245 Cut into filets and soaked for six hours in lime juice, my two fish made a raw hors-d'œuvre of the most delicate kind. I took a plate of it to the house of a neighbor who had asked me to dinner, and this old-timer in the South Seas pronounced it of the very first order. You would enjoy knowing him: he has been in this part of the world since the 'seventies—supercargo, skipper, trader on islands seldom visited even to-day. Now he is retired and lives on a small plantation which represents the savings of a lifetime. After dinner, as we sat on his wide veranda with pipes going and glasses on the table between us, he told me a tale so curious that I cannot resist repeating it to you—the story of an island far away to the north and west—an island I shall call Ariri.
Atolls are by nature lonely places, but of all atolls in the Pacific, Ariri is perhaps the loneliest—never visited, far off from any group, out of the paths of navigation. Not very many years ago Ariri was a bit of no man's land; though marked on the chart, its existence was ignored by the Powers—it had never been inhabited, no flag had ever been raised above its beaches of dazzling coral sand. At that time, as for centuries before, the sea birds nested undisturbed on the islets within the reef, where all day long the water flashed blue in the sunlight and the trade wind hummed a song of loneliness among the palm tops.
Then a day came when two Frenchmen—shrewd traders and planters of coconuts in the Tuamotu—spoke of Ariri. Here was an island capable of an annual hundred tons of copra, and claimed by no man; they would plant it and reap the rewards of enterprise. The chief difficulty was to find a superintendent to 246 take charge of the project; it needed a white man, but white men willing to undertake a task of such poignant loneliness were not to be found every day in Papeete. As it chanced, their man was at hand.
The natives called him Tino—perhaps his name had once been King. Years among the islands had obliterated whatever stamp of nationality he might have possessed; it was rumored that he was English by birth, and also that he had held a commission in the Confederate navy. Tall, strong, and of fine presence, with a full blond beard and eyes of reckless blue, a great singer and dancer—always the merriest at a feast and the idol of the women, a remarkable linguist and story-teller, drunken, brave, witty, and unprincipled—Tino was of a type which thrives in Polynesia.
When they offered him the position of superintendent at Ariri the two Frenchmen were not without misgivings. He was on the beach at the time, though the only sign of that condition was an unusual laxity in returning the favor when a friend invited him to drink. Tino had no money, but that was his sole limitation; each of a dozen native families vied for the honor of transferring his mat and camphorwood box to their house; when evening came he had his choice of a dozen invitations to dine, and a dozen girls competed for the joy of doing his laundry and making hats for him. But this easy-going philosophy and lack of worry over a situation scarcely respectable in the eyes of Papeete's business men were calculated to sow distrust. In the case of Ariri, however, it was difficult to see how he could go astray; there would be no liquor—they would see to that—and with no visitors and no means of 247 leaving the island there seemed little chance of trouble, Tino was a famous handler of native labor.
The agreement was made and in due time a schooner sailed into the Ariri lagoon to land Tino and a score of Raiatea boys with their wives. The Frenchmen took care to leave no boat capable of putting out to sea, but as there were houses and sheds to build they left a considerable variety of tools and gear, in addition to a year's supply of medicine, food, and clothing. A day or two later the schooner sailed away.
The superintendent called his men together and appointed a foreman. The main island was to be cleared, rows staked out, and the nuts brought for seed to be planted in such a manner. Before this work began, a house was to be built for each family. That was all, except that Tino needed five men at once for special work of his own—let them be those most skilled in woodworking. With that he seems to have dismissed the business of planting coconuts from his mind.
There was a certain amount of hibiscus on the island, as well as the trees called tou and puka. In seven months' time, with the help of his men, Tino cut down trees, sawed out timbers and planking, and built a forty-foot cutter—sturdy, fast, and seaworthy. Her mast was the smoothed-down trunk of an old coconut palm; her sails a patchwork of varied fabrics; her cordage of cinnet, twisted and braided coconut fiber—the work of women, incredibly skillful and patient. For anchor, she carried a grooved coral bowlder, and her water tanks were five-gallon kerosene tins. At the end of the seventh month this improbable vessel was launched, rigged, and provisioned. Tino bade his men 248 farewell and set sail—promising to return—to the westward, fearless and alone. His only instrument was a compass, and yet he made the passage to Fiji—twelve hundred miles—in fifteen days.
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 249 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 250 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.
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 252 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 253 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 254 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 255 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 256 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 257 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 258 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, 259 where the paddles had to be made in two pieces—blade lashed to handle.  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.  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. 260 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 261 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.  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."
262 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 263 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.  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 264 fathoms, three fathoms—another two fathoms were needed, work for the odd moments of a month.  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, 265 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 266 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 267 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 268 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.  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.  The 269 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 270 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 271 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, 272 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 273 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 274 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 275 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 276 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.
IT is not easy to analyze the magic which cozens every traveler into believing that he is the first to see Tahiti with clear eyes—one feels that it is made up of nature in a mood of unearthly loveliness; of a sense of ancient and unalterable life; of a realization that strange beliefs persist under a semblance of Christianity; of the lure of a race whose confidence the white man can never fully gain. The mail steamers, the wireless, the traders, the scattering of French officials—these things are a mere play of shadows on the surface. Even the churches, I was tempted to say; but the church plays more than a shadowy part in the life of the native, whose religion, at the present day, is a singular blending of Christian doctrine and old heathen belief. The Tahitian reads his Bible (he has no other book) and sings loudly every Sunday in church; but the dead are still things of horror in his mind; sorcerers—masquerading as doctors—still carry on a brisk trade; and Tautau, the Great-headed, is still a living presence in the valley of Punaruu.
When the people of the Society Islands accepted Christianity a century ago they did so with reservations 278 of which the missionaries, perhaps, were not aware. Here and there, as at Faatoai on Moorea, there was a burning of idols, but a great mass of material—old gods and heathen weapons—was stored in secure hiding places among the hills. To-day, after three generations of increasing European influence, hundreds of natives know of these caves and repair to them for purposes of their own, yet a white man might spend his life on Tahiti without a glimpse of a cinnet-bound orooro or a slender ironwood spear.
My friend Airima is typical. The widow of a Yankee skipper, the owner of a neat wooden villa in Papeete, where she appears regularly, on her way to church, in shoes, stockings, and a black-silk gown, she finds it necessary, from time to time, to cast off the unnatural manners of Europe and live as she was meant to live; to be herself, an elderly and delightful savage. When the mood comes she closes the villa in Papeete, gathers the willing members of her family, and repairs to her native house, far off on the peninsula of Taiarapu.
The house of Airima stands on the river bank, shaded by a pair of mango trees, dark green and immemorially old. The roof is thatched with braided fronds of coconut; breezes play through the lofty single room, bare of furniture and floored with mats spread on white coral gravel, leveled and packed. Past the veranda, on which the family sleeps through the warm hours of the day, the river flows out gently to the sea; a broad, still water, deep and glassy clear, peopled with darting shoals of fish—mullet, young pampano, and nato, the trout of the South Seas. Opposite the river mouth the reef is broken by a pass, through which the steady lines of combers sweep in to crash and tumble on the 279 bar. Morning and afternoon the breakers are alive with naked children, shouting and glistening brown in the sunlight as they ride the waves.
Inland, the valley marking the river's course is lost in a maze of broken and fantastic peaks; seaward, bordering the green and blue of the lagoon, the snowy line of the reef stretches off endlessly; and beyond a three-league expanse of bright sea the headlands of Tahiti Nui rise in vast, swelling curves, up and up to the perpetual clouds which veil the heights. Under a bright sun at midday, when the palm tops toss to the trade which paints the lagoon—in the deep passes and over the patches of sandy bottom—with ruffled sapphire and emerald, and sets the whitecaps to dancing beyond the reef, or in the calm of night, with the moon hanging low over pinnacles of basalt—when the polished surface of the lagoon is broken by the plunge and swirl of heavy fish, and native songs, rising and falling in savage cadences, float out across the water—it is a place not easily forgotten.
It was still dark when we rose—Maruae and I; the brothers of Maruae had returned from the reef, and the ovens behind the cook house were smoking, for in these places the hour of the day's first meal is set by the return of the fishermen. I took one shuddering plunge into the river, dressed myself in a shirt, a waistcloth, and a pair of hobnailed boots, and squatted with the rest to consume a fresh-caught mackerel and a section of breadfruit, dipped in the common bowl of sauce.
