Part 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later Byron:

“The happy shores without a law, Where all partake the earth without dispute, And bread itself is gathered as a fruit; Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams: The goldless age, where gold disturbs no dreams.”

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

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

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

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

“Little birdling Colibri, Lead us thou to Tahiti!”

February 12th.

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

TAHITI

When we rose in the early morning our ship had already passed the reef, and we were in the harbour of Papeete. There was the usual enchantment of the land, a light blue sky and a light blue sea; an air that felt colder than that of Samoa, whatever the thermometer might say; and when we had landed, a funny little town, stretched along the beach, under many tall and beautiful trees. From under their shade the outside blue was still more wonderful, and at the edge where the blue of sky and sea came together opposite us, the island of Moorea, all mountain, peaked and engrailed like some far distance of Titian’s landscapes, seemed swimming in the blue.

Near the quay neatly edged with stone steps, ships lay only a few rods off in the deep water, so that their yards ran into the boughs of the great trees. Further out, on a French man-of-war, the bugle marked the passing duty of the hour. Everything else was lazy, except the little horses driven by the _kanakas_. Natives moved easily about, no longer with the stride of the Samoans, which throws out the knees and feet, as if it were for the stage. People were lighter built, more _efface_; but there were pretty faces, many evidently those of half-breeds.

White men were there with the same contrasting look of fierceness and inquisitiveness marked in their faces; these now that we see less of them, look beaky and eager in contrast with the brown types that fill the larger part of our sight and acquaintance.

We were kindly received by the persons for whom we had introductions; and set about through various more or less shady streets marked French-wise on the corners: _Rue des Beaux-Arts_, _Rue de la Cathédrale_, etc.; first to a little restaurant, where I heard in an adjacent room, “Buvons, amis, buvons,” and the noise of fencing; then to hire furniture and buy household needs for the housekeeping we proposed to set up that very day, for there are no hotels. The evening was ended at the “Cercle,” where we played dominoes, to remind ourselves that we were in some outlying attachment of provincial France. By the next morning we were settled in a little cottage on the wonderful beach, that is shaded all along by worthy trees; we had engaged a cook, and Awoki was putting all to rights. As we walk back into the town there are French walls and yellow stuccoed houses for government purposes. A few officers in white and soldiers pass along.

A few scattered French ladies pass under the trees; so far as

[Illustration: STUDY OF SURF BREAKING ON OUTSIDE REEF. TAUTIRA, TAIARAPU, TAHITI]

we can tell (because we have been long away) dressed in some correct French fashion; looking not at all incongruous, because already we feel that this is dreamland--that anybody in any guise is natural here, except a few Europeans, who meet the place halfway, and belong neither to where they came from, nor to the unreality of the place they are in. There is no noise, the street is the beach; the trappings of the artillery horses, and the scabbards of the sabres rattle in a profound silence, so great that I can distinctly count the pulsations of the water running from the fountain near us into the sea. The shapes and finish of the government buildings, their long spaces of enclosure, the moss upon them, remind us of the sleepiest towns of out-of-the-way bits of France.

The natives slip over the dust in bare feet, the waving draperies of the long gowns of the women seeming to add to the stealthy or undulating movement which carries them along. Many draw up under the arm some corner of this long, nightgowny dress that it may not trail, or let their arms swing loosely to the rhythm of their passing by.

Most of the native men wear loose jackets, sometimes shirts above the great loin-cloth which hangs down from the waist, and which is the same as the _lava-lava_ of the Samoans, the _sulu_ of the Fijians, and is here called the _pareu_.

Many of the women have garlands round their necks and

[Illustration]

flowers behind their ears. Occasionally we hear sounds of singing that come back to us from some cross-street; and as I have ventured to look, I see in a little enclosure some women seated, and one standing before them, making some gestures, perhaps of a dance; and I grieve to say, looking as if they had begun their latest evening very early in the day. But this I have noticed from sheer inquisitiveness. I feel that in another hour or so I shall not care to look for anything, but shall sit quietly and let everything pass like the turn of a revolving panorama. In this state of mind, which represents the idleness of arrival, we meet at our Consul’s an agreeable young gentleman belonging to a family well known to us by name--the Branders; a family that represents--though mixed with European--the best blood of the islanders. They speak French and English with the various accents and manners that belong to those divisions of European society; they are well-connected over in Scotland. Do you remember the Branders of “Lorna Doone”? At home their ancestry goes back full forty generations. They are young and pleasant, and we forget how old we are in comparison. We call on their mother later, a charming woman, and on an aunt, Mrs. Atwater, who has a similar charm of manner, accent and expression; and on another aunt, the ex-Queen Marau; but she is away with her younger sister Manihinihi.

