Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the
Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the
lively haunt of its exercise, there by scanty but significant
survivals.  Hawaii is the most doubtful.  We find cannibalism
chronicled in Hawaii, only in the history of a single war, where it
seems to have been thought exception, as in the case of mountain
outlaws, such as fell by the hand of Theseus.  In Tahiti, a single
circumstance survived, but that appears conclusive.  In historic
times, when human oblation was made in the marae, the eyes of the
victim were formally offered to the chief:  a delicacy to the
leading guest.  All Melanesia appears tainted.  In Micronesia, in
the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a
tourist, I could find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone
I long looked and asked in vain.  I was told tales indeed of men
who had been eaten in a famine; but these were nothing to my
purpose, for the same thing is done under the same stress by all
kindreds and generations of men.  At last, in some manuscript notes
of Dr. Turner's, which I was allowed to consult at Malua, I came on
one damning evidence:  on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for
theft was to be killed and eaten.  How shall we account for the
universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of
such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such
different blood?  What circumstance is common to them all, but that
they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food?
I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on
vegetables only.  When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew
to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open
another tin of miserable mutton.  And in at least one ocean
language, a particular word denotes that a man is 'hungry for
fish,' having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer
satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews in the desert,
begins to lust after flesh-pots.  Add to this the evidences of
over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I think we
see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal.

It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far
from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice.  The
higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and
Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part
forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a top-
sail in their waters.  It lingered only in some low islands where
life was difficult to maintain, and among inveterate savages like
the New-Zealanders or the Marquesans.  The Marquesans intertwined
man-eating with the whole texture of their lives; long-pig was in a
sense their currency and sacrament; it formed the hire of the
artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion and
attraction of a feast.  To-day they are paying the penalty of this
bloody commixture.  The civil power, in its crusade against man-
eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and
pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal
element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript
list.  Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution
exquisite, the designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more
handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the
beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run,
and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European
practice of tight-lacing among women.  And now it has been found
needful to forbid the art.  Their songs and dances were numerous
(and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen).  They now face
empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall
pity them?  The least rigorous will say that they were justly
served.

Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance:  the flesh must
be eaten.  The chief who seized Mr. Whalon preferred to eat him;
and he thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a
vengeance.  Two or three years ago, the people of a valley seized
and slew a wretch who had offended them.  His offence, it is to be
supposed, was dire; they could not bear to leave their vengeance
incomplete, and, under the eyes of the French, they did not dare to
hold a public festival.  The body was accordingly divided; and
every man retired to his own house to consummate the rite in
secret, carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a Swedish
match-box.  The barbarous substance of the drama and the European
properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination.
Yet more striking is another incident of the very year when I was
there myself, 1888.  In the spring, a man and woman skulked about
the school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child
alone.  Him they approached with honeyed words and carneying
manners--'You are So-and-so, son of So-and-so?' they asked; and
caressed and beguiled him deeper in the woods.  Some instinct woke
in the child's bosom, or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of
his deceivers.  He sought to break from them; he screamed; and
they, casting off the mask, seized him the more strongly and began
to run.  His cries were heard; his schoolmates, playing not far
off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple fled and
vanished in the woods.  They were never identified; no prosecution
followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge
against the boy's father, and designed to eat him in revenge.  All
over the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be
observed that the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an
individual.  A family, a class, a village, a whole valley or
island, a whole race of mankind, share equally the guilt of any
member.  So, in the above story, the son was to pay the penalty for
his father; so Mr. Whalon, the mate of an American whaler, was to
bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian slaver.  I am
reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group, which was
told me by an eye-witness, and which I tell here again for the
strangeness of the scene.  Two men had awakened the animosity of
the Jaluit chiefs; and it was their wives who were selected to be
punished.  A single native served as executioner.  Early in the
morning, in the face of a large concourse of spectators, he waded
out upon the reef between his victims.  These neither complained
nor resisted; accompanied their destroyer patiently; stooped down,
when they had waded deep enough, at his command; and he (laying one
hand upon the shoulders of each) held them under water till they
drowned.  Doubtless, although my informant did not tell me so,
their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach.

It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high
place.