Maruae sucked his fingers and stood up, calling to the dogs. Airima glanced at me over the back of a large fish she was gnawing, holding it with both hands. 280 "Go, you two," she said. "You stay," replied Maruae, as he turned to take the path to the mountains. The oceanic tongue possesses no other words of parting.
We followed the river across the flatlands of the coast. Dawn was flushing in the east; the profile of lofty ridges, fern clad and incredibly serrated, grew sharp against the sky. The mynahs were awakening; from the thick foliage of orange and mango trees came their extraordinary morning chorus—a thousand voices, whistling, screaming, and chattering that it was time the assembly broke up for the foraging of another day. In one place, where a turn of the path brought us suddenly to the edge of a still reach of water, a pair of native ducks (Anas superciliosa) rose vertically on beating wings and sped off over the palm tops. A little farther on, where volcanic bowlders began to appear through the alluvial soil and the river leaped and foamed over the first rapids, a family of Tahitian jungle fowl, led by a splendid burnished cock, sprang out of the grass and streamed away, in easy, rapid flight, toward the hills. The dogs bounded forward and stopped, whining as they watched the wild chickens dwindle to speeding dots.
The groves of coconut palms and open pasture land were behind us now; the valley was narrowing, hemmed in by thousand-foot cliffs to which a tangle of vegetation clung. The river had become a torrent, boiling and waist deep—plunging over cataracts, roaring down dark rapids under a roof of matted trees: giant hibiscus a yard through, too remote to tempt the ax of the canoe builder; candle nut, Barringtonia, and mapé, the island chestnut, with boles like fluted columns of a temple. The trail wound back and forth, 281 across the river, over the trunks of fallen trees, around masses of rock tumbled from the cliffs above, mounting higher and higher into the heart of the island. Once, as we stopped to rest, I looked back and caught a glimpse of the sea—a wedge of blue, far behind us and below. The dogs had begun to range ahead, for they knew that any moment we might start a sounder of wild pig. I was growing tired—it was not easy to follow Maruae at his own gait. He walked with the rapid, springy tread of a mountain man; when he stooped to clear a low-branching limb or lopped off a section of creeper with an easy swing of his machete I admired the play of muscles on his back, rippling powerfully under the smooth, brown skin. Silken and unblemished—unless it be by scars—the skin of these people is not like ours, but softer and closer in texture; seeming, like marble, to glimmer with reflected light.
The gorge grew narrower; we rounded a buttress of jointed basalt and came suddenly into the light and open of a lonely valley. A quarter of a mile wide and twice as long, set high above the sea, and hemmed in by untrodden ridges, it lay here uninhabited and forgotten, in a silence broken only by the roar of savage cataracts and the far-off bellowing of wild bulls. Yet man had been here. Along the base of the cliffs we found the terraced stone of his dwellings, the blocks of volcanic rock pried apart by the roots of huge old trees.
Maruae was squatting on his heels beside me, contemplating in silence these relics of an older time. Finally he turned his head. "Those stones are very old," he remarked; "they have been here always, since the beginning. Men placed them there and men 282 slept on them, but not the men of my people." My thoughts dwelt on the old idle tales I had heard—of the Lizard men, of the dark-skinned aborigines, the Manahune, said to have been in possession of the land when the eyes of Polynesian voyagers first rested on cloudy Orofena. There were other tales, too, of a later day; of a tribe of men dwelling in the valleys, neither tasting fish nor setting foot on the beach except when, at certain intervals, they were permitted to come down to worship by the sea. Even to-day it needs no effort of the imagination to see two distinct types among the island people: men and women of the kind one considers typically Polynesian—tall, clean limbed, and light brown, with clear, dark eyes, straight or waving hair, and heads not differing greatly from the heads of Europeans; and another kind, of a negroid or Melanesian cast—short, squat, and many shades darker in complexion, thick-lipped and apish, with muddy eyes, kinky hair, and flattened, undeveloped heads. And, strangely enough, after more than a century of missions and leveling foreign influence, the dark and awkward people seem still to fill the humbler walks of life—they are the servants and dependents, the feeders of pigs, the carriers of wood and water. Great stature, physical beauty, and light complexion are still the hall marks of aristocratic birth. Writing of the islands a hundred years ago, old Ellis, the often-quoted, closest observer of them all, remarked: "It is a singular fact in the physiology of the inhabitants of this part of the world that the chiefs, and persons of hereditary rank and influence of the islands, are, almost without exception, as much superior to the peasantry or common people in stateliness, dignified deportment, and physical 283 strength as they are in rank and circumstances, although they are not elected to their station on account of their personal endowments, but derive their rank and elevation from their ancestry. This is the case with most of the groups of the Pacific, but peculiarly so in Tahiti and the adjacent isles. The father of the late king was six feet four inches high; Pomare was six feet two. The present king of Raiatea is equally tall. ... Their limbs are generally well formed, and the whole figure is proportioned to their height, which renders the difference between the rulers and their subjects so striking that Bougainville and some others have supposed they were a distinct race, the descendants of a superior people, who at a remote period had conquered the aborigines and perpetuated their supremacy." There is a curious inconsistency in the matter of complexion, for in the old days a dark skin was considered the sign of a strong, warlike, and masterly man. Ellis records an extract from an old song: "If dark be the complexion of the mother, the son will sound the conch shell"; and yet, on the same page, he observes that "the majority of the reigning family in Raiatea are not darker than the inhabitants of some parts of southern Europe."
While Maruae and I rested among the ruins of the ancient settlement the dogs had been more usefully engaged. My musings were disturbed by a sudden burst of squeals, punctuated by excited yelpings. Maruae sprang to his feet, long knife in hand. It was only a small pig, a sixty-pounder, but he was bursting fat, stuffed with Vi apples fallen from the great tree under which he had been feeding. The dogs had him by the ears when we arrived; a thrust of the machete 284 put an end to his short and idyllic life. I hung him from a branch and skinned him while Maruae went off in search of fei.  There was a clump of palms near by, another sign, perhaps, of man's former occupation—the relics of unnumbered vegetable generations; we had coconuts to drink, pork and fei were at hand, and plenty of fresh-water crayfish to be had in the river. In the islands, the obtaining of food is always the signal for a meal. Maruae beckoned to me and led the way to the river, where he readjusted his waistcloth to leave a kind of apron hanging in front and plunged up to his armpits in the still water. With the apron spread as a trap for the darting crayfish, he moved slowly along the grassy and overhanging bank of the stream, stopping every moment or so to hand a struggling victim up to me. This little fresh-water lobster is one of the most delicious shellfish in the world—of the same dimensions as the French ecrivisse, and not unlike it in flavor. In fifteen minutes we had enough, and the work of preparing our meal began.
I gathered wood and started a fire against a face of rock.  Our meal was genuinely primitive; I had cigarettes, matches, and a paper of salt stowed in the tuck of my pareu—excepting our knives, we had nothing else that the rudest of savages might not have possessed. Turning up the earth with his 285 machete, my companion scraped out a shallow trench—a Maori oven. He set a ring of stones about the edge, lined the inside with pebbles, and filled the whole with coals from our camp-fire. While the coals glowed, heating the earth and stones, he cut off a loin and hind-quarter of pork, wrapped the meat carefully in plantain leaves, and selected half a dozen of the riper plantains for our meal. Finally, when the oven was thoroughly hot, he scraped away the coals from the middle, laid in the leaf-wrapped pork, surrounded by a ring of plantains, pushed the hot stones close to the food, and covered the whole with a thick layer of plantain leaves. We ate the crayfish—boiled to a bright scarlet—while the balance of our meal was cooking. I added salt to the boiled-down liquor in the bottom of the bamboo, and dipped in this natural sauce. The first course whetted our appetites for the tender meat and juicy plantains which soon came from the oven.
As we lay smoking after our meal I could see that Maruae had something in his mind and was debating whether or not to speak. Finally he began, cautiously and with an air of skeptical restraint at first, but with more and more assurance as he saw that I listened seriously to his story.
