Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa—Tahuku,
say the slovenly whites—may be called the port of Atuona. It is a narrow
and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points, and opening above
upon a woody valley: a little French fort, now disused and deserted,
overhangs the valley and the inlet. Atuona itself, at the head of the
next bay, is framed in a theatre of mountains, which dominate the more
immediate settling of Taahauku and give the salient character of the
scene. They are reckoned at no higher than four thousand feet; but
Tahiti with eight thousand, and Hawaii with fifteen, can offer no such
picture of abrupt, melancholy alps. In the morning, when the sun falls
directly on their front, they stand like a vast wall: green to the
summit, if by any chance the summit should be clear—water-courses here
and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards
afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range
comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous
buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike
the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.
The mountains, dividing and deflecting the endless airy deluge of the
Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate. A strong draught of
wind blew day and night over the anchorage. Day and night the same
fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the heavens, the same dusky
cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the mountain. The land-breezes
came very strong and chill, and the sea, like the air, was in perpetual
bustle. The swell crowded into the narrow anchorage like sheep into a
fold; broke all along both sides, high on the one, low on the other; kept
a certain blowhole sounding and smoking like a cannon; and spent itself
at last upon the beach.
On the side away from Atuona, the sheltering promontory was a nursery of
coco-trees. Some were mere infants, none had attained to any size, none
had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-like shaft of the mature
palm. In the young trees the colour alters with the age and growth. Now
all is of a grass-like hue, infinitely dainty; next the rib grows golden,
the fronds remaining green as ferns; and then, as the trunk continues to
mount and to assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on manlier and
more decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the distance, glisten
against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the assault of the
wind. In this young wood of Taahauku, all these hues and combinations
were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly
spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for
drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there
the stroller had a glimpse of the _Casco_ tossing in the narrow anchorage
below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the
Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. The
trade-wind moving in the fans made a ceaseless noise of summer rain; and
from time to time, with the sound of a sudden and distant drum-beat, the
surf would burst in a sea-cave.
At the upper end of the inlet, its low, cliffy lining sinks, at both
sides, into a beach. A copra warehouse stands in the shadow of the
shoreside trees, flitted about for ever by a clan of dwarfish swallows;
and a line of rails on a high wooden staging bends back into the mouth of
the valley. Walking on this, the new-landed traveller becomes aware of a
broad fresh-water lagoon (one arm of which he crosses), and beyond, of a
grove of noble palms, sheltering the house of the trader, Mr. Keane.
Overhead, the cocos join in a continuous and lofty roof; blackbirds are
heard lustily singing; the island cock springs his jubilant rattle and
airs his golden plumage; cow-bells sound far and near in the grove; and
when you sit in the broad verandah, lulled by this symphony, you may say
to yourself, if you are able: ‘Better fifty years of Europe . . .’
Farther on, the floor of the valley is flat and green, and dotted here
and there with stripling coco-palms. Through the midst, with many
changes of music, the river trots and brawls; and along its course, where
we should look for willows, puraos grow in clusters, and make shadowy
pools after an angler’s heart. A vale more rich and peaceful, sweeter
air, a sweeter voice of rural sounds, I have found nowhere. One
circumstance alone might strike the experienced: here is a convenient
beach, deep soil, good water, and yet nowhere any paepaes, nowhere any
trace of island habitation.
It is but a few years since this valley was a place choked with jungle,
the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals. Two clans laid claim
to it—neither could substantiate the claim, and the roads lay desert, or
were only visited by men in arms. It is for this very reason that it
wears now so smiling an appearance: cleared, planted, built upon,
supplied with railways, boat-houses, and bath-houses. For, being no
man’s land, it was the more readily ceded to a stranger. The stranger
was Captain John Hart: Ima Hati, ‘Broken-arm,’ the natives call him,
because when he first visited the islands his arm was in a sling.
Captain Hart, a man of English birth, but an American subject, had
conceived the idea of cotton culture in the Marquesas during the American
War, and was at first rewarded with success. His plantation at Anaho was
highly productive; island cotton fetched a high price, and the natives
used to debate which was the stronger power, Ima Hati or the French:
deciding in favour of the captain, because, though the French had the
most ships, he had the more money.
He marked Taahauku for a suitable site, acquired it, and offered the
superintendence to Mr. Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already some time
in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on Tauata. Mr. Stewart
was somewhat averse to the adventure, having some acquaintance with
Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu. He had once landed there, he
told me, about dusk, and found the remains of a man and woman partly
eaten. On his starting and sickening at the sight, one of Moipu’s young
men picked up a human foot, and provocatively staring at the stranger,
grinned and nibbled at the heel. None need be surprised if Mr. Stewart
fled incontinently to the bush, lay there all night in a great horror of
mind, and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow. ‘It was always
a bad place, Atuona,’ commented Mr. Stewart, in his homely Fifeshire
voice. In spite of this dire introduction, he accepted the captain’s
offer, was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen, and proceeded to clear
the jungle.
