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WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS
by
FREDERICK O'BRIEN
With Many Illustrations from Photographs
T. Werner Laurie, Ltd.
1919
[Illustration: Village of Atuona, showing peak of Temetiu
The author's house is the small white speck in the center]
FOREWORD
There is in the nature of every man, I firmly believe, a longing to
see and know the strange places of the world. Life imprisons us all
in its coil of circumstance, and the dreams of romance that color
boyhood are forgotten, but they do not die. They stir at the sight
of a white-sailed ship beating out to the wide sea; the smell of
tarred rope on a blackened wharf, or the touch of the cool little
breeze that rises when the stars come out will waken them again.
Somewhere over the rim of the world lies romance, and every heart
yearns to go and find it.
It is not given to every man to start on the quest of the rainbow's
end. Such fantastic pursuit is not for him who is bound by ties of
home and duty and fortune-to-make. He has other adventure at his own
door, sterner fights to wage, and, perhaps, higher rewards to gain.
Still, the ledgers close sometimes on a sigh, and by the cosiest
fireside one will see in the coals pictures that have nothing to do
with wedding rings or balances at the bank.
It is for those who stay at home yet dream of foreign places that I
have written this book, a record of one happy year spent among the
simple, friendly cannibals of Atuona valley, on the island of
Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. In its pages there is little of profound
research, nothing, I fear, to startle the anthropologist or to
revise encyclopedias; such expectation was far from my thoughts when
I sailed from Papeite on the _Morning Star_. I went to see what I
should see, and to learn whatever should be taught me by the days as
they came. What I saw and what I learned the reader will see and
learn, and no more.
Days, like people, give more when they are approached in not too
stern a spirit. So I traveled lightly, without the heavy baggage of
the ponderous-minded scholar, and the reader who embarks with me on
the "long cruise" need bring with him only an open mind and a love
for the strange and picturesque. He will come back, I hope, as I did,
with some glimpses into the primitive customs of the long-forgotten
ancestors of the white race, a deeper wonder at the mysteries of the
world, and a memory of sun-steeped days on white beaches, of palms
and orchids and the childlike savage peoples who live in the
bread-fruit groves of "Bloody Hiva-oa."
The author desires to express here his thanks to Rose Wilder Lane,
to whose editorial assistance the publication of this book is very
largely due.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Farewell to Papeite beach; at sea in the _Morning Star_; Darwin's
theory of the continent that sank beneath the waters of the South
Seas
CHAPTER II
The trade-room of the _Morning Star_; Lying Bill Pincher;
M. L'Hermier des Plantes, future governor of the Marquesas;
story of McHenry and the little native boy, His Dog
CHAPTER III
Thirty-seven days at sea; life of the sea-birds; strange
phosphorescence; first sight of Fatu-hiva; history of the islands;
chant of the Raiateans
CHAPTER IV
Anchorage of Taha-Uka; Exploding Eggs, and his engagement as valet;
inauguration of the new governor; dance on the palace lawn
CHAPTER V
First night in Atuona valley; sensational arrival of the Golden Bed;
Titihuti's tattooed legs
CHAPTER VI
Visit of Chief Seventh Man Who is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire;
journey to Vait-hua on Tahuata island; fight with the devil-fish;
story of a cannibal feast and the two who escaped
CHAPTER VII
Idyllic valley of Vait-hua; the beauty of Vanquished Often; bathing
on the beach; an unexpected proposal of marriage
CHAPTER VIII
Communal life; sport in the waves; fight of the sharks and the
mother whale; a day in the mountains; death of Le Capitaine Halley;
return to Atuona
CHAPTER IX
The Marquesans at ten o'clock mass; a remarkable conversation about
religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his idea of the
devil
CHAPTER X
The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple
natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani
CHAPTER XI
Filling the _popoi_ pits in the season of the breadfruit; legend of
the _mei_; the secret festival in a hidden valley
CHAPTER XII
A walk in the jungle; the old woman in the breadfruit tree; a night
in a native hut on the mountain
CHAPTER XIII