"The old people say," he remarked, pointing to the head of the valley, where the cliffs narrowed to a deep crack through which the river rushed, "that far up in this same valley, beyond the upper gorge you see, a spirit dwells, one of the heathen spirits which are as old as the land. You and I may not believe in these things, but it is good, when the evenings are long, to listen to the stories of the old men. The name of this spirit is Tefatu; some call him varua ino, saying that he 286 dogs the footsteps of the living and preys upon the souls of the newly dead, but that is not true, for many times in the memory of my fathers he has been known to aid those in perplexity or distress. The old men believe that if a traveler, lost in these mountains at nightfall, calls on Tefatu for succor, the spirit will appear before him in the likeness of a pale, moving fire, and lead him in safety down to the sea. Once in sight of the sea, the man must cry out in a loud voice, 'You have aided me, Tefatu, and I am content; stop here and I will go on my way.' It is not good to neglect these words of parting. Sometimes he is seen at night, flying from ridge to ridge of the mountain—a great glowing head, trailing a thin body of fire. Long ago, during the childhood of my grandmother, Tefatu left this land for a space of years; men said that he had flown to Hawaii, but now he is returned beyond a doubt. High up among the cliffs I found the cave in which he sleeps by day.... These eyes of mine have seen the Old Lord lying there among the whitened heads of men—I looked and turned away quickly, for my stomach was cold with fear.
"I cannot tell you clearly," Maruae went on, in answer to my obvious question, "for I was greatly afraid. It seemed to me that he was a figure of wood, longer and thinner than a man, black with age, covered with carved patterns, and bound, in places, with close wrappings of napé—the fine sennit my people have forgotten how to make. The place was full of bones; scores of men had been slain and their bodies offered there, as was the custom of our old kings. Once, not many years ago, a wise man came here from the islands of Hawaii—an old man, bearded and wearing spectacles. 287 It was his work to write down the names of our ancestors, and he spoke our tongue, though haltingly and with a strange twist. He lived with us for a time and we grew fond of him, for he was a simple man, who made us laugh with his jokes and was kind to the children. One evening I told him how I had found the place of Tefatu. As I spoke his eyes grew bright behind their windows of glass, and when I had done he begged me, in great excitement, to lead him to the cave—offering a hundred of your dollars if I could prove that I had spoken true words. I was younger then, and in need of money, for I was courting a girl. We went together into the mountains, but as we drew near the place something within me made me hesitate and I grew afraid. In the end I deceived that man who was my friend, telling him that I could not find the way. He was indeed a wise man; another would have mocked me for a liar and a teller of idle tales, but he only smiled, looking at me kindly—he knew that my words were true and that I feared to betray the sleeping place of the Old Lord."
Maruae rose to his feet with the sigh of a man who has eaten well and is deprived of his rightful siesta. He shouldered his ponderous load of fei—which I could scarcely raise from the ground—and led the way toward the sea, while I followed, bearing the remnants of the pig. It was noon when we reached the flatlands of the coast.
A quarter of a mile above the house of Airima we stopped to watch a large canoe, loaded with a mound of seine, gliding up the river, followed by a fleet of smaller craft. An old woman stood in the bow, directing the proceedings with shrill volubility; she 288 was the proprietor of the net, a village character at once kindly and tyrannical—widow of one chief and mother of another. As her canoe drew abreast of us she gave the command to halt and spread the net. The river at this point is almost without current, very still and clear; Maruae and I sat on the high bank, too tired to do more than play the part of spectators.
They grounded the big canoe just below where we sat, putting one end of the seine ashore and paddling slowly across the river while the net was laid out in a deep, sagging curve downstream. One after another the smaller canoes were beached, and the people, half naked and carrying spears, ran along the bank to take to the water a few hundred yards above. The river was alive with them, splashing and shouting as they drove the fish toward the trap. Next moment the bright shoals began to appear beneath us, the sunlight glinting on burnished sides as they darted this way and that by hundreds, seeking a way of escape. A run of mullet flashed downstream, saw the net, turned, and were headed back toward the sea. A series of cries went up—"Aué! Aué!"—as fifty or sixty of the beautiful silvery fish leaped the line of floats and dashed away to safety. The old headwoman, dressed in a Mother Hubbard of respectable black and a rather handsome hat, was swimming easily in three fathoms of water; nothing escaped her watchful eye.
"E ara!" she shouted, angrily; "the best fish are getting away! Hurry, you lazy ones—splash the water below the net, or we shall not have a mullet left! Remember that when the haul is over he who has not worked shall have no fish."
As the line of beaters drew near, the men in the big 289 canoe paddled upstream and across behind them, throwing out net as they went, until the frightened fish and a score of swimmers were encircled. The two ends of the seine were now close together on the bank, and half a dozen men began to haul in with a will, their efforts causing the circle to narrow slowly and steadily. Looking down from the high bank, one could see children of ten or twelve, stark naked, and carrying tiny spears in their hands, swimming like frogs a fathom deep in the clear water, pursuing the darting fish.  The people of the islands, as a rule, are neither fast nor showy swimmers; one can see prettier swimming any summer afternoon on the Long Island shore, but the Polynesian is at home in the water in a way the white man can never match. I watched an old woman, all of seventy and wearing a black blouse girded tightly to her waist with a pareu, treading water at the lower end of the net, where the fish were beginning to concentrate. She was as much at her ease as though she had been lying on her veranda exchanging gossip with a neighbor. Each time she thought the headwoman's eyes were turned away she reached over the net, seized a fish, and stuffed it into her blouse, until a flapping bulge hung down over her pareu. But old Tinomana's eyes were sharp. "Enough," she cried, half laughing and half in anger, "aué, tera vahine e! Perhaps she thought to get a string of fish, too, for that worthless son-in-law of hers!"
At length the seine lay in two great piles on the beach, and only a bulging pocket, filled with a pulsating mass of silver, remained in the river. Under the 290 direction of Tinomana the fish were divided into little piles, strung on bits of hibiscus bark, and apportioned among the people, according to the size of their families and the amount of help they had given in the haul. For herself she reserved a considerable share, for her household was large, and as the owner of the net she was entitled to a full half—more than she loaded into the big canoe.
It was early afternoon when we laid down our burdens in the cook house and stripped for a swim. The others were awakening from their siesta; a flock of brown children, all vaguely related to the family of Airima, followed us to the river, carrying miniature surf boards. Next moment they were in the water, splashing and shouting as they paddled downstream toward where the surf broke on the bar. Tehinatu, the pretty sister of Maruae, passed us with a rush and leaped feet first from the high bank. She rose to the surface thirty yards away, shouting a challenge to catch her before she could reach the opposite shore. Her brother and I dove together, raced across the river, and had nearly overtaken the girl when she went under like a grebe. I was no match for her at this game; under water she could swim as fast as I, and was a hundred times more at home. I gave up the pursuit and landed for a sunning among the warm rocks of the point.
Out where the seas reared for the landward rush the black heads of children appeared and disappeared; I could hear the joyous screams of others, flattened on their boards and racing toward me, buried in flying spray. The old woman I had seen helping herself to fish was coming down the river, paddling an incredibly 291 small canoe, laden with an enormous bunch of bananas and four kerosene tins of water. She lived a mile down the coast and, like many of her neighbors, braved the surf daily to supply her house with fresh water from the river. The gunwale of her canoe seemed to clear the water by no more than a couple of inches; I watched with some anxiety, thinking of the feelings of an American grandmother in the same situation.
She ceased to paddle at the river mouth and watched her chance, while the frail dugout rose and fell in the wash of half a dozen big seas. Then in a momentary lull she dug her paddle into the water. I sat up to watch; a boy standing in the shallows near by shouted encouragement. At first I thought that she had chosen her moment well. The canoe passed the white water, topped a little wave without swamping, and was seemingly out of danger; but suddenly a treacherous sea sprang up from nowhere, rearing a tossing crest. It was too late to retreat—certain disaster lay ahead. Stoically, without a sign of dismay, the paddler held her craft bow on; the canoe rose wildly against the foaming wall, seemed to hang for an instant almost vertically, and then canoe, cargo, and old woman disappeared in the froth. The boy screamed in ecstasy as he galloped through the shallows to lend a hand. The other children ceased their play and soon the canoe and its recovered cargo were brought ashore. They emptied the dugout and filled the tins with fresh water; I heard the old woman laugh shrilly as she wrung her clothes on the beach. Presently, coached by a dozen amused spectators, she made a second attempt, and passed the surf without a wetting; when I saw her last she was paddling off steadily to the west.