War was pursued at that time, almost without interval, between the men of
Atuona and the men of Haamau; and one day, from the opposite sides of the
valley, battle—or I should rather say the noise of battle—raged all the
afternoon: the shots and insults of the opposing clans passing from hill
to hill over the heads of Mr. Stewart and his Chinamen. There was no
genuine fighting; it was like a bicker of schoolboys, only some fool had
given the children guns. One man died of his exertions in running, the
only casualty. With night the shots and insults ceased; the men of
Haamau withdrew; and victory, on some occult principle, was scored to
Moipu. Perhaps, in consequence, there came a day when Moipu made a
feast, and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of it.
These passed early by Taahauku, and some of Moipu’s young men were there
to be a guard of honour. They were not long gone before there came down
from Haamau, a man, his wife, and a girl of twelve, their daughter,
bringing fungus. Several Atuona lads were hanging round the store; but
the day being one of truce none apprehended danger. The fungus was
weighed and paid for; the man of Haamau proposed he should have his axe
ground in the bargain; and Mr. Stewart demurring at the trouble, some of
the Atuona lads offered to grind it for him, and set it on the wheel.
While the axe was grinding, a friendly native whispered Mr. Stewart to
have a care of himself, for there was trouble in hand; and, all at once,
the man of Haamau was seized, and his head and arm stricken from his
body, the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe. In the first
alert, the girl escaped among the cotton; and Mr. Stewart, having thrust
the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside, supposed the
affair was over. But the business had not passed without noise, and it
reached the ears of an older girl who had loitered by the way, and who
now came hastily down the valley, crying as she came for her father.
Her, too, they seized and beheaded; I know not what they had done with
the axe, it was a blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the
girl; and the blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to
foot. Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying
the heads to Moipu. It may be fancied how the feast broke up; but it is
notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire. These passed
back through Taahauku in extreme disorder; a little after the valley
began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing braves; and a letter of
warning coming at the same time to Mr. Stewart, he and his Chinamen took
refuge with the Protestant missionary in Atuona. That night the store
was gutted, and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves. Three
days later the schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr.
Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to
view the grave, which was already indicated by the stench. While they
were so employed, a party of Moipu’s young men, decked with red flannel
to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from Atuona, dug up
the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried them away on sticks.
That night the feast began.
Those who knew Mr. Stewart before this experience declare the man to be
quite altered. He stuck, however, to his post; and somewhat later, when
the plantation was already well established, and gave employment to sixty
Chinamen and seventy natives, he found himself once more in dangerous
times. The men of Haamau, it was reported, had sworn to plunder and
erase the settlement; letters came continually from the Hawaiian
missionary, who acted as intelligence department; and for six weeks Mr.
Stewart and three other whites slept in the cotton-house at night in a
rampart of bales, and (what was their best defence) ostentatiously
practised rifle-shooting by day upon the beach. Natives were often there
to watch them; the practice was excellent; and the assault was never
delivered—if it ever was intended, which I doubt, for the natives are
more famous for false rumours than for deeds of energy. I was told the
late French war was a case in point; the tribes on the beach accusing
those in the mountains of designs which they had never the hardihood to
entertain. And the same testimony to their backwardness in open battle
reached me from all sides. Captain Hart once landed after an engagement
in a certain bay; one man had his hand hurt, an old woman and two
children had been slain; and the captain improved the occasion by
poulticing the hand, and taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair.
It is true these wars were often merely formal—comparable with duels to
the first blood. Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being
carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought wanting in
civility to the guests of the other. About one-half of the population
served day about on alternate sides, so as to be well with each when the
inevitable peace should follow. The forts of the belligerents were over
against each other, and close by. Pigs were cooking. Well-oiled braves,
with well-oiled muskets, strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast. No
business, however needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed
to be centred in this mockery of war. A few days later, by a regrettable
accident, a man was killed; it was felt at once the thing had gone too
far, and the quarrel was instantly patched up. But the more serious wars
were prosecuted in a similar spirit; a gift of pigs and a feast made
their inevitable end; the killing of a single man was a great victory,
and the murder of defenceless solitaries counted a heroic deed.
The foot of the cliffs, about all these islands, is the place of fishing.
Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly women, some nearly
naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses, perched in little surf-beat
promontories—the brown precipice overhanging them, and the convolvulus
overhanging that, as if to cut them off the more completely from
assistance. There they would angle much of the morning; and as fast as
they caught any fish, eat them, raw and living, where they stood. It was
such helpless ones that the warriors from the opposite island of Tauata
slew, and carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted mighty men
of valour. Of one such exploit I can give the account of an eye-witness.