The household of Lam Kai Oo; copra making; marvels of the
cocoanut-groves; the sagacity of pigs; and a crab that knows the
laws of gravitation
CHAPTER XIV
Visit of Le Moine; the story of Paul Gauguin; his house, and a
search for his grave beneath the white cross of Calvary
CHAPTER XV
Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the
death of a race
CHAPTER XVI
A savage dance, a drama of the sea, of danger and feasting; the rape
of the lettuce
CHAPTER XVII
A walk to the Forbidden Place; Hot Tears, the hunchback; the story
of Behold the Servant of the Priest, told by Malicious Gossip in the
cave of Enamoa
CHAPTER XVIII
A search for rubber-trees on the plateau of Ahoa; a fight with the
wild white dogs; story of an ancient migration, told by the wild
cattle hunters in the Cave of the Spine of the Chinaman
CHAPTER XIX
A feast to the men of Motopu; the making of _kava_, and its drinking;
the story of the Girl Who Lost Her Strength
CHAPTER XX
A journey to Taaoa; Kahuiti, the cannibal chief, and his story of an
old war caused by an unfaithful woman
CHAPTER XXI
The crime of Huahine for love of Weaver of Mats; story of Tahia's
white man who was eaten; the disaster that befell Honi, the white
man who used his harpoon against his friends
CHAPTER XXII
The memorable game for the matches in the cocoanut-grove of Lam Kai
Oo
CHAPTER XXIII
Mademoiselle N----
CHAPTER XXIV
A journey to Nuka-hiva; story of the celebration of the fête of Joan
of Arc, and the miracles of the white horse and the girl
CHAPTER XXV
America's claim to the Marquesas; adventures of Captain Porter in
1812; war between Haapa and Tai-o-hae, and the conquest of Typee
valley
CHAPTER XXVI
A visit to Typee; story of the old man who returned too late
CHAPTER XXVII
Journey on the _Roberta_; the winged cockroaches; arrival at a Swiss
paradise in the valley of Oomoa
CHAPTER XXVIII
Labor in the South Seas; some random thoughts on the "survival of
the fittest"
CHAPTER XXIX
The white man who danced in Oomoa valley; a wild-boar hunt in the
hills; the feast of the triumphant hunters and a dance in honor of
Grelet
CHAPTER XXX
A visit to Hanavave; Père Olivier at home; the story of the last
battle between Hanahouua and Oi, told by the sole survivor; the
making of _tapa_ cloth, and the ancient garments of the Marquesans
CHAPTER XXXI
Fishing in Hanavave; a deep-sea battle with a shark; Red Chicken
shows how to tie ropes to sharks' tails; night-fishing for dolphins,
and the monster sword-fish that overturned the canoe; the native
doctor dresses Red Chicken's wounds and discourses on medicine
CHAPTER XXXII
A journey over the roof of the world to Oomoa; an encounter with a
wild woman of the hills
CHAPTER XXXIII
Return in a canoe to Atuona; Tetuahunahuna relates the story of the
girl who rode the white horse in the celebration of the fête of Joan
of Arc in Tai-o-hae; Proof that sharks hate women; steering by the
stars to Atuona beach
CHAPTER XXXIV
Sea sports; curious sea-foods found at low tide; the peculiarities
of sea-centipedes and how to cook and eat them
CHAPTER XXXV
Court day in Atuona; the case of Daughter of the Pigeon and the
sewing-machine; the story of the perfidy of Drink of Beer and the
death of Earth Worm who tried to kill the governor
CHAPTER XXXVI
The madman Great Moth of the Night; story of the famine and the one
family that ate pig
CHAPTER XXXVII
A visit to the hermit of Taha-Uka valley; the vengeance that made
the Scallamera lepers; and the hatred of Mohuto
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son
CHAPTER XXXIX
The chants of departure; night falls on the Land of the War Fleet
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Village of Atuona, showing peak of Temetiu
Beach at Viataphiha-Tahiti
Where the belles of Tahiti lived in the shade to whiten their
complexions
Lieutenant L'Hermier des Plantes, Governor of the Marquesas Islands
Entrance to a Marquesan Bay
The ironbound coast of the Marquesas
A road in Nuka-Hiva
Harbor of Tai-o-hae
Schooner _Fetia Taiao_ in the Bay of Traitors
André Bauda, Commissaire
The public dance in the garden
Antoinette, a Marquesan dancing girl
Marquesans in Sunday clothes
Vai Etienne
The pool by the Queen's house
Idling away the sunny hours
Nothing to do but rest all day
Catholic Church at Atuona
A native spearing fish from a rock
A volunteer cocoanut grove, with trees of all ages
Climbing for cocoanuts
Splitting cocoanut husks in copra making process
Cutting the meat from cocoanuts to make copra
A Marquesan home on a _paepae_
Isle of Barking Dogs
The _haka_, the Marquesan national dance
Hot Tears with Vai Etienne