The day was sultry and clouded.  Drenching tropical showers
succeeded bursts of sweltering sunshine.  The green pathway of the
road wound steeply upward.  As we went, our little schoolboy guide
a little ahead of us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand,
and named the trees for me, and read aloud from his notes the
abstract of their virtues.  Presently the road, mounting, showed us
the vale of Hatiheu, on a larger scale; and the priest, with
occasional reference to our guide, pointed out the boundaries and
told me the names of the larger tribes that lived at perpetual war
in the old days:  one on the north-east, one along the beach, one
behind upon the mountain.  With a survivor of this latter clan
Father Simeon had spoken; until the pacification he had never been
to the sea's edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea-fish.
Each in its own district, the septs lived cantoned and beleaguered.
One step without the boundaries was to affront death.  If famine
came, the men must out to the woods to gather chestnuts and small
fruits; even as to this day, if the parents are backward in their
weekly doles, school must be broken up and the scholars sent
foraging.  But in the old days, when there was trouble in one clan,
there would be activity in all its neighbours; the woods would be
laid full of ambushes; and he who went after vegetables for himself
might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes.  Nor was the
pointed occasion needful.  A dozen different natural signs and
social junctures called this people to the war-path and the
cannibal hunt.  Let one of chiefly rank have finished his
tattooing, the wife of one be near upon her time, two of the
debauching streams have deviated nearer on the beach of Hatiheu, a
certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain ominous formation
of cloud observed above the northern sea; and instantly the arms
were oiled, and the man-hunters swarmed into the wood to lay their
fratricidal ambuscades.  It appears besides that occasionally,
perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house,
where he lay for a stated period like a person dead.  When he came
forth it was to run for three days through the territory of the
clan, naked and starving, and to sleep at night alone in the high
place.  It was now the turn of the others to keep the house, for to
encounter the priest upon his rounds was death.  On the eve of the
fourth day the time of the running was over; the priest returned to
his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the morning the number of
the victims was announced.  I have this tale of the priest on one
authority--I think a good one,--but I set it down with diffidence.
The particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I almost
think I must have heard them oftener referred to.  Upon one point
there seems to be no question:  that the feast was sometimes
furnished from within the clan.  In times of scarcity, all who were
not protected by their family connections--in the Highland
expression, all the commons of the clan--had cause to tremble.  It
was vain to resist, it was useless to flee.  They were begirt upon
all hands by cannibals; and the oven was ready to smoke for them
abroad in the country of their foes, or at home in the valley of
their fathers.

At a certain corner of the road our scholar-guide struck off to his
left into the twilight of the forest.  We were now on one of the
ancient native roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and
clambering, it seemed, at random over boulders and dead trees; but
the lad wound in and out and up and down without a check, for these
paths are to the natives as marked as the king's highway is to us;
insomuch that, in the days of the man-hunt, it was their labour
rather to block and deface than to improve them.  In the crypt of
the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold; overhead, upon the
leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but only here and
there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop would fall,
and make a spot upon my mackintosh.  Presently the huge trunk of a
banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an
ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm,
announced that we had reached the paepae tapu.

Paepae signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is
built on; and even such a paepae--a paepae hae--may be called a
paepae tapu in a lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the
haunt of spirits; but the public high place, such as I was now
treading, was a thing on a great scale.  As far as my eyes could
pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was
all paved.  Three tiers of terrace ran on the slope of the hill; in
front, a crumbling parapet contained the main arena; and the
pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with several wells
and small enclosures.  No trace remained of any superstructure, and
the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to seize.  I visited
another in Hiva-oa, smaller but more perfect, where it was easy to
follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of honour
for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a single
joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights
richly carved.  In the old days the high place was sedulously
tended.  No tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach
upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement.  The stones
were smoothly set, and I am told they were kept bright with oil.
On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to
watch and cleanse it.  No other foot of man was suffered to draw
near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there to
sleep--perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand; but, in the time of
the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body, and each
had his appointed seat.  There were places for the chiefs, the
drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests.  The drums--
perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high--
continuously throbbed in time.  In time the singers kept up their
long-drawn, lugubrious, ululating song; in time, too, the dancers,
tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and
gesticulated--their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like
butterflies.  The sense of time, in all these ocean races, is
extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that almost
every sound and movement fell in one.  So much the more unanimously
must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more
wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld
them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan,
rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of
the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a
complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes
of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead
women.  All manner of island food was meanwhile spread for the
women and the commons; and, for those who were privileged to eat of
it, there were carried up to the dead-house the baskets of long-
pig.  It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the people came
from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy
with their beastly food.  There are certain sentiments which we
call emphatically human--denying the honour of that name to those
who lack them.  In such feasts--particularly where the victim has
been slain at home, and men banqueted on the poor clay of a comrade
with whom they had played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they
had shared--the whole body of these sentiments is outraged.  To
consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, the
fervours of self-righteous old ship-captains, who would man their
guns, and open fire in passing, on a cannibal island.

And yet it was strange.  There, upon the spot, as I stood under the
high, dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the
one hand, in his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan
schoolboy on the other, the whole business appeared infinitely
distant, and fallen in the cold perspective and dry light of
history.  The bearing of the priest, perhaps, affected me. He
smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of these feasters and
their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave of one of the
old, ill-omened choruses.  Centuries might have come and gone since
this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the place
with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge.
In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still
living and latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within
the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped
victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of
some repugnance for the natives.  But here, too, the priests
maintained their jocular attitude:  rallying the cannibals as upon
an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say,
to shame them from the practice by good-natured ridicule, as we
shame a child from stealing sugar.  We may here recognise the
temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon.