292 I was dozing among the rocks when a ringing whistle startled me and I looked up to see a bird like a large sandpiper alight on the beach and begin to feed, running briskly after the receding waves or springing into the air for a short flight when threatened by a rush of water. It was a wandering tattler, and no bird was ever better named. Solitary in its habits, except in the breeding season, when it resorts to northern lands so remote that its nest and eggs are still (I believe) unknown, it travels south at the approach of winter, making lonely passages across some of the widest stretches of ocean in the world ... to Hawaii, to the Galapagos, to the Marquesas, and probably to the remote southern islands of Polynesia. What obscure sense enables the migrating bird to follow its course far out of sight of land? In France, I have flown side by side with wild geese, heading steadily southward above a sea of clouds. It seemed to me that—like the pilot of an airplane—they might guide themselves, in a general way, by the sun, the stars, or the look of the land below—an idea borne out by the fact that geese become lost and confused in a fog. But in considering a bird like the carrier pigeon or the tattler, all such theorizing comes to an end. No general sense of north and south could guide the tattler to the lonely landfalls of the South Pacific; his wanderings—like the migration of the golden plover, or the instinct of the shearwater, which sends him unerringly, on the darkest night of storm, to his individual burrow in the cliffs—must be classed among the inexplicable mysteries of nature.
On the road which passes close to the house of Airima I found Tehinatu in conversation with the driver of a 293 Chinese cart. She was bargaining for a watermelon; the Chinaman stood out for three francs—she offered two.
"Enough of talking," she said, firmly; "the melon is the best you have, but it is green. I will give two francs."
"A toru toata," muttered the proprietor of the melon, indifferently. ("Toata" means a franc, but is obviously a corruption of quarter, for the dollar passed current here long before the money of France.)
"Look at my clothes," pleaded the deceitful girl, changing her tactics suddenly. "I am a poor woman who cannot afford to pay the prices you expect from the chief. Come, dear Tinito, give me the melon for two francs."
The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders and glanced at me. The glint in his narrow eye might have meant, "Ah, these women—what's the use!" He sighed; for a moment, while Tehinatu looked at him pleadingly, he was silent.
"Take the melon," he said, "and give me two francs; I must be on my way. But do not think you have deceived me, cunning woman; I know that you are not poor, for only yesterday your brother sold the copra from your land."
Without a sign of embarrassment the girl opened her hand and held up a hundred-franc note. "Ah, you are rich," remarked the Chinaman, as he undid an oilcloth wallet and stripped the change from a substantial roll of bills. "I knew it. Are you not ashamed to practice such deceit?" But Tehinatu only tucked the melon under her arm with a triumphant smile.
It is a curious study to watch the contact of Chinese and Polynesian, races separated by the most profound 294 of gulfs, yet possessing the meeting ground of a common love of bargaining. All through the French islands you will find Chinamen, scattered singly or in little groups—through the windward and leeward Societies; the Marquesas; among the distant atolls of the Paumotu; in the remote Gambiers; in Tupuai, Rurutu, and lonely Rimatara. They are keepers of small stores, for the most part, where you may see them interrupted at their eternal task of copra making to exchange a box of matches for a single coconut or to haggle for a quarter of an hour over a matter of five sous. Patient, painstaking, and unobtrusive—existing in inconceivable squalor, without the common pleasures which enable most of us to tolerate our lives—they seem to be impelled by motives far more profound than the longing for material gain, by a species of idealism equally incomprehensible to the native and to the visitor of European race. It is not beyond possibility that in the course of a few more generations it will be the native islander who lingers here and there, isolated in communities principally Chinese; for the islanders, superb physically, are the least prolific of men, while the weedy little Tinito, who brings his own women with him, or succeeds, with his own peculiar knack, in obtaining women from a population which regards him with amused contempt, surrounds himself with children in as short a time as nature allows. I have sometimes thought that the secret of the Chinaman's dogged and self-denying labors might lie here—traceable to his cult of ancestor worship: to become a revered ancestor one must have children, and in order to bring up properly a large family of children one must spend one's life in unceasing toil.
295 I doubt that Europeans in large numbers will ever be tempted to make the islands their home; the life is too alien, the change too great. As things are, the relation of Polynesian and Chinese amounts to a subtle contest for the land—a struggle of which both parties are aware. The native, incapable of abstract thought, feels and resents it vaguely; to the Chinaman, whose days are spent in meditation undisturbed by the automatic labors of his body, the issue is no doubt clear cut. The native is by far the more attractive of the two—clean, kindly, selfish, jolly, childish, well bred, and pleasing to the eye; but the Chinaman possesses the less attractive qualities which make for the survival of a race—the industry, the unselfishness, the capacity to live for an idea—and in the end, if only by force of numbers, he will win. Looking into the future, one can see the Eastern islands populated by Chinese, as our own islands of Hawaii have been peopled with immigrants from Japan. "They are dying, anyway, and they won't work," the commercial gentleman will tell you; "here is rich cane land, needing only labor to produce bountifully—and the world needs sugar." Perhaps this view is correct—for myself, I feel that the question is debatable. There are certain parts of the world—like our American mountains, deserts, and lonely stretches of coast—which seem planned for the spiritual refreshment of mankind; places from which one carries away a new serenity and the sense of a yearning for beauty satisfied. Ever since the days of Cook the islands of the South Sea have charmed the white man—explorers, naturalists, traders, and the rough crews of whaling vessels; the strange beauty of these little lands, insignificant so far 296 as commercial exploitation is concerned, seems worthy of preservation. And the native, paddling his outlandish canoe or lounging in picturesque attitudes before his house, is indispensable to the scene. If the day comes when his canoe lies rotting on the beach and his house is tenanted by industrious Chinese—though the same jagged peaks rise against the sky and the same sea thunders lazily along the reef—when the anchor drops and the call comes to go ashore, I, for one, shall hesitate.
In the Cook group, six hundred miles west of Tahiti, the prospect is less depressing, for the British have adopted a policy of exclusion and made it impossible for the native to sell his land. The Cook-Islander, reinforced here and there with a dash of white blood, and undiscouraged by a competition he is not fitted to meet, seems to be holding his own. The reason is clear—the native has been little tampered with, left in possession of his land, and protected rigidly against epidemics like the influenza of 1918, which ravaged the island populations wherever infected vessels were permitted to touch. Imported disease, exploitation of the land, and coolie immigration—these are the destroying forces from which the native must be preserved if a shadow of the old charm is to linger for the enjoyment of future generations of travelers.
Following Tehinatu toward the house, I thought to myself how wonderfully the island charm had been preserved here on the peninsula of Taiarapu. We were within fifty miles of Papeete, where business is carried on, and steamers call, and perspiring tourists walk briskly about the streets; yet here, in this lonely settlement by the lagoon, civilization seemed half a 297 world away. When I walked abroad the sight of a white man brought the people to their doors, and bands of children followed me, staring and bright eyed, with interest.
On the veranda children surrounded us while the girl cut and distributed thin slices of her melon. There is a fascination in watching these youngsters, brought up without clothes and without restraint, in an environment nearly as friendly as that of the original human pair. Once they are weaned from their mothers' breasts—which often does not occur until they have reached an age of two and a half or three—the children of the islands are left practically to shift for themselves; there is food in the house, a place to sleep, and a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool—that is the extent of parental responsibility. The child eats when it pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself with no other resources than its own. As it grows older certain light duties are expected of it—gathering fruit, lending a hand with fishing, cleaning the ground about the house—but the command to work is casually given and as casually obeyed. Punishment is scarcely known; yet under a system which would ruin forever an American or English child the brown youngster flourishes with astonishingly little friction—sweet tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom quarrelsome. The small boy tugs at the net or gathers bait for the fishermen, seemingly without a thought of drudgery; the small girl tends her smaller sister in the spirit of playing with a doll. Perhaps the restless and aggressive spirit which makes discipline necessary in bringing up our own children is the very quality that has made the white race master of the world; 298 perhaps the more hostile surroundings of civilization have made necessary the enforcement of prohibitory laws.
I filled my pipe and lay smoking on a mat, with an eye on the youngsters at their play. For the time being, a little girl, at the most attractive period of childhood, was the center of interest. One of her front teeth was loose; she had tied a bit of bark to it and was summoning up courage for a determined pull. A boy stole up behind her, reached over her shoulder, and gave the merciful jerk; next moment he was dancing around her, waving the strip of bark to which the tooth was still attached. The owner of the tooth began to sob, holding a hand over her mouth, but her lamentations ceased when a larger boy shouted, seriously, "Give her the tooth and let her speak to the rat!" The small girl trotted to the edge of the bush, where I heard her repeat a brief invocation before she flung the tooth into a thicket of hibiscus. I knew what she was saying, for I had made inquiries concerning this children's custom—probably as old as it is quaint. It is a sort of exchange; the baby tooth is thrown among the bushes and the rat is invoked to replace it with one as white and durable as his own. The child says:
"Thy tooth, thy tooth, O rat, give to the man;
The tooth, the tooth of the man, I give to the rat."