The old cannibal of Taipi Valley
Enacting a human sacrifice of the Marquesans
Interior of Island of Fatu-hiva, where the author walked over the
mountains
The plateau of Ahoa
Kivi, the _kava_ drinker with the _hetairae_ of the valley
A pool in the jungle
The Pekia, or Place of Sacrifice, at Atuona
Marquesan cannibals, wearing dress of human hair
Tepu, a Marquesan girl of the hills, and her sister
A tattooed Marquesan with carved canoe paddle
A chieftess in _tapa_ garments with _tapa_ parasol
Launching the whale-boat
Père Simeon Delmas' church at Tai-o-hae
Gathering the _feis_ in the mountains
Near the Mission at Hanavave
Starting from Hanavave for Oomoa
Feis, or mountain bananas
Where river and bay meet at Oomoa, Island of Fatu-hiva
Sacred banyan tree at Oomoa
Elephantiasis of the legs
Removing the pig cooked in the _umu_, or native oven
The _Koina Kai_, or feast in Oomoa
Beach at Oomoa
Putting the canoe in the water
Pascual, the giant Paumotan pilot and his friends
A pearl diver's sweetheart
Spearing fish in Marquesas Islands
Pearl shell divers at work
Catholic Church at Hanavave
A canoe in the surf at Oomoa
The gates of the Valley of Hanavave
A fisherman's house of bamboo and cocoanut leaves
Double canoes
Harbor sports
Tahaiupehe, Daughter of the Pigeon, of Taaoa
Nataro Puelleray and wife
Author's Note. Foreign words in a book are like rocks in a path. There
are two ways of meeting the difficulty; the reader may leap over them,
or use them as stepping stones. I have written this book so that they
may easily be leaped over by the hasty, but he will lose much enjoyment
by doing so; I would urge him to pronounce them as he goes. Marquesan
words have a flavor all their own; much of the simple poetry of the
islands is in them. The rules for pronouncing them are simple;
consonants have the sounds usual in English, vowels have the Latin
value, that is, a is ah, e is ay, i is ee, o is oh, and u is oo.
Every letter is pronounced, and there are no accents. The Marquesans
had no written language, and their spoken tongue was reproduced as
simply as possible by the missionaries.
WHITE SHADOWS IN THE SOUTH SEAS
CHAPTER I
Farewell to Papeite beach; at sea in the _Morning Star_; Darwin's
theory of the continent that sank beneath the waters of the South
Seas.
By the white coral wall of Papeite beach the schooner _Fetia
Taiao_ (_Morning Star_) lay ready to put to sea. Beneath the
skyward-sweeping green heights of Tahiti the narrow shore was a mass
of colored gowns, dark faces, slender waving arms. All Papeite,
flower-crowned and weeping, was gathered beside the blue lagoon.
Lamentation and wailing followed the brown sailors as they came over
the side and slowly began to cast the moorings that held the _Morning
Star_. Few are the ships that sail many seasons among the Dangerous
Islands. They lay their bones on rock or reef or sink in the deep,
and the lovers, sons and husbands of the women who weep on the beach
return no more to the huts in the cocoanut groves. So, at each sailing
on the "long course" the anguish is keen.
"_Ia ora na i te Atua!_ Farewell and God keep you!" the women cried
as they stood beside the half-buried cannon that serve to make fast
the ships by the coral bank. From the deck of the nearby _Hinano_
came the music of an accordeon and a chorus of familiar words:
"I teie nie mahana
Ne tere no oe e Hati
Na te Moana!"
"Let us sing and make merry,
For we journey over the sea!"
It was the _Himene Tatou Arearea_. Kelly, the wandering I.W.W.,
self-acclaimed delegate of the mythical Union of Beach-combers and
Stowaways, was at the valves of the accordeon, and about him
squatted a ring of joyous natives. "_Wela ka hao!_ Hot stuff!" they
shouted.
Suddenly Caroline of the Marquesas and Mamoe of Moorea, most
beautiful dancers of the quays, flung themselves into the _upaupahura_,
the singing dance of love. Kelly began "Tome! Tome!" a Hawaiian hula.
Men unloading cargo on the many schooners dropped their burdens and
began to dance. Rude squareheads of the fo'c'sles beat time with
pannikins. Clerks in the traders' stores and even Marechel, the
barber, were swept from counters and chairs by the sensuous melody,
and bareheaded in the white sun they danced beneath the crowded
balconies of the Cercle Bougainville, the club by the lagoon. The
harbor of Papeite knew ten minutes of unrestrained merriment, tears
forgotten, while from the warehouse of the navy to the Poodle Stew
café the hula reigned.
[Illustration: Beach at Viataphiha-Tahiti]
[Illustration: Where the belles of Tahiti lived in the shade to
whiten their complexions.]