CHAPTER XII--THE STORY OF A PLANTATION



Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa--
Tahuku, say the slovenly whites--may be called the port of Atuona.
It is a narrow and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points,
and opening above upon a woody valley:  a little French fort, now
disused and deserted, overhangs the valley and the inlet.  Atuona
itself, at the head of the next bay, is framed in a theatre of
mountains, which dominate the more immediate settling of Taahauku
and give the salient character of the scene.  They are reckoned at
no higher than four thousand feet; but Tahiti with eight thousand,
and Hawaii with fifteen, can offer no such picture of abrupt,
melancholy alps.  In the morning, when the sun falls directly on
their front, they stand like a vast wall:  green to the summit, if
by any chance the summit should be clear--water-courses here and
there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks.  Towards
afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the
range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge,
tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun.  At all hours of the
day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the
same menacing gloom.

The mountains, dividing and deflecting the endless airy deluge of
the Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate.  A strong
draught of wind blew day and night over the anchorage.  Day and
night the same fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the
heavens, the same dusky cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the
mountain.  The land-breezes came very strong and chill, and the
sea, like the air, was in perpetual bustle.  The swell crowded into
the narrow anchorage like sheep into a fold; broke all along both
sides, high on the one, low on the other; kept a certain blowhole
sounding and smoking like a cannon; and spent itself at last upon
the beach.

On the side away from Atuona, the sheltering promontory was a
nursery of coco-trees.  Some were mere infants, none had attained
to any size, none had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-
like shaft of the mature palm.  In the young trees the colour
alters with the age and growth.  Now all is of a grass-like hue,
infinitely dainty; next the rib grows golden, the fronds remaining
green as ferns; and then, as the trunk continues to mount and to
assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on manlier and more
decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the distance,
glisten against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the
assault of the wind.  In this young wood of Taahauku, all these
hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score.  The
trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there
interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for
storing it.  Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the
Casco tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever
before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the
cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward.  The trade-wind moving in
the fans made a ceaseless noise of summer rain; and from time to
time, with the sound of a sudden and distant drum-beat, the surf
would burst in a sea-cave.

At the upper end of the inlet, its low, cliffy lining sinks, at
both sides, into a beach.  A copra warehouse stands in the shadow
of the shoreside trees, flitted about for ever by a clan of
dwarfish swallows; and a line of rails on a high wooden staging
bends back into the mouth of the valley.  Walking on this, the new-
landed traveller becomes aware of a broad fresh-water lagoon (one
arm of which he crosses), and beyond, of a grove of noble palms,
sheltering the house of the trader, Mr. Keane.  Overhead, the cocos
join in a continuous and lofty roof; blackbirds are heard lustily
singing; the island cock springs his jubilant rattle and airs his
golden plumage; cow-bells sound far and near in the grove; and when
you sit in the broad verandah, lulled by this symphony, you may say
to yourself, if you are able:  'Better fifty years of Europe . . .'
Farther on, the floor of the valley is flat and green, and dotted
here and there with stripling coco-palms.  Through the midst, with
many changes of music, the river trots and brawls; and along its
course, where we should look for willows, puraos grow in clusters,
and make shadowy pools after an angler's heart.  A vale more rich
and peaceful, sweeter air, a sweeter voice of rural sounds, I have
found nowhere.  One circumstance alone might strike the
experienced:  here is a convenient beach, deep soil, good water,
and yet nowhere any paepaes, nowhere any trace of island
habitation.

It is but a few years since this valley was a place choked with
jungle, the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals.  Two
clans laid claim to it--neither could substantiate the claim, and
the roads lay desert, or were only visited by men in arms.  It is
for this very reason that it wears now so smiling an appearance:
cleared, planted, built upon, supplied with railways, boat-houses,
and bath-houses.  For, being no man's land, it was the more readily
ceded to a stranger.  The stranger was Captain John Hart:  Ima
Hati, 'Broken-arm,' the natives call him, because when he first
visited the islands his arm was in a sling.  Captain Hart, a man of
English birth, but an American subject, had conceived the idea of
cotton culture in the Marquesas during the American War, and was at
first rewarded with success.  His plantation at Anaho was highly
productive; island cotton fetched a high price, and the natives
used to debate which was the stronger power, Ima Hati or the
French:  deciding in favour of the captain, because, though the
French had the most ships, he had the more money.