No doubt the games of children everywhere are very much the same; in the islands, at any rate, an American child would soon find itself at home. The boys walk on stilts, play tag, blindman's buff, prisoner's base, 299 and a game called Pere Pana, like what we called Pewee when I was a youngster in California—almost exactly as these things are done at home. The girls play cat's cradle, hopscotch, jackstones, and jackstraws—often joining in the rougher games of their brothers. One curious game, evidently modern, and perhaps originated by the children of missionaries, is called Pere Puaa Taehae (the Game of the Wild Beast). The boys and girls, who pretend to be sheep, stand in line one behind the other, clinging together under the protection of the mother ewe at the head of the line. Presently the wild beast appears, demanding a victim to eat. "You are the wild beast?" the sheep ask. "Yes," he replies, "and I want a male sheep." He then waits while the sheep—in whispers inaudible to him—decide on which boy (for the beast has his choice of sexes) shall be sacrificed. When the decision is made the mother at the head of the line says, "You want a male sheep?"  The last word is the signal for the victim to make a dash for safety; if he can get behind the mother before the wild beast catches him the performance is repeated until the beast succeeds in catching another boy or girl, who then becomes the Puaa Taehae.
The twelve-year-old daughter of Maruae—for Airima was a great-grandmother, not an uncommon thing in this land of rapid generations—had been talking for several days of piercing her ears in order to install a pair of earrings to which she had fallen heir. This evening she had finally mustered courage for the ordeal; I watched her hesitating approach and saw 300 her hand Tehinatu the necessary instruments—a cork, a pair of scissors, and a brace of sharp orange thorns from which the green bark had been carefully stripped. Whatever her color, woman's endurance in the name of vanity is proverbial; the child made no outcry as the thorn passed through the lobe of her ear, sank into the cork, and was snipped off, inside and out, close to the skin—the remaining section to be removed a fortnight later, when the small wound had healed. As Tehinatu smiled at me and flourished the scissors, to which clung a drop of blood, I heard a shrill call from the cook house, "Haere mai tamaa!" It was supper time.
Some of the children, in answer to the call, straggled toward where Airima squatted beside her oven; others, already stuffed with odds and ends of fruit, went on with their play. Maruae beckoned to me as he passed. The meal was a casual affair; one helped oneself without ceremony, squatting to exchange conversation between bites, or walked away, food in hand. There were pork, cold fish, baked taro, and sections of cream-colored breadfruit, ripe and delicately cooked.
The sun had set when we finished, and as the sky gave promise of a clear night I spread a mat on the river bank. Bedtime in these places comes when drowsiness sets in; as I fell asleep the clouds veiling the highlands of Tahiti Nui were still luminous in the afterglow.
It was midnight when I awoke. In the house, faintly illuminated by the light of a turned-down lamp, the family of Airima slept. The air was warm and scented with the perfume of exotic flowers. The river was like a dark mirror reflecting the stars; even 301 the Pacific seemed to sleep, breathing gently in the sigh of little waves, dallying with the bar. Presently I became aware of subdued voices—Airima and Tinomana, the chief's mother, were seated on the rocks below me, fishing with long rods of bamboo for the faia which runs in with the night tide. They were recalling the past, as old ladies will.
"The women of Tahiti," remarked Tinomana, "are not what they were when I was young; nowadays you may travel from morning till night without seeing a really beautiful girl."
"Those are true words," said Airima; "Aué, if you had seen my eldest daughter, who died when she was fifteen! She was lovely as the itatae, the white tern which hovers above the tree tops. Her eyes were brown and laughing, her hair fell in ringlets to her knees, her teeth were small white pearls, and her laughter like the sound of cool water running in a shady place. Alas, my Vahinetua! She was our first-born; my husband loved her as he loved none of the others. A strange, dreamy child.... I used to watch her when she thought herself alone. Sometimes, I know not why, the tears came to my eyes as I saw her gazing into the sky while she chanted under her breath the little old song the children sing to the tern:
"O Itatae, sailing above the still forest, where shall you fly to-night?
Downwind across the sea to Tetiaroa, the low island....
"As she grew older a wasting illness fell on her; the doctors could do nothing to stop her coughing; my husband even took her to the white doctor in Papeete—it was on his recommendation that we took her to sea. 302 We were in Mangareva, far off in the Gambier Islands, when I saw that the end was near.  Vahinetua was never more beautiful than on the last morning of her life—cheeks flushed and eyes shining soft and clear as the first star of evening. We were nearly home—off Maitea, the little island which lies between Tahiti and Anaa; she died in my arms and I covered her with the bright patchwork tifaefae her own hands had sewn. 'Our child is dead,' I told the captain, her father, as I came on deck. He said nothing, but put a hand on my shoulder and pointed toward the masthead, where I saw a small white tern hovering above us. I cannot tell you how, but I knew at once the soul of my daughter was in that pretty bird. It flew with us all day, and at evening, as we entered the harbor of Papeete, it turned back and disappeared in the night. For many years thereafter, each time my husband passed Maitea homeward bound, the white bird was waiting for him at the place where my daughter had died...."
The voices of the old women murmured on, recalling the joys and sorrows of other days. Suddenly, in a mango tree behind the house, a rooster crowed, answered far and near by others of his kind. As the last drawn-out cry died in the silence of the night I yielded to an overpowering drowsiness and fell asleep.
THE evening was very warm and still. The sea rumbled faintly on the reef, half a mile offshore, and behind us—above the vague heights of the interior—a full moon was rising. The palms were asleep after their daily tussle with the trade—fronds drooping and motionless in silhouette against the sky. We had spread mats on the grass close to the beach; Tehinatu lay beside me, chin propped in her hands—she had been bathing, and her dark hair, still damp, hung in a cloud about her face. Her grandmother, Airima—the woman of Maupiti—sat facing us, cross-legged in the position of her people. Now and then a fish leaped in the lagoon; once, far down the beach, a ripe nut thudded to the earth.
"If you two like," said old Airima, "I will tell you the story of my ancestor, the Lizard Woman."
The girl smiled and raised her head in the little gesture which corresponds to our nod. "That is a good tale," she declared, "and true, for I am named after that Lizard Woman who died so many years ago."
The woman of Maupiti lit a match to dry a leaf of black tobacco over the flame; when she had twisted it in a strip of pandanus and inhaled deeply of the 304 smoke, she spoke once more. Her voice was flexible and soft with a sweet huskiness—an instrument to render the music of the old island tongue—its cadences measured or rapid, falling or rising with the ebb and flow of the tale.
"In the old days," Airima began, "so long ago that his name is now forgotten, there was a king of Papenoo, a just man, successful in war and beloved by his people. His wife was a daughter of Bora Bora—the most beautiful woman of that island; she was the delight of his heart, and they had many children. When she fell ill and died, a great sadness came over the king; he could do nothing but brood over his loneliness.  A day came at last when he could endure the sight of them no longer, and a plan to be rid of them took form in his mind.
"There had been a storm and he knew that the waves would be running high at a place where there was a break in the reef. 'Come,' he said to the women of his household, 'bring my children to swim—it will hearten me to see them sporting in the surf.' But when they came to that beach and the women saw the great waves thundering in through the pass, they were afraid, for even a strong swimmer could not live in such a sea. Then the king, whose hope was that his children might drown, bade them forget their fears. One after another the young boys and girls went into the sea and were swept out by the undertow—fearless and shouting. The waves broke over them and at times they disappeared; the women began to cover 305 their faces, for they thought, 'Those pretty children, so dear to us, are as good as dead.'
"Then the watchers saw a strange thing—a true thing, told me by my grandfather, who had learned it from the lips of his ancestors. Beyond the breaking of the surf, the children began to sport in the water, diving and leaping higher and higher into the air. Their skins grew black and glistened in the sunlight; their arms turned to fins and their feet became like the tails of fish; the gods of those days had taken pity on their innocence and made of them the first dolphins—the playful children of the sea. And the king was glad, for he saw that his children would not die, and he knew that they could no longer come to his house to bring back bitter memories.