In the evening, with some remnant of energy, we walk still further than our house upon the beach, passing over the same roads that Stoddard wearily trod in his “South Sea Idyls.” We try to find, by the little river that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the calaboose where Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our search; no one remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of woodland that Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm of light and air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to bring back home in words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if composed for Claude Lorraine. Great trees stand up within a few feet of the tideless sea. Where the shadows run in at times, canoes with outriggers are pulled up. People sit near the water’s edge, on the grass. Outside of all this shade, we see the island of Moorea further out than the far line of the reef, no longer blue, but glowing like a rose in the beginning of the twilight.

At night we hear girls passing before our little garden; we see them swinging together, with arms about the flowers of their necks. They sing--alas! not always soberly, and the wind brings the odour of the gardenias that cover their necks and heads.

In the night the silence becomes still greater around us, though we can hear at a distance the music of the band that plays in the square, which is the last amusement left to this dreary deserted village called a town. In the square, which is surrounded by many trees, through which one passes to hidden official buildings, native musicians play European music, apparently accommodated to their own ideas, but all in excellent time, so that one just realizes that somehow or other these airs must have been certain well-known ones. But nothing matters very much.

A few visitors walk about; native women sit in rows on the ground, apparently to sell flowers, which they have before them. People of distinction make visits to a few carriages drawn up under the trees. Occasionally, in the shadows or before the lights, in an uncertain manner, natives begin to dance to the accompaniment of the band. But it is all listless, apparently, at least to the sight, and just as drowsy as the day.

In the very early morning we drive to the end of the bay at Point Venus, to see the stones placed by Wilkes and subsequent French navigators, in order to test the growth of the coral outside. And we make a call on a retired French naval officer, who has been about here more or less since 1843, the time of Melville. We drive at first through back roads of no special character. We pass through a great avenue of trees over-arching, the pride of the town; we cross a river torrent, and the end of our road brings us along the sea, but far up, so that we look down over spaces of palm and indentations of small bays fringed with foam, all in the shade below us. On the sea outline, always the island of Moorea, and back on Tahiti, the great mountain, the Aorai, the edge apparently of a great central crater; a fantastic serrated peak called the “Diadem,” also an edge of the great chasm; and on either side along slopes that run to the sea, from the central heights, and recall the slopes of Hawaii. But all is green; even the eight thousand feet of the Aorai, which look blue and violet, melt into the green around us, so as to show that the same verdure passes unbroken, wherever there is a foothold, from the sea to the highest tops. This haze of green, so delicate as to be namable only by other colours, gives a look of sweetness to these high spaces, and makes them repeat, in tones of light, against the blue of the sky, chords of colour similar to those of the trees and the grass against the blue and the violet of the sea.

Nearer us the slopes are all broken up into knife edges of green velvet streaked right near us by clay, which in contrast seems almost like vermilion. So far the roads were good, though the slippery clay might be very different when the great rains came down; and as our driver forced his horses at a gallop near the edges of the cliffs hanging over the lovely pictures of the secluded trees and water, we felt that a more sandy, more prosaic road would better suit the South Sea habits of carriage travel.

All the trees were about us that we knew in Samoa; and many more rounded mango trees, with red fruit hanging on long stems, or lying green by the road. All this was to be seen with cool air full of life, and under a sky more like ours than the Samoan, but exquisitely blue and gay.

Little has been done by us, even of going about; Atamo has written many letters; I have tried to sketch a little from our verandah, in front of which, on the shore, grows a twisted _purau_, called _fau_ in Samoa. Through its branches I see the sea and the reef, and the island of Moorea, in every tint of blue that keeps the light, even in the evening or in the afterglow, when the sunset lights up in yellow and purple the sky behind it. And yet there is a reminiscence in my mind of something not foreign to us, even at this moment, when the haze of light seems new, and the pale blue sea is spangled with little silver stars, as far as I can see distinctly.

We have called on the ex-King; and in the evening, at the club, I have seen him--a handsome, elderly man, somewhat broken and far from sober. He was playing with a certain

[Illustration: THE DIADEM MOUNTAIN. TAHITI]

Keke, a black Senegambian in the French service, a prince of his own negro land, who speaks excellent French, and whom I surprised sitting on the sill of his house one evening (while we were taking a rainy walk). Keke wore in this retirement a pair of marvellous trousers, of a brilliant yellow, with red flamboyant pattern--something too fine for the ordinary out-of-door world. Many of the officials are coloured men from the French colonies, and so is the governor more or less. Of course the idea is infinitely respectable and humanitarian, as so many French things are, but I fear that the Republic is unwise in sending people whom the native here cannot look up to as he does to a white man.

Of course they are all French and have votes, as the natives here can have also; but whether it is for the real good of a population accustomed to dependence I am not so sure. There are many curious anomalies: our American friends of Samoa speak, with our natural way of looking at things correctly, of the preposterous way the French have of backing the Catholic missions and protecting their missionaries, even as we would. But here I find the Catholic mission dependent upon the gifts of the faithful, while the Protestant missions are supported by the French government, as the Protestant clergy would be in France.