He marked Taahauku for a suitable site, acquired it, and offered
the superintendence to Mr. Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already
some time in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on
Tauata.  Mr. Stewart was somewhat averse to the adventure, having
some acquaintance with Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu.
He had once landed there, he told me, about dusk, and found the
remains of a man and woman partly eaten.  On his starting and
sickening at the sight, one of Moipu's young men picked up a human
foot, and provocatively staring at the stranger, grinned and
nibbled at the heel.  None need be surprised if Mr. Stewart fled
incontinently to the bush, lay there all night in a great horror of
mind, and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow.  'It was
always a bad place, Atuona,' commented Mr. Stewart, in his homely
Fifeshire voice.  In spite of this dire introduction, he accepted
the captain's offer, was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen,
and proceeded to clear the jungle.

War was pursued at that time, almost without interval, between the
men of Atuona and the men of Haamau; and one day, from the opposite
sides of the valley, battle--or I should rather say the noise of
battle--raged all the afternoon:  the shots and insults of the
opposing clans passing from hill to hill over the heads of Mr.
Stewart and his Chinamen.  There was no genuine fighting; it was
like a bicker of schoolboys, only some fool had given the children
guns.  One man died of his exertions in running, the only casualty.
With night the shots and insults ceased; the men of Haamau
withdrew; and victory, on some occult principle, was scored to
Moipu.  Perhaps, in consequence, there came a day when Moipu made a
feast, and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of
it.  These passed early by Taahauku, and some of Moipu's young men
were there to be a guard of honour.  They were not long gone before
there came down from Haamau, a man, his wife, and a girl of twelve,
their daughter, bringing fungus.  Several Atuona lads were hanging
round the store; but the day being one of truce none apprehended
danger.  The fungus was weighed and paid for; the man of Haamau
proposed he should have his axe ground in the bargain; and Mr.
Stewart demurring at the trouble, some of the Atuona lads offered
to grind it for him, and set it on the wheel.  While the axe was
grinding, a friendly native whispered Mr. Stewart to have a care of
himself, for there was trouble in hand; and, all at once, the man
of Haamau was seized, and his head and arm stricken from his body,
the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe.  In the first
alert, the girl escaped among the cotton; and Mr. Stewart, having
thrust the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside,
supposed the affair was over.  But the business had not passed
without noise, and it reached the ears of an older girl who had
loitered by the way, and who now came hastily down the valley,
crying as she came for her father.  Her, too, they seized and
beheaded; I know not what they had done with the axe, it was a
blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the girl; and the
blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to foot.
Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying
the heads to Moipu.  It may be fancied how the feast broke up; but
it is notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire.
These passed back through Taahauku in extreme disorder; a little
after the valley began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing
braves; and a letter of warning coming at the same time to Mr.
Stewart, he and his Chinamen took refuge with the Protestant
missionary in Atuona.  That night the store was gutted, and the
bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves.  Three days later the
schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr. Stewart and
the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view
the grave, which was already indicated by the stench.  While they
were so employed, a party of Moipu's young men, decked with red
flannel to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from
Atuona, dug up the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried
them away on sticks.  That night the feast began.

Those who knew Mr. Stewart before this experience declare the man
to be quite altered.  He stuck, however, to his post; and somewhat
later, when the plantation was already well established, and gave
employment to sixty Chinamen and seventy natives, he found himself
once more in dangerous times.  The men of Haamau, it was reported,
had sworn to plunder and erase the settlement; letters came
continually from the Hawaiian missionary, who acted as intelligence
department; and for six weeks Mr. Stewart and three other whites
slept in the cotton-house at night in a rampart of bales, and (what
was their best defence) ostentatiously practised rifle-shooting by
day upon the beach.  Natives were often there to watch them; the
practice was excellent; and the assault was never delivered--if it
ever was intended, which I doubt, for the natives are more famous
for false rumours than for deeds of energy.  I was told the late
French war was a case in point; the tribes on the beach accusing
those in the mountains of designs which they had never the
hardihood to entertain.  And the same testimony to their
backwardness in open battle reached me from all sides.  Captain
Hart once landed after an engagement in a certain bay; one man had
his hand hurt, an old woman and two children had been slain; and
the captain improved the occasion by poulticing the hand, and
taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair.  It is true these
wars were often merely formal--comparable with duels to the first
blood.  Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being
carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought
wanting in civility to the guests of the other.  About one-half of
the population served day about on alternate sides, so as to be
well with each when the inevitable peace should follow.  The forts
of the belligerents were over against each other, and close by.
Pigs were cooking.  Well-oiled braves, with well-oiled muskets,
strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast.  No business, however
needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed to be
centred in this mockery of war.  A few days later, by a regrettable
accident, a man was killed; it was felt at once the thing had gone
too far, and the quarrel was instantly patched up.  But the more
serious wars were prosecuted in a similar spirit; a gift of pigs
and a feast made their inevitable end; the killing of a single man
was a great victory, and the murder of defenceless solitaries
counted a heroic deed.