"As the years went on, the daughters of many chiefs were brought to the king, but no woman found favor in his eyes; his heart was always heavy and no man saw him laugh. Sometimes he walked alone in the mountains where men do not go even to-day, for he feared nothing—neither the ravening spirits of the dead, nor the Lizard People, who in those days lived in the interior of the island. Fifty generations of men have lived and died since our ancestors came to this island; they found the Lizard People already in possession of the land. Ta 'a ta Mōo, they called them—half human, half lizard; able to climb among the cliffs where no man could follow. The human warriors were more powerful in battle, and as time went on the Lizard Folk were driven into the fastnesses of the mountains. Now the last of them is dead, but if you doubt that they once lived, go into the hills and you will see the remains of their plantain gardens high 306 above cliffs no human creature could scale. My own people are traveling the same path—soon the last of us will also be dead, and the white man will glance at the scattered stones of our maraes to make sure that once upon a time we lived.
"But I was telling you of the king. One day, as he wandered alone in the mountains, a Lizard Woman was lying in the fern beside the trail—a head woman of her people, skilled in magic and able to read the future. This king was a tall man, very strong and handsome; as he passed without looking down, she seized his foot gently. At that he looked down and his heart swelled with love of her. He dwelt with her in the mountains, and when at last he came down to the sea his people had given him up for dead.
"In due time a son was born to that Lizard Woman—a strong and beautiful boy, the image of the king his father; she reared him alone in the mountains and grew to love him better than her life. But when she looked into the future her tears fell. When the child was twelve years old she led him to the mouth of her valley and talked long with him, telling him what he was to do, before she turned away and went back to her own place, weeping. Taking thought of her words, the boy went alone to the village of the king. His dress was the skin of lizards.
"When he came to that place he said to those about, 'Take me to the king, my father.' But when they repeated his words, the king said, 'It is false; I have no wife and no child.' Then the child sent back word asking the king if he had forgotten walking one day in the mountains many years before. With that the king remembered his love for the Lizard Woman and 307 bade his men bring the boy to him. And when he saw the strong, fearless child and heard his people exclaim at the beauty of the boy and the wondrous likeness to himself his heart softened and he said, 'This is indeed my son!'
"The years passed, and the heart of the Lizard Woman—sad and alone in the mountains—grew ever more hungry for her son, until at length her life became intolerable without sight of him. She stole down from the hills by night and went softly about the village, weeping and lamenting because her son was not to be seen; the people trembled at sight of her in the moonlight and at the sound of her weeping, and the king feared her, for he knew that she was powerful in magic, and thought that she had come to take her son away. In his fear he took canoe with the young man, and they went down the wind to Tetuaroa, the Low Island, where he thought to be safe from her. But the Lizard Woman, by her magic, knew where they had gone; she looked into the future and saw only sadness and death for herself. What must be cannot be avoided. She leaped into the sea and swam first to Raiatea, where she had lands and where the bones of her ancestors lay in the marae. When she came to that shore she knew that her death was near and that she would die by the hand of her own son. Close by the beach she stopped to weep, and the place of her weeping is still called Tai Nuu Iti (the Little Falling of Tears). Farther on her path, she stopped again to weep still more bitterly, and to this day the name of that place is Tai Nuu Rahi (the Great Falling of Tears). When she had been to her marae, she plunged again into the ocean and swam to Tetuaroa—in all the 308 islands there was no swimmer like her; because of his mother, her son was named Au Moana (Swimmer in the Sea).
"The king and the king's son saw Tehinatu coming far off—for Tehinatu was the name of that Lizard Woman—and they felt such fear that they climbed to the top of a tall palm. Then, knowing the manner of her death, she came out of the water—weeping all the while—and began to climb the palm tree. The two men trembled with fear of her; they threw down coconuts, hoping to strike her so that she would fall to the earth. But though she was bruised and her eyes blinded with tears, she climbed on until she was just beneath them, clinging to the trunk where the first fronds begin to branch. She stopped to rest for a moment, and as she clung to the palm, allowing her body to relax, her son hurled a heavy nut which struck her on the breast. She made no outcry, but her hands let go their hold and she fell far down to the earth. But the men still trembled and were afraid to come down out of the tree, for she struck in a swampy place and was long in dying; all afternoon she lay there, weeping and lamenting, until at sunset the spirit left her body. When she was dead, they took her to Raiatea and buried her in her marae. After that the two men returned to Papenoo, and when the king died the son of the Lizard Woman reigned long in his stead. These are true words, for the blood of Swimmer in the Sea, born of the Lizard Woman, flows in my veins."
Old Airima ceased to speak. From the coconut shell at her side she took a lump of black native tobacco and began to tear off a leaf for a fresh cigarette. Her 309 granddaughter turned on one side—head resting on a folded forearm—and looked at me.
"Aye, those are true words," she said; "for is my name not the same as that of the Lizard Woman? During a thousand years, perhaps more—mai tahito mai: since the beginning—the women of our family have been called Tehinatu. You yourself, though we call you Tehari, have a real name among us—Au Moana, after her son. These names belong to us; no other family does well to use them."
The flare of a match illuminated for an instant the wrinkled and aquiline face of Airima. As she tossed the glowing stick aside, the moonlight smoothed away the lines; I was aware only of her black eyes, wonderfully alive and young.
"Tell him of Poia," she suggested, "and the dead ones in robes of flame."
"Aué," said the girl; "that is a strange tale, and it came about because of a name." She sat up, shaking the hair back over her shoulders.
"The woman who saw these things," she went on, "was another of our ancestors. She was called Poia, a name her grandfather had given. She lived at Tai Nuu Iti in Baiatea, where Tehinatu first stopped to weep.
"One day, in midafternoon, Poia was sitting in the house beside her mother, busy with the weaving of a mat. All at once a darkness closed in before her eyes and she felt the spirit struggling to leap from her body. It was like the pangs of death, but at last her spirit was free and with its eyes she saw her body lying as if in sleep, and perceived that there were strangers in the house—two women and a man. The women were very lovely, with flowers in their hair and robes of scarlet 310 which seemed to flicker like fire. They were Vahinetua and Vivitautua, ancestors dead many years before, who loved Poia dearly. The man was likewise dressed in flaming scarlet, and he wore a tall headdress of red feathers. He was Tanetua, another of Poia's ancestors. The three had come from the marae to seek Poia, and they spoke to her kindly, saying, 'Come with us, daughter.' And though she felt shame when she looked down at her dull dress and disordered hair, she followed where they led.
"They took her to the marae of Tai Nuu Rahi, and there Poia saw a huge woman waiting for them. The right side of that woman was white, and the left side black; when she saw them coming she fell on her knees and began to weep for joy. 'Is it you, Poia?' she cried. 'Then welcome!' As Poia stood there, marveling, the stone of the marae opened before her like the door of a great house, and Vahinetua and Vivitautua said to her, 'Go in.' The door gave on a chamber of stone—the floor was of stone, and the ceiling and the walls. They passed through another door into a second empty room of stone, and thence into a third, and there Poia chanced to look down at herself. She had become lovely as the others; her hair was dressed with flowers and her robe was scarlet, seeming to flicker like fire. While she was looking at herself, no longer ashamed, the two women said to her: 'You must stay here, for you belong to us. We are angry with your grandfather because he called you Poia. That is not all of your name—your true name is Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea. That name belongs to us, and you must have it, for you are our descendant and we love you.'
311 "She did not know that this was her name; she thought it was only Poia. In spite of their kindness she was frightened and told them that she wished to go home. They took her to the door of her house and left her there; and she found herself lying with the half-woven mat in her fingers. Her mother, who was sitting beside her, only said, 'You have slept well.' But Poia, in fear and wonder at what she had seen, said nothing to her mother, not even when the two went to bathe.
"The next day, in midafternoon, Poia again felt the darkness close in before her eyes, the pangs of death as her spirit struggled and at last escaped from the body. But this time she found herself gloriously clothed and beautiful at once. All went as before until they came to the third chamber of the marae; there were leaves spread on the floor of that place as if for a feast, but the only food was purple flowers. The others sat down and began to eat, and Poia attempted to do likewise, but the taste of the flowers was bitter in her mouth. Again the two women said, 'You belong to us; you must not be called Poia, but Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea.' And they coaxed her to stay with them, but she wept and said that she could not bear to be separated from her husband, whom she loved. As before, they were kind to her and took her to her house, where she awoke as if from sleep, and said nothing.
