of a charge of dynamite will move the boulder against which the near wheel is securely jammed. With the horses going berserk at thirty miles an hour, therefore, something has to give way, and the Tahitian has wisely figured that it is easier to patch a harness than a wagon. So it happens that when the latter is brought up short in midstream, the harnesses dissolve like webs of gossamer and the horses pop out of them and go on ahead. The driver, and any one who chances to be on the front seat with him, usually follows the horses for a few yards; those upon the back seats telescope upon one another. The assistance of wayfaring natives is almost imperative at this juncture and, strange to tell, with the infallibility of St. Bernard dogs in children's Alpine stories, they always seem to turn up at the psychologic moment.
From one such predicament our party was rescued by a bevy of girls on their way to market. These, after a short spell of not unpardonable mirth had subsided, manfully tucked up their pareos, put their sturdy brown shoulders to the wheels and literally lifted the whole outfit through to the bank. An hour later, after a similar mishap, we were all carried ashore on the broad coconut-oiled backs of the half-intoxicated members of a party of revellers, who left a hula unfinished to rush to the rescue. They were all real "mitinaire boys," they said, and were "ver' glad to help Chris'yun white vis'tor." And to show that these were not idle words, they offered to carry us all across the stream and back again in pure good fellowship.
One of them, in fact, a six-foot Apollo with his matted hair rakishly topped with a coronal of white tiare, had Claribel over his shoulder and half way down the bank before we could convince him that we were fully assured of his good will without further demonstration. The imperturbable Claribel, having been "cannibal broke" in the Marquesas, accepted the impetuous gallantry with the philosophical passivity of the sack of copra she might have been for all the Kanaka Lochinvar's care in keeping her right side up. This was our only experience of anything approaching a lack of courtesy in a Tahitian, and the victim's charitable interpretation of the act as a mistaken kindness saved the offender from even being denied participation in the division of a handful of coppers.
Hiteaea, a village situated half way down the windward side of the island from Papeete, is as lovely as a steamship company's folder description; the kind of a place you have always suspected never existed outside the imagination of a drop-curtain painter. Half of the settlement is smothered in giant bamboos, curving and feather-tipped, and the remainder in flamboyant, frangipani and burao trees, which carpet the ground inches deep with blossoms of scarlet, waxy cream and pale gold. Nothing less strong than the persistent southeast Trade-wind could furnish the place with air; nothing less bright than the equatorial sun could pierce the dense curtains with shafts of light. Toward the sea the jungle thins and in a palm-dotted clearing, walled in with flowering stephanosis and tiare, are the brown thatched houses of the Chief. A rolling natural lawn leads down to the beach of shining coral clinkers, which curves about a lagoon reflecting the blended shades of lapis lazuli, chrysoprase and pale jade. A froth-white lace collar of surf reveals the outer reef, and across the cloud-mottled indigo sea loom the fantastic heights of the mountains and cliffs behind Tautira.
The squealing of chased pigs and the squawk of captured chickens welled up to our ears as we topped the last divide and saw the blue smoke of the Hiteaea flesh-pots filtering through the green curtain which still hid the village from our sight, sounds which, to the trained ears of our island friends, the Dotys, told that their messenger had carried the news of our coming and that fitting preparations were being made for our reception. The wayfarer in colder, greyer climes sings of the emotions awakened in his breast by the "watch-dog's deep-mouthed welcome" as he draws near home, or of the "lamp in the window" which is waiting for him; to the Tahitian traveller all that the dog and the lamp express, and a deal more besides, is carried in the dying wails of pigs and chickens, the inevitable signal of rushed preparations for expected visitors.
Our driver and post-boys answered the signal with a glad chorus of yells, and the jaded horses, a moment before drooping from the stiff climb to the summit of the divide, galvanized into life and dashed off down the serpentine trough of roots and tussocks which answered for a road at a rate which kept the tugs connecting them to the madly pursuing chariot straightened all the way to the beach. Some of us were shouting with excitement, some with fright, and some of the less stoical—at the buffets dealt them by the half-padded cushions and the swaying sides—even with pain. Most of the unsecured baggage—cameras, suitcases, hand-bags, phonograph records and the like—went flying off like nebulæ in our comet-like wake; a man with a load of plantain was knocked sprawling, a litter of pigs ground under foot, a flock of ducks parted down the middle and a bevy of babies just avoided, before we brought up in a shower of tinkling coral at the door of the Chief's house. It was as spectacular an entry as even our postboys could have desired, but our garrulous gratulation was checked an instant later when two grave faced young women in black holakaus came out to tell us that their father, the Chief, had died the night before.
The good souls, in spite of their sorrow and the endless amount of ceremony and preparation incident to the funeral of a Tahitian chief, had made all the arrangements to accommodate us for the night, and would neither permit us to take the road again for Terevao, nor to put up with anything less than the best that Hiteaea had to offer. So the evening of feasting which would ordinarily have been our portion, was dispensed with, and we spent the night quietly and comfortably in the house of mourning.
Beyond Hiteaea the road dips into the vanilla bean zone, and from there to the Taiarapu Isthmus the gushing Trade-wind smites the nostrils like a blast from a pastry cook's oven. Vanilla is one of Tahiti's budding industries, and like everything else industrial in the Societies, seems likely not to get far beyond the budding stage. The vanilla vine requires little but heat, moisture, a tree to climb upon and a little care. The natural conditions are near ideal in the jungle sections of Tahiti, but the hitch has come on the score of care.