The foot of the cliffs, about all these islands, is the place of
fishing.  Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly
women, some nearly naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses,
perched in little surf-beat promontories--the brown precipice
overhanging them, and the convolvulus overhanging that, as if to
cut them off the more completely from assistance.  There they would
angle much of the morning; and as fast as they caught any fish, eat
them, raw and living, where they stood.  It was such helpless ones
that the warriors from the opposite island of Tauata slew, and
carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted mighty men of
valour.  Of one such exploit I can give the account of an eye-
witness.  'Portuguese Joe,' Mr. Keane's cook, was once pulling an
oar in an Atuona boat, when they spied a stranger in a canoe with
some fish and a piece of tapu.  The Atuona men cried upon him to
draw near and have a smoke.  He complied, because, I suppose, he
had no choice; but he knew, poor devil, what he was coming to, and
(as Joe said) 'he didn't seem to care about the smoke.'  A few
questions followed, as to where he came from, and what was his
business.  These he must needs answer, as he must needs draw at the
unwelcome pipe, his heart the while drying in his bosom.  And then,
of a sudden, a big fellow in Joe's boat leaned over, plucked the
stranger from his canoe, struck him with a knife in the neck--
inward and downward, as Joe showed in pantomime more expressive
than his words--and held him under water, like a fowl, until his
struggles ceased.  Whereupon the long-pig was hauled on board, the
boat's head turned about for Atuona, and these Marquesan braves
pulled home rejoicing.  Moipu was on the beach and rejoiced with
them on their arrival.  Poor Joe toiled at his oar that day with a
white face, yet he had no fear for himself.  'They were very good
to me--gave me plenty grub:  never wished to eat white man,' said
he.

If the most horrible experience was Mr. Stewart's, it was Captain
Hart himself who ran the nearest danger.  He had bought a piece of
land from Timau, chief of a neighbouring bay, and put some Chinese
there to work.  Visiting the station with one of the Godeffroys, he
found his Chinamen trooping to the beach in terror:  Timau had
driven them out, seized their effects, and was in war attire with
his young men.  A boat was despatched to Taahauku for
reinforcement; as they awaited her return, they could see, from the
deck of the schooner, Timau and his young men dancing the war-dance
on the hill-top till past twelve at night; and so soon as the boat
came (bringing three gendarmes, armed with chassepots, two white
men from Taahauku station, and some native warriors) the party set
out to seize the chief before he should awake.  Day was not come,
and it was a very bright moonlight morning, when they reached the
hill-top where (in a house of palm-leaves) Timau was sleeping off
his debauch.  The assailants were fully exposed, the interior of
the hut quite dark; the position far from sound.  The gendarmes
knelt with their pieces ready, and Captain Hart advanced alone.  As
he drew near the door he heard the snap of a gun cocking from
within, and in sheer self-defence--there being no other escape--
sprang into the house and grappled Timau.  'Timau, come with me!'
he cried.  But Timau--a great fellow, his eyes blood-red with the
abuse of kava, six foot three in stature--cast him on one side; and
the captain, instantly expecting to be either shot or brained,
discharged his pistol in the dark.  When they carried Timau out at
the door into the moonlight, he was already dead, and, upon this
unlooked-for termination of their sally, the whites appeared to
have lost all conduct, and retreated to the boats, fired upon by
the natives as they went.  Captain Hart, who almost rivals Bishop
Dordillon in popularity, shared with him the policy of extreme
indulgence to the natives, regarding them as children, making light
of their defects, and constantly in favour of mild measures.  The
death of Timau has thus somewhat weighed upon his mind; the more
so, as the chieftain's musket was found in the house unloaded.  To
a less delicate conscience the matter will seem light.  If a
drunken savage elects to cock a fire-arm, a gentleman advancing
towards him in the open cannot wait to make sure if it be charged.

I have touched on the captain's popularity.  It is one of the
things that most strikes a stranger in the Marquesas.  He comes
instantly on two names, both new to him, both locally famous, both
mentioned by all with affection and respect--the bishop's and the
captain's.  It gave me a strong desire to meet with the survivor,
which was subsequently gratified--to the enrichment of these pages.
Long after that again, in the Place Dolorous--Molokai--I came once
more on the traces of that affectionate popularity.  There was a
blind white leper there, an old sailor--'an old tough,' he called
himself--who had long sailed among the eastern islands.  Him I used
to visit, and, being fresh from the scenes of his activity, gave
him the news.  This (in the true island style) was largely a
chronicle of wrecks; and it chanced I mentioned the case of one not
very successful captain, and how he had lost a vessel for Mr. Hart;
thereupon the blind leper broke forth in lamentation.  'Did he lose
a ship of John Hart's?' he cried; 'poor John Hart!  Well, I'm sorry
it was Hart's,' with needless force of epithet, which I neglect to
reproduce.