‘Portuguese Joe,’ Mr. Keane’s cook, was once pulling an oar in an Atuona
boat, when they spied a stranger in a canoe with some fish and a piece of
tapu. The Atuona men cried upon him to draw near and have a smoke. He
complied, because, I suppose, he had no choice; but he knew, poor devil,
what he was coming to, and (as Joe said) ‘he didn’t seem to care about
the smoke.’ A few questions followed, as to where he came from, and what
was his business. These he must needs answer, as he must needs draw at
the unwelcome pipe, his heart the while drying in his bosom. And then,
of a sudden, a big fellow in Joe’s boat leaned over, plucked the stranger
from his canoe, struck him with a knife in the neck—inward and downward,
as Joe showed in pantomime more expressive than his words—and held him
under water, like a fowl, until his struggles ceased. Whereupon the
long-pig was hauled on board, the boat’s head turned about for Atuona,
and these Marquesan braves pulled home rejoicing. Moipu was on the beach
and rejoiced with them on their arrival. Poor Joe toiled at his oar that
day with a white face, yet he had no fear for himself. ‘They were very
good to me—gave me plenty grub: never wished to eat white man,’ said he.
If the most horrible experience was Mr. Stewart’s, it was Captain Hart
himself who ran the nearest danger. He had bought a piece of land from
Timau, chief of a neighbouring bay, and put some Chinese there to work.
Visiting the station with one of the Godeffroys, he found his Chinamen
trooping to the beach in terror: Timau had driven them out, seized their
effects, and was in war attire with his young men. A boat was despatched
to Taahauku for reinforcement; as they awaited her return, they could
see, from the deck of the schooner, Timau and his young men dancing the
war-dance on the hill-top till past twelve at night; and so soon as the
boat came (bringing three gendarmes, armed with chassepots, two white men
from Taahauku station, and some native warriors) the party set out to
seize the chief before he should awake. Day was not come, and it was a
very bright moonlight morning, when they reached the hill-top where (in a
house of palm-leaves) Timau was sleeping off his debauch. The assailants
were fully exposed, the interior of the hut quite dark; the position far
from sound. The gendarmes knelt with their pieces ready, and Captain
Hart advanced alone. As he drew near the door he heard the snap of a gun
cocking from within, and in sheer self-defence—there being no other
escape—sprang into the house and grappled Timau. ‘Timau, come with me!’
he cried. But Timau—a great fellow, his eyes blood-red with the abuse of
kava, six foot three in stature—cast him on one side; and the captain,
instantly expecting to be either shot or brained, discharged his pistol
in the dark. When they carried Timau out at the door into the moonlight,
he was already dead, and, upon this unlooked-for termination of their
sally, the whites appeared to have lost all conduct, and retreated to the
boats, fired upon by the natives as they went. Captain Hart, who almost
rivals Bishop Dordillon in popularity, shared with him the policy of
extreme indulgence to the natives, regarding them as children, making
light of their defects, and constantly in favour of mild measures. The
death of Timau has thus somewhat weighed upon his mind; the more so, as
the chieftain’s musket was found in the house unloaded. To a less
delicate conscience the matter will seem light. If a drunken savage
elects to cock a fire-arm, a gentleman advancing towards him in the open
cannot wait to make sure if it be charged.
I have touched on the captain’s popularity. It is one of the things that
most strikes a stranger in the Marquesas. He comes instantly on two
names, both new to him, both locally famous, both mentioned by all with
affection and respect—the bishop’s and the captain’s. It gave me a
strong desire to meet with the survivor, which was subsequently
gratified—to the enrichment of these pages. Long after that again, in
the Place Dolorous—Molokai—I came once more on the traces of that
affectionate popularity. There was a blind white leper there, an old
sailor—‘an old tough,’ he called himself—who had long sailed among the
eastern islands. Him I used to visit, and, being fresh from the scenes
of his activity, gave him the news. This (in the true island style) was
largely a chronicle of wrecks; and it chanced I mentioned the case of one
not very successful captain, and how he had lost a vessel for Mr. Hart;
thereupon the blind leper broke forth in lamentation. ‘Did he lose a
ship of John Hart’s?’ he cried; ‘poor John Hart! Well, I’m sorry it was
Hart’s,’ with needless force of epithet, which I neglect to reproduce.
Perhaps, if Captain Hart’s affairs had continued to prosper, his
popularity might have been different. Success wins glory, but it kills
affection, which misfortune fosters. And the misfortune which overtook
the captain’s enterprise was truly singular. He was at the top of his
career. Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the French as an indemnity
for the robberies at Taahauku. But the Ile Masse was only suitable for
cattle; and his two chief stations were Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the
north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva-oa, some hundred miles to the southward,
and facing the south-west. Both these were on the same day swept by a
tidal wave, which was not felt in any other bay or island of the group.
The south coast of Hiva-oa was bestrewn with building timber and
camphor-wood chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a
reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests
apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into
their houses. But the recovery of such jetsam could not affect the
result. It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality
of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended.
Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new
plantation arisen in their stead.