A number of Chinamen, with plantations small enough to allow them to do their own work, are making a considerable success of vanilla, but where Kanakas have had to be employed there has been nothing but failure. A native set to pollenize a lot of vines—this has to be done artificially in Tahiti on account of the absence of the insects which perform that service in other countries—is more likely than not to pick the orchidlike flowers to chew or stick behind his ear, or to weave the new tendrils into garlands for his Olympian brow. They tell you in Papeete that the vanilla industry is not flourishing because of the increasing use of artificial flavouring extracts in America; the real reason for its backwardness is the non-use of an artificial—or any other kind of—labour extractor on the Kanaka.
At the Isthmus of Terevao the girdling highway swings back down the leeward side of the island to Papeete. Tautira is reached by a spur which is, however, much better maintained than portions of the main road. The bush is not so dense in this part of the island as along the road we had just traversed, but the mountains, especially in the vicinity of Tautira, assume an even wilder aspect than any down to windward. Knife-pointed pinnacles of every conceivable shade of blue, green and purple are tossed together in an aimless jumble, showing the skyline of a battered saw. Here a mountain has been rent by some Titan to let a river through; there a mountain has refused to rend and a river closes its eyes and launches itself over a thousand-foot cliff, paling with terror as it realizes the magnitude of its leap and changing from a bar of green jade to a fluttering scarf of grey satin, finally to collapse into a rumple of white gossamer where the jungle riots in shimmering verdancy against the foot of the cliff.
Unfathomable gorges with overhanging sides tunnel into the hearts of unclimbable mountains; sheer precipices drop curtains of creepers that dangle their be-tasselled skirts in the quiet river reaches hundreds of feet below; ghostly castles, scarped and buttressed and battlemented, now of mist-wreathed rock, now of rockpierced mist, fade and reappear with the shifting of the curtains of the clouds; and above is the flaming, sun-shot sky, below the wind-tossed, diamond-sprinkled ocean. Very pertinent was Claribel's observation in point.
"What does the Frenchman want of absinthe and the Chinaman of opium when they both have a place like this to look upon?" she ejaculated between jolts as we bounded along between the mountains and the sea on this last lap of the outward journey; "it is a dream that nothing but a flying Tahitian chariot brought up short by a four-foot mid-river boulder can bring you out of."
An instant later the very thing which Claribel had defined as alone being equal to waking one from his dream of the mountains had eventuated, and because the left fore wheel had been called upon to stand more than its share of such jolts, it dished up like a closed umbrella, collapsed, and precipitated every one and everything in the long-suffering old vehicle into the water. Luckily, Tautira, our destination, lay just beyond the farther bank and, salvaging a couple of bags containing changes of only slightly wet clothes, we waded out and proceeded on foot to the house which Chief Ori had prepared for us, leaving the driver to bring on the wreckage at leisure.
Tautira, though the second town of the island, is almost entirely a native settlement, the "foreign colony" consisting of but one missionary, one trader and one French official. This does not mean that the town is backward or decadent, but rather to the contrary. Missionaries, as a pretty general rule, will always be found thickest on the "firing line," and where operations are in the hands of a single white or native preacher it may be taken to indicate that the people, professedly at least, are well within the fold. There is but one trader in Tautira because the natives are shrewd enough to own their own cutters and trade directly with Papeete. The official is there to collect taxes, not because he is needed to keep order. As far as morals are concerned, Consul Doty expressed it very well when he said that "there is more mischief to the square foot—or should I say the rounded ankle?—in Papeete than in all of Tautira."
Except for its scenery, Tautira's chief claim to distinction is Ori, and Ori's chief claim to distinction is the fact that he was the host for a month or more of Robert Louis Stevenson's party on the novelist's first cruise to the South Seas in the Casco. Stevenson, still weak from overwork and hardly yet beginning to feel the beneficial effects of the cruise, was ill during nearly all of his stay in Tautira. No account of this visit appears in his South Sea book, but in the published letters of his mother it is written of at length, and most entertainingly.
From Mrs. Stevenson's account it would appear that the party was tendered the usual round of feasts, dances and gifts, and countered with feasts and gift-givings of its own. They tell you in Papeete that Stevenson's illness during this visit made him see their island through dark glasses, and that this was the reason that he ultimately settled in Samoa instead of Tahiti. From the standpoint of picturesque and tropical loveliness Tautira, and even Papeete, is distinctly ahead of Apia, so that it is more likely that the greater attractiveness of the incomparable Samoan native who, then as now, was much less touched by white influence than the Tahitian, turned the scale in favour of the more westerly group for the novelist's home.
Ori—a wily old hypocrite whose six-feet-four of stature, unlike that of most Tahitians, is not cumbered with an ounce of superfluous flesh—made a great point of assuring us that the whole plan of entertainment provided for our party was patterned on that which he had dispensed to the Stevensons. We were quartered in one of the houses the Stevensons had occupied; quite as many pigs and chickens were slaughtered for our "native" feasts as for those of the Stevensons; full as many singers were mustered for our himines as turned out for the Stevensons; he would lavish quite as rich gifts upon us as he did upon the Stevensons, and—the Stevensons had given him such and such and such things, ad infinitum. Inasmuch as we were paying for our entertainment at a rate which we knew to be about a hundred per cent. above the normal, there was little of base ingratitude in the remark of the Commodore who, when his knife blade turned on the rubberoid leg of one of Ori's broilers, asked that venerable rascal if the drumstick in question came from one of the chickens left over by the Stevensons.