Perhaps, if Captain Hart's affairs had continued to prosper, his
popularity might have been different.  Success wins glory, but it
kills affection, which misfortune fosters.  And the misfortune
which overtook the captain's enterprise was truly singular.  He was
at the top of his career.  Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the
French as an indemnity for the robberies at Taahauku.  But the Ile
Masse was only suitable for cattle; and his two chief stations were
Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva-
oa, some hundred miles to the southward, and facing the south-west.
Both these were on the same day swept by a tidal wave, which was
not felt in any other bay or island of the group.  The south coast
of Hiva-oa was bestrewn with building timber and camphor-wood
chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a reasonable
salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests
apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built
into their houses.  But the recovery of such jetsam could not
affect the result.  It was impossible the captain should withstand
this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the
Marquesas ended.  Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of
itself; nor has any new plantation arisen in their stead.



CHAPTER XIII--CHARACTERS



There was a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different
indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister island,
Nuka-hiva.  Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would
be a whale-boat manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra
for sale; now perhaps a single canoe come after commodities to buy.
The anchorage was besides frequented by fishers; not only the lone
females perched in niches of the cliff, but whole parties, who
would sometimes camp and build a fire upon the beach, and sometimes
lie in their canoes in the midst of the haven and jump by turns in
the water; which they would cast eight or nine feet high, to drive,
as we supposed, the fish into their nets.  The goods the purchasers
came to buy were sometimes quaint.  I remarked one outrigger
returning with a single ham swung from a pole in the stern.  And
one day there came into Mr. Keane's store a charming lad,
excellently mannered, speaking French correctly though with a
babyish accent; very handsome too, and much of a dandy, as was
shown not only in his shining raiment, but by the nature of his
purchases.  These were five ship-biscuits, a bottle of scent, and
two balls of washing blue.  He was from Tauata, whither he returned
the same night in an outrigger, daring the deep with these young-
ladyish treasures.  The gross of the native passengers were more
ill-favoured:  tall, powerful fellows, well tattooed, and with
disquieting manners.  Something coarse and jeering distinguished
them, and I was often reminded of the slums of some great city.
One night, as dusk was falling, a whale-boat put in on that part of
the beach where I chanced to be alone.  Six or seven ruffianly
fellows scrambled out; all had enough English to give me 'good-
bye,' which was the ordinary salutation; or 'good-morning,' which
they seemed to regard as an intensitive; jests followed, they
surrounded me with harsh laughter and rude looks, and I was glad to
move away.  I had not yet encountered Mr. Stewart, or I should have
been reminded of his first landing at Atuona and the humorist who
nibbled at the heel.  But their neighbourhood depressed me; and I
felt, if I had been there a castaway and out of reach of help, my
heart would have been sick.

Nor was the traffic altogether native.  While we lay in the
anchorage there befell a strange coincidence.  A schooner was
observed at sea and aiming to enter.  We knew all the schooners in
the group, but this appeared larger than any; she was rigged,
besides, after the English manner; and, coming to an anchor some
way outside the Casco, showed at last the blue ensign.  There were
at that time, according to rumour, no fewer than four yachts in the
Pacific; but it was strange that any two of them should thus lie
side by side in that outlandish inlet:  stranger still that in the
owner of the Nyanza, Captain Dewar, I should find a man of the same
country and the same county with myself, and one whom I had seen
walking as a boy on the shores of the Alpes Maritimes.

We had besides a white visitor from shore, who came and departed in
a crowded whale-boat manned by natives; having read of yachts in
the Sunday papers, and being fired with the desire to see one.
Captain Chase, they called him, an old whaler-man, thickset and
white-bearded, with a strong Indiana drawl; years old in the
country, a good backer in battle, and one of those dead shots whose
practice at the target struck terror in the braves of Haamau.
Captain Chase dwelt farther east in a bay called Hanamate, with a
Mr. M'Callum; or rather they had dwelt together once, and were now
amicably separated.  The captain is to be found near one end of the
bay, in a wreck of a house, and waited on by a Chinese.  At the
point of the opposing corner another habitation stands on a tall
paepae.  The surf runs there exceeding heavy, seas of seven and
eight feet high bursting under the walls of the house, which is
thus continually filled with their clamour, and rendered fit only
for solitary, or at least for silent, inmates.  Here it is that Mr.
M'Callum, with a Shakespeare and a Burns, enjoys the society of the
breakers.  His name and his Burns testify to Scottish blood; but he
is an American born, somewhere far east; followed the trade of a
ship-carpenter; and was long employed, the captain of a hundred
Indians, breaking up wrecks about Cape Flattery.  Many of the
whites who are to be found scattered in the South Seas represent
the more artistic portion of their class; and not only enjoy the
poetry of that new life, but came there on purpose to enjoy it.  I
have been shipmates with a man, no longer young, who sailed upon
that voyage, his first time to sea, for the mere love of Samoa; and
it was a few letters in a newspaper that sent him on that
pilgrimage.  Mr. M'Callum was another instance of the same.  He had
read of the South Seas; loved to read of them; and let their image
fasten in his heart:  till at length he could refrain no longer--
must set forth, a new Rudel, for that unseen homeland--and has now
dwelt for years in Hiva-oa, and will lay his bones there in the end
with full content; having no desire to behold again the places of
his boyhood, only, perhaps--once, before he dies--the rude and
wintry landscape of Cape Flattery.  Yet he is an active man, full
of schemes; has bought land of the natives; has planted five
thousand coco-palms; has a desert island in his eye, which he
desires to lease, and a schooner in the stocks, which he has laid
and built himself, and even hopes to finish.  Mr. M'Callum and I
did not meet, but, like gallant troubadours, corresponded in verse.
I hope he will not consider it a breach of copyright if I give here
a specimen of his muse.  He and Bishop Dordillon are the two
European bards of the Marquesas.


