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 school-house 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, Malden, 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, graybearded, 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 varua 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.