"It was the same the next day, but this time, when they had come to the third chamber of the marae, Vahinetua and Vivitautua said: 'Now you must no longer think of returning. You are ours and we wish you to stay here with us.' Poia wept at their words, 312 for she began to think of the man she loved. 'I must go,' she said; 'if I had no husband I would gladly remain with you here.' At last, when her tears had fallen for a long time, the three dwellers in the marae took her home; they bade her farewell reluctantly, saying that next day she must come to them for good.
"This time Poia awoke in great fear, and she told the story to her mother when they went to bathe together. Her mother went straight to the grandfather, to tell him what she had seen and ask him if her true name was Poia, as he had said years before. Then the old man said that he had done wrong, for the name was not only Poia, but Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea, a name which belonged to Vahinetua and Tanetua and Vivitautua. And these three came no more to get Poia; they were content, for they loved her and wanted her to have their name."
As she finished her story, Tehinatu lay down once more, resting her head on her grandmother's knee. My thoughts were wandering far away—across a great ocean and a continent—to the quiet streets of New Bedford, set with old houses in which the descendants of the whalers live out their ordered lives. In all probability the girl beside me, Polynesian to the core and glorying in a long line of ancestors whose outlandish names fell musically from her lips—had cousins who lived on those quiet streets; for she was the granddaughter of a New Bedford whaling captain, the husband of Airima—a Puritan who ate once too often of the fei, and lingered in the islands to turn trader and rear a family of half-caste children, and finally to die. The story is an old one, repeated over and over again in every group: the white cross; the half-white 313 children at the parting of the ways; their turning aside from the stony path of the father's race to the pleasant ways of the mother. And so in the end the strain of white, further diluted with each succeeding generation, shows itself in nothing more than a name ... seldom used and oftentimes forgotten. It is Nature at work, and she is not always cruel.
"Is it the same with names in your land?" Airima was asking. "Are certain names kept in a family throughout the years?"
"It is somewhat the same," I told her, "though we do not prize names so highly. My father and grandfather and his father were all named Charles, which you call Tehari."
"Among my people," she said, "the possession of a name means much. As far back as our stories go, there has been a man named Maruae in each generation of my father's family. Some of these Maruaes were strange men. There was Maruae Taura Varua Ino, who fished with a bait of coconut for the spirits of men drowned in the sea; and another was Maruae Mata Tofa, who stole a famous shark—the adopted child of a man of Fariipiti. That was a good shark; it lived in the lagoon, harming no one, and every day the man and his wife called it to them with certain secret words. But Maruae coveted the shark, and he prepared an underwater cave in the coral before his house. Then, when the cave was ready, he hid in the bushes on the shore of the lagoon while the man was calling his shark, and in this way Maruae learned the secret words of summons. When the man and his wife had gone, Maruae called out the words; the shark appeared close inshore and followed him to the cave, 314 where it stayed, well content. And that night he taught it new words. Next day the man and his wife called to their shark; and when it did not come they suspected that Maruae had enticed it away. After that they went to the house of Maruae and accused him of the theft; but he said: 'Give the call, if you think I have stolen your shark. I have a shark, but it is not yours.' They called, but the shark did not come, for he had taught it new words. Then Maruae called and the shark came at once, so he said, 'See, it must be my shark, for it obeys me and not you.' As he turned away to return to Fariipiti, the other man said, 'I think it is my shark, but if it will obey you and no other, you may have it.'
"Some days later, a party of fishermen came to Maruae's cave, where the shark lived. They baited a great hook and threw it into the water, and as it sank into the cave they chanted a magic chant. Then the shark seized the bait, and as they hauled him out they laughed with joy and chanted, 'E matau maitai puru maumau e anave maitai maea i te rai.' This chant is something about a good hook and a good line, but the other words are dead—what they mean no man knows to-day. That night there was feasting in the houses of the fishermen, but next morning, when Maruae went down to the sea and called his shark, nothing came, though he stayed by the lagoon, calling, from morning till the sun had set. After that he learned that his shark had been killed and eaten, and from that day none of Maruae's undertakings prospered; finally he pined away and died."
Tehinatu stirred and sat up, eyes shining in the moonlight. The subject of sharks has for these people 315 a fascination we do not understand, a significance tinged with the supernatural.
 I remember the tale my mother told me of Viritoa, the long-haired Paumotuan woman—wife of Maruae Ouma Ati. Her god was a shark. It was many years ago, when the vessels of the white men were few in these islands; Maruae shipped on a schooner going to New Zealand, taking his wife with him, as was permitted in those days. That woman was not like us; she understood ships and had no fear of the sea; as for swimming, there were few like her. When she came here the women marveled at her hair; it reached to her ankles, and she wore it coiled about her head in two great braids, thick as a man's arm.
"The captain of that schooner was always drinking; most of the time he lay stupefied in his bed. As they sailed to the south the sea grew worse and worse, but the captain was too drunk to take notice. The men of the crew were in great fear; they had no confidence in the mate, and the seas were like mountain ridges all about them. The morning came when Viritoa said to Maruae: 'Before nightfall this schooner will be at the bottom of the sea; let us make ready. Rub yourself well with coconut oil, and I will braid my hair and fasten it tightly about my head.' Toward midday they were standing together by the shrouds when Viritoa said, 'Quick, leap into the rigging!' That woman knew the ways of the sea; next moment a great wave broke over the schooner. The decks gave way, and most of the people—who were below—died the death of rats at once, but Viritoa and her husband leaped into the sea before the vessel went down.
316 "A day and a night they were swimming; there were times when Maruae would have lost courage if Viritoa had not cheered him. 'Put your hands on my shoulders,' she said, 'and rest; remember that I am a woman of the Low Islands—we are as much at home in the sea as on land.' All the while she was praying to the shark who was her god. The storm had abated soon after the schooner went down; next day the sea was blue and very calm. Presently, when the sun was high, Viritoa said to her husband, 'I think my god will soon come to us; put your head beneath the water and tell me what you see.' With a hand on her shoulder, he did as she had told him, gazing long into the depths below. Finally he raised his head, dripping, and when he had taken breath he spoke. 'I see nothing,' he said; 'naught but the miti hauriuri—the blue salt water.'  'Something is rising in the sea beneath us,' he said as his breath came fast—'a great shark large as a ship and bright red like the mountain plantain. My stomach is sick with fear.' 'Now I am content,' said the Paumotuan woman, 'for that great red shark is my god. Have no fear—either he will eat us and so end our misery, or he will carry us safely to shore. Next moment the shark rose beside them, like the hull of a ship floating bottom up; the fin on his back stood tall as a man. Then Viritoa and her husband swam to where he awaited them, and with the last of their strength they clambered up his rough side and seated themselves one on each side of the fin, to which they clung.
317 "For three days and three nights they sat on the back of the shark while he swam steadily to the northeast. They might have died of thirst, but when there were squalls of rain Viritoa unbound her hair and sucked the water from one long braid, while Maruae drank from the other. At last, in the first gray of dawn, they saw land—Mangaia, I think you call it. The shark took them close to the reef; they sprang into the sea and the little waves carried them ashore without a scratch. As they lay resting on the reef the shark swam to and fro, close in, as though awaiting some word from them. When she saw this, Viritoa stood up and cried out in a loud voice: 'We are content—we owe our lives to thee. Now go, and we shall stay here!' At those words the shark-god turned away and sank into the sea; to the day of her death Viritoa never saw him again. After that she and her husband walked to the village, where the people of Manitia made them welcome; and after a few years they got passage on a schooner back to Maruae's own land."
The soft voice of the girl died away—I heard only the murmur of the reef. Masses of cloud were gathering about the peaks; above our heads, the moon was sailing a clear sky, radiant and serene. The world was all silver and gray and black—the quiet lagoon, the shadowy land, the palms like inky lace against the moonlight. Tehinatu stifled a little yawn and stretched out on the mat with the abrupt and careless manner of a child. Her grandmother tossed away a burnt-down cigarette.
"It is late," said the woman of Maupiti, "and we must rise at daybreak. Now let us sleep."
ON the third day of the homeward voyage the wind died away, and in the middle of the afternoon it fell dead calm when we were less than a mile distant from the atoll of Pinaki.  It lies toward the eastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, and is one of four small atolls, all within a radius of thirty miles of one another. On charts of that segment of the eastern Pacific these four islands are barely discernible, and Pinaki, the least of them, appears but little larger than the dot of the "i" in Whitsunday, its English name.