'Sail, ho!  Ahoy!  Casco,
First among the pleasure fleet
That came around to greet
These isles from San Francisco,

And first, too; only one
Among the literary men
That this way has ever been -
Welcome, then, to Stevenson.

Please not offended be
At this little notice
Of the Casco, Captain Otis,
With the novelist's family.

Avoir une voyage magnifical
Is our wish sincere,
That you'll have from here
Allant sur la Grande Pacifical.'


But our chief visitor was one Mapiao, a great Tahuku--which seems
to mean priest, wizard, tattooer, practiser of any art, or, in a
word, esoteric person--and a man famed for his eloquence on public
occasions and witty talk in private.  His first appearance was
typical of the man.  He came down clamorous to the eastern landing,
where the surf was running very high; scorned all our signals to go
round the bay; carried his point, was brought aboard at some hazard
to our skiff, and set down in one corner of the cockpit to his
appointed task.  He had been hired, as one cunning in the art, to
make my old men's beards into a wreath:  what a wreath for Celia's
arbour!  His own beard (which he carried, for greater safety, in a
sailor's knot) was not merely the adornment of his age, but a
substantial piece of property.  One hundred dollars was the
estimated value; and as Brother Michel never knew a native to
deposit a greater sum with Bishop Dordillon, our friend was a rich
man in virtue of his chin.  He had something of an East Indian
cast, but taller and stronger:  his nose hooked, his face narrow,
his forehead very high, the whole elaborately tattooed.  I may say
I have never entertained a guest so trying.  In the least
particular he must be waited on; he would not go to the scuttle-
butt for water; he would not even reach to get the glass, it must
be given him in his hand; if aid were denied him, he would fold his
arms, bow his head, and go without:  only the work would suffer.
Early the first forenoon he called aloud for biscuit and salmon;
biscuit and ham were brought; he looked on them inscrutably, and
signed they should be set aside.  A number of considerations
crowded on my mind; how the sort of work on which he was engaged
was probably tapu in a high degree; should by rights, perhaps, be
transacted on a tapu platform which no female might approach; and
it was possible that fish might be the essential diet.  Some salted
fish I therefore brought him, and along with that a glass of rum:
at sight of which Mapiao displayed extraordinary animation, pointed
to the zenith, made a long speech in which I picked up umati--the
word for the sun--and signed to me once more to place these
dainties out of reach.  At last I had understood, and every day the
programme was the same.  At an early period of the morning his
dinner must be set forth on the roof of the house and at a proper
distance, full in view but just out of reach; and not until the fit
hour, which was the point of noon, would the artificer partake.
This solemnity was the cause of an absurd misadventure.  He was
seated plaiting, as usual, at the beards, his dinner arrayed on the
roof, and not far off a glass of water standing.  It appears he
desired to drink; was of course far too great a gentleman to rise
and get the water for himself; and spying Mrs. Stevenson,
imperiously signed to her to hand it.  The signal was
misunderstood; Mrs. Stevenson was, by this time, prepared for any
eccentricity on the part of our guest; and instead of passing him
the water, flung his dinner overboard.  I must do Mapiao justice:
all laughed, but his laughter rang the loudest.

These troubles of service were at worst occasional; the
embarrassment of the man's talk incessant.  He was plainly a
practised conversationalist; the nicety of his inflections, the
elegance of his gestures, and the fine play of his expression, told
us that.  We, meanwhile, sat like aliens in a playhouse; we could
see the actors were upon some material business and performing
well, but the plot of the drama remained undiscoverable.  Names of
places, the name of Captain Hart, occasional disconnected words,
tantalised without enlightening us; and the less we understood, the
more gallantly, the more copiously, and with still the more
explanatory gestures, Mapiao returned to the assault.  We could see
his vanity was on the rack; being come to a place where that fine
jewel of his conversational talent could earn him no respect; and
he had times of despair when he desisted from the endeavour, and
instants of irritation when he regarded us with unconcealed
contempt.  Yet for me, as the practitioner of some kindred mystery
to his own, he manifested to the last a measure of respect.  As we
sat under the awning in opposite corners of the cockpit, he
braiding hairs from dead men's chins, I forming runes upon a sheet
of folio paper, he would nod across to me as one Tahuku to another,
or, crossing the cockpit, study for a while my shapeless scrawl and
encourage me with a heartfelt 'mitai!--good!'  So might a deaf
painter sympathise far off with a musician, as the slave and master
of some uncomprehended and yet kindred art.  A silly trade, he
doubtless considered it; but a man must make allowance for
barbarians--chaque pays a ses coutumes--and he felt the principle
was there.