Under the gorgeous flamboyant trees that paved their shade with
red-gold blossoms a group of white men sang:
"Well, ah fare you well, we can stay no more with you, my love,
Down, set down your liquor and the girl from off your knee,
For the wind has come to say
'You must take me while you may,
If you'd go to Mother Carey!'
(Walk her down to Mother Carey!)
Oh, we're bound for Mother Carey where she feeds her chicks at sea!"
The anchor was up, the lines let go, and suddenly from the sea came
a wind with rain.
The girls from the Cocoanut House, a flutter of brilliant scarlet
and pink gowns, fled for shelter, tossing blossoms of the sweet
tiati Tahiti toward their sailor lovers as they ran. Marao, the
haughty queen, drove rapidly away in her old chaise, the Princess
Boots leaning out to wave a slender hand. Prince Hinoi, the fat
spendthrift who might have been a king, leaned from the balcony of
the club, glass in hand, and shouted, "_Aroha i te revaraa!_" across
the deserted beach.
So we left Papeite, the gay Tahitian capital, while a slashing
downpour drowned the gay flamboyant blossoms, our masts and rigging
creaking in the gale, and sea breaking white on the coral reef.
Like the weeping women, who doubtless had already dried their tears,
the sky began to smile before we reached the treacherous pass in the
outer reef. Beyond Moto Utu, the tiny islet in the harbor that had
been harem and fort in kingly days, we saw the surf foaming on the
coral, and soon were through the narrow channel.
We had lifted no canvas in the lagoon, using only our engine to
escape the coral traps. Past the ever-present danger, with the wind
now half a gale and the rain falling again in sheets--the
intermittent deluge of the season--the _Morning Star_, under reefed
foresail, mainsail and staysail, pointed her delicate nose toward the
Dangerous Islands and hit hard the open sea.
She rode the endlessly-tossing waves like a sea-gull, carrying her
head with a care-free air and dipping to the waves in jaunty fashion.
Her lines were very fine, tapering and beautiful, even to the eye of
a land-lubber.
A hundred and six feet from stem to stern, twenty-three feet of beam
and ten feet of depth, she was loaded to water's edge with cargo for
the islands to which we were bound. Lumber lay in the narrow lanes
between cabin-house and rails; even the lifeboats were piled with
cargo. Those who reckon dangers do not laugh much in these seas.
There was barely room to move about on the deck of the _Morning Star_;
merely a few steps were possible abaft the wheel amid the play of
main-sheet boom and traveler. Here, while my three fellow-passengers
went below, I stood gazing at the rain-whipped illimitable waters
ahead.
Where is the boy who has not dreamed of the cannibal isles, those
strange, fantastic places over the rim of the world, where naked
brown men move like shadows through unimagined jungles, and horrid
feasts are celebrated to the "boom, boom, boom!" of the twelve-foot
drums?
Years bring knowledge, paid for with the dreams of youth. The wide,
vague world becomes familiar, becomes even common-place. London,
Paris, Venice, many-colored Cairo, the desecrated crypts of the
pyramids, the crumbling villages of Palestine, no longer glimmer
before me in the iridescent glamor of fancy, for I have seen them.
But something of the boyish thrill that filled me when I pored over
the pages of Melville long ago returned while I stood on the deck of
the _Morning Star_, plunging through the surging Pacific in the
driving tropic rain.
Many leagues before us lay Les Isles Dangereux, the Low Archipelago,
first stopping-point on our journey to the far cannibal islands yet
another thousand miles away across the empty seas. Before we saw the
green banners of Tahiti's cocoanut palms again we would travel not
only forward over leagues of tossing water but backward across
centuries of time. For in those islands isolated from the world for
eons there remains a living fragment of the childhood of our
Caucasian race.
Darwin's theory is that these islands are the tops of a submerged
continent, or land bridge, which stretches its crippled body along
the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues. A lost land,
whose epic awaits the singer; a mystery perhaps forever to be
unsolved. There are great monuments, graven objects, hieroglyphics,
customs and languages, island peoples with suggestive legends--all,
perhaps, remnants of a migration from Asia or Africa a hundred
thousand years ago.
Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured the Caucasian people, the
dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the continent fell from
the sight of sun and stars save in those spots now the mountainous
islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas, the survivors were isolated
for untold centuries.
Here in these islands the brothers of our long-forgotten ancestors
have lived and bred since the Stone Age, cut off from the main
stream of mankind's development. Here they have kept the childhood
customs of our white race, savage and wild, amid their primitive and
savage life. Here, three centuries ago, they were discovered by the
peoples of the great world, and, rudely encountering a civilization
they did not build, they are dying here. With their passing vanishes
the last living link with our own pre-historic past. And I was to see
it, before it disappears forever.