The current carried us slowly along the northwesterly side of the island. It was intensely hot. Teriaa, nephew of Miti, the skipper, was sluicing the blistered deck, but the water steamed out of the scuppers, and in a moment the planking was as dry and as hot to the touch as before. He soon left off and took refuge in the whaleboat, which he covered with a piece of canvas. I crawled in with him, but the suffocating shade was less endurable than the full glare of the sun. 322 Tane, the other sailor, a man of fifty, was below. He had remained there most of the time since our departure from Rutiaro, sleeping on a greasy mat, indifferent to the cockroaches—the place was alive with them by night—or the copra bugs, which were a nuisance at all hours. The stench from the little cabin, filled almost to the ceiling with unsacked copra, was terrible; and it was not much better on deck. I took shelter beside Miti, who was sitting in the meager shade of the mainsail. Presently, pointing casually toward the shore, he said: "You see him? What he do there?"
I saw the man plainly enough, now that he was pointed out to me, standing with his arms folded, leaning lightly against a tree. I was limited to a hasty glance through my binoculars, for he was looking toward us; but I saw that he was unmistakably white, although his skin seemed as dark as that of a native. He was barefoot, naked to the waist, and for a nether garment wore a pair of trousers chopped off at the knee.
I, too, wondered what a white man could be doing on an uninhabited island. Miti knew no more of the atoll than that it was or had formerly been uninhabited. It belonged, he said, to the natives of Nukatavake, which lay nine miles to the northwest. We could see this other atoll as we rode to the light swell, a splotch of blue haze a nail's breadth wide, vanishing and reappearing against the clear line of the horizon. In two hours' time the current had carried us to the lee side of the island. It ran swiftly there, but in a more northerly direction, so that we were forced out of the main stream of it, and drifted gradually into quiet water near the shore. An anchor was carried to the 323 reef and we brought up to within thirty yards of it. With another anchor out forward, the schooner was safely berthed for the night.
I went ashore with the two sailors for a fresh supply of drinking coconuts, but I gave no help in collecting them. A fire was going on the lagoon beach, and there I found the solitary resident frying some fish before a small hut built in the native fashion. He might have been of any age between thirty-five and forty-five; was powerfully built, with a body as finely proportioned as a Polynesian's. His voice was pleasant and his manner cordial as he gave me welcome, but a pair of the coldest blue eyes I have ever seen made me doubt the sincerity of it. I felt the need of making apologies for the intrusion, adding, lamely, "I haven't seen a white man in three months, and our skipper speaks very little English."
"I was about to look you up," he said. "I can't say that I'm lonely here. I manage to get along without much companionship. But to be frank, I'm hungry for tobacco. There's none left at Nukatavake, and I've been sucking an empty pipe since last November. You haven't a fill in your pouch by any chance?"
I would have given something for his relish of the first pipeful, or the fifth, for that matter. Finally he said: "I imagine you are in for several days of Pinaki. You have noticed the sky? Not a sign of wind. I can't offer you much in the way of food; but the fishing is good, and if you care to you are welcome to stop ashore."
I accepted the invitation gladly; but as I walked back to the schooner for a few belongings and some more tobacco I questioned the propriety of my decision. 324 My prospective host was an Englishman by his accent, although, like my friend Crichton at Tanso, he was evidently long away from home. He struck me as being a good deal of the Crichton type, although he differed greatly from him outwardly. I remembered that Crichton, too, had been pleasant and friendly, once the ice was broken between us; but the prospect of an early parting and the certitude of our never meeting again had been the basis for the friendship in so far as he was concerned. This other Englishman was not living on an uninhabited atoll because of a liking for companionship. I was debating the matter of a return to shore when Tane crawled out of the cabin to make preparations for supper, and as he was a sufferer from elephantiasis, the sight of his immense swollen limbs and his greasy, sweating body decided me. Papeete was far distant, and I would have enough of Tane before we reached the end of the journey.
Supper was ready by the time I reached the hut. It consisted of fish deliciously broiled, coconuts, and hard biscuit. Over it I gave my host an account of my stay at Rutiaro and of the unsuccessful experiment in solitude.
"Yes," he said, "they are rather too sociable, these natives. The people of Nukatavake used to bother me a good deal when I first came here. I thought nine miles of open sea would keep them away; but they often came over in sailing canoes—a dozen or two at a time when the wind favored; and they would stay until it shifted back into the southeast. I didn't encourage them. In fact, I made it quite plain that I preferred to be alone. The island is theirs, of course, 325 and I can't prevent them from coming during the copra-making season; but they no longer come at other times. Nine months out of the year I have the place to myself. But they are damnably inquisitive. I don't like Kanakas in the aggregate, although I have one or two good friends among them."
The dying fire lit us to bed about midnight. I lay awake for a long time after my host was sleeping. We had talked for three hours, chiefly about the islands. In fact, all that he told me of himself was that he was fond of fishing.
There was not a hint of a breeze the next day, nor the next, nor the day after that. The sea was almost as calm as the lagoon, and the Potii Ravarava lay motionless at anchor as though frozen in a sheet of clear ice. Miti and the two sailors remained on board most of the time, sleeping during the heat of the day under a piece of canvas rigged over the main beam, and at night fishing over the side in dreamy contentment. If they came ashore at all it was only for a few moments, and they never crossed to the lagoon beach. During these three days I remained the Englishman's guest, and although I was out of patience with myself for my curiosity, it grew in spite of me. What under the sun was the man doing here? Evidently he had not come to an atoll, as my friend Crichton had, to do his writing and thinking undisturbed. Crichton had books, a practical interest in planting, and a cultural interest in Polynesian dialects. He would muse for hours over a word in one dialect which might or might not bear a remote resemblance to some other word in usage a thousand miles away. The study fascinated him. As he once told me, it gave his imagination 326 room to work in. I have no doubt that he made up for himself stories of the early Polynesian migrations vastly better than any romances he might have read. This other Englishman had no books; not so much as a scrap of writing paper. At least I saw none in his house, which was as bare as it was clean. There was a sleeping mat in one corner; a chest and some fishing gear against the wall; picks and shovels in a corner; a few old clothes hanging from nails driven into the supports, and absolutely nothing else. How did he put in his time? Fishing was a healthy interest, but it was not enough to keep a man sane for a period of seven years. He let that bit of information slip in one conversation I had with him.
He was not a taciturn chap. After our first evening he talked quite freely about his earlier adventures. He had spent three years in northern Australia, prospecting for gold, and he gave me an intensely interesting account of the aborigines there—of their marvelous skill at following a trail, no matter over what sort of country. I had heard that these people were biologically different from the rest of humankind and that their blood would not cross with white blood. This was not the case, he said. He had known white men animal enough to take the Australian blacks for wives, and had seen the children which they had by them. From Australia he had gone to New Guinea, still prospecting for gold, although at times he sought relief from the disappointment of it by making expeditions with the natives in search of bird-of-paradise feathers. But "gold" was the word that rang through all his talk. Several times it was on the tip of my tongue to say, "But there's no gold at Pinaki." I was able 327 to resist the temptation, remembering his remark about the damnable inquisitiveness of the people of Nukatavake. Then, on the morning of my third day on the island, an incident occurred which made the situation clear.
I rose at dawn, but my host was out before me. He had left two fish cleaned and ready for cooking on a plate outside the door. Having breakfasted, I started on a walk around the atoll, which I estimated I could accomplish in about an hour. I expected to meet the Englishman somewhere on the way, and I did find him on the opposite side of the lagoon. The shore was steep-to there. He had a steel-tipped rod in his hand and was diving off a ledge of rock, remaining below for as long as a full minute. He waved when he saw me, but kept on with his work. In about a quarter of an hour he came over to where I was standing.
"Tiresome work," he said. "I need a blow." Then, "You see, I've been doing a bit of digging here."
I had walked along the lagoon beach and had not noticed before the series of trenches higher up the land. I should think he had been digging! I inspected the ditches under his guidance. There were three at least a quarter of a mile in length each and from three to four feet deep. These ran in parallel lines and were about four paces apart. Fifteen to twenty shorter trenches cut through them at right angles.
329 The sun was well above the horizon. We lit our pipes and sat down in the shade. After a few moments of silence he said: "I suppose you know what I'm doing here? If you have been in Papeete you must have heard. There is no secret about it—at least not any longer."
I said that I had left Papeete shortly after my arrival. I had spent several idle afternoons on the veranda of the Bougainville Club, but in the talk which went around there I didn't remember having heard of Pinaki.