The time came at last when his labours, which resembled those
rather of Penelope than Hercules, could be no more spun out, and
nothing remained but to pay him and say farewell.  After a long,
learned argument in Marquesan, I gathered that his mind was set on
fish-hooks; with three of which, and a brace of dollars, I thought
he was not ill rewarded for passing his forenoons in our cockpit,
eating, drinking, delivering his opinions, and pressing the ship's
company into his menial service.  For all that, he was a man of so
high a bearing, and so like an uncle of my own who should have gone
mad and got tattooed, that I applied to him, when we were both on
shore, to know if he were satisfied.  'Mitai ehipe?' I asked.  And
he, with rich unction, offering at the same time his hand--'Mitai
ehipe, mitai kaehae; kaoha nui!'--or, to translate freely:  'The
ship is good, the victuals are up to the mark, and we part in
friendship.'  Which testimonial uttered, he set off along the beach
with his head bowed and the air of one deeply injured.

I saw him go, on my side, with relief.  It would be more
interesting to learn how our relation seemed to Mapiao.  His
exigence, we may suppose, was merely loyal.  He had been hired by
the ignorant to do a piece of work; and he was bound that he would
do it the right way.  Countless obstacles, continual ignorant
ridicule, availed not to dissuade him.  He had his dinner laid out;
watched it, as was fit, the while he worked; ate it at the fit
hour; was in all things served and waited on; and could take his
hire in the end with a clear conscience, telling himself the
mystery was performed duly, the beards rightfully braided, and we
(in spite of ourselves) correctly served.  His view of our
stupidity, even he, the mighty talker, must have lacked language to
express.  He never interfered with my Tahuku work; civilly praised
it, idle as it seemed; civilly supposed that I was competent in my
own mystery:  such being the attitude of the intelligent and the
polite.  And we, on the other hand--who had yet the most to gain or
lose, since the product was to be ours--who had professed our
disability by the very act of hiring him to do it--were never weary
of impeding his own more important labours, and sometimes lacked
the sense and the civility to refrain from laughter.



CHAPTER XIV--IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY



The road from Taahauku to Atuona skirted the north-westerly side of
the anchorage, somewhat high up, edged, and sometimes shaded, by
the splendid flowers of the flamboyant--its English name I do not
know.  At the turn of the hand, Atuona came in view:  a long beach,
a heavy and loud breach of surf, a shore-side village scattered
among trees, and the guttered mountains drawing near on both sides
above a narrow and rich ravine.  Its infamous repute perhaps
affected me; but I thought it the loveliest, and by far the most
ominous and gloomy, spot on earth.  Beautiful it surely was; and
even more salubrious.  The healthfulness of the whole group is
amazing; that of Atuona almost in the nature of a miracle.  In
Atuona, a village planted in a shore-side marsh, the houses
standing everywhere intermingled with the pools of a taro-garden,
we find every condition of tropical danger and discomfort; and yet
there are not even mosquitoes--not even the hateful day-fly of
Nuka-hiva--and fever, and its concomitant, the island fe'efe'e, are
unknown.

This is the chief station of the French on the man-eating isle of
Hiva-oa.  The sergeant of gendarmerie enjoys the style of the vice-
resident, and hoists the French colours over a quite extensive
compound.  A Chinaman, a waif from the plantation, keeps a
restaurant in the rear quarters of the village; and the mission is
well represented by the sister's school and Brother Michel's
church.  Father Orens, a wonderful octogenarian, his frame scarce
bowed, the fire of his eye undimmed, has lived, and trembled, and
suffered in this place since 1843.  Again and again, when Moipu had
made coco-brandy, he has been driven from his house into the woods.
'A mouse that dwelt in a cat's ear' had a more easy resting-place;
and yet I have never seen a man that bore less mark of years.  He
must show us the church, still decorated with the bishop's artless
ornaments of paper--the last work of industrious old hands, and the
last earthly amusement of a man that was much of a hero.  In the
sacristy we must see his sacred vessels, and, in particular, a
vestment which was a 'vraie curiosite,' because it had been given
by a gendarme.  To the Protestant there is always something
embarrassing in the eagerness with which grown and holy men regard
these trifles; but it was touching and pretty to see Orens, his
aged eyes shining in his head, display his sacred treasures.