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.
Thirty-seven days at sea brought us to the eve of our landing in
Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. Thirty-seven monotonous days, varied only
by rain-squalls and sun, by calm or threatening seas, by the
changing sky. Rarely a passing schooner lifted its sail above the
far circle of the horizon. It was as though we journeyed through
space to another world.
Yet all around us there was life--life in a thousand varying forms,
filling the sea and the air. On calm mornings the swelling waves
were splashed by myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground
of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed
ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human
creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. Surrounded by a
universe filled with pulsing, sentient life clothed in such
multitudinous forms, man learns humility. He shrinks to a speck on
an illimitable ocean.
I spent long afternoons lying on the cabin-house, watching the
frigates, the tropics, gulls, boobys, and other sea-birds that
sported through the sky in great numbers. The frigate-birds were
called by the sailors the man-of-war bird, and also the sea-hawk.
They are marvelous flyers, owing to the size of the pectoral muscles,
which compared with those of other birds are extraordinarily large.
They cannot rest on the water, but must sustain their flights from
land to land, yet here they were in mid-ocean.
[Illustration: The ironbound coast of the Marquesas]
[Illustration: A road in Nuka-Hiva]
My eyes would follow one higher and higher till he became a mere dot
in the blue, though but a few minutes earlier he had risen from his
pursuit of fish in the water. He spread his wings fully and did not
move them as he climbed from air-level to air-level, but his long
forked tail expanded and closed continuously.
Sighting a school of flying-fish, which had been driven to frantic
leaps from the sea by pursuing bonito, he begins to descend. First
his coming down is like that of an aeroplane, in spirals, but a
thousand feet from his prey he volplanes; he falls like a rocket,
and seizing a fish in the air, he wings his way again to the clouds.
If he cannot find flying-fish, he stops gannets and terns in mid-air
and makes them disgorge their catch, which he seizes as it falls.
Refusal to give up the food is punished by blows on the head, but
the gannets and terns so fear the frigate that they seldom have the
courage to disobey. I think a better name for the frigate would be
pirate, for he is a veritable pirate of the air. Yet no law
restrains him.
I observed that the male frigate has a red pouch under the throat
which he puffs up with air when he flies far. It must have some
other purpose, for the female lacks it, and she needs wind-power
more than the male. It is she who seeks the food when, having laid
her one egg on the sand, she goes abroad, leaving her husband to
keep the egg warm.
The tropic-bird, often called the boatswain, or phaëton, also climbs
to great heights, and is seldom found out of these latitudes. He is
a beautiful bird, white, or rose-colored with long carmine
tail-feathers. In the sun these roseate birds are brilliant objects
as they fly jerkily against the bright blue sky, or skim over the sea,
rising and falling in their search for fish. I have seen them many
times with the frigates, with whom they are great friends. It would
appear that there is a bond between them; I have never seen the
frigate rob his beautiful companion.
In such idle observations and the vague wonders that arose from them,
the days passed. An interminable game of cards progressed in the
cabin, in which I occasionally took a hand. Gedge and Lying Bill
exchanged reminiscences. McHenry drank steadily. The future governor
of the Marquesas added a _galon_ to his sleeves, marking his advance
to a first lieutenancy in the French colonial army. He was a very
soft, sleek man, a little worn already, his black hair a trifle thin,
but he was plump, his skin white as milk, and his jetty beard and
mustache elaborately cared for. He was much before the mirror,
combing and brushing and plucking. Compared to us unkempt wretches,
he was as a dandy to a tramp.
The ice, which was packed in boxes of sawdust on deck, afforded one
cold drink in which to toast the gallant future governor, and that
was the last of it. At night the Tahitian sailors helped themselves,
and we bade farewell to ice until once more we saw Papeite.
It was no refreshment to reflect that had we dredging apparatus long
enough we could procure from the sea-bottom buckets of ooze that
would have cooled our drinks almost to the freezing point.
Scientists have done this. Lying Bill was loth to believe the story
and the explanation, that an icy stream flows from the Antarctic
through a deep valley in the sea-depths.
"It's contrar-iry to nature," he affirmed. "The depper you go the
'otter it is. In mines the 'eat is worse the farther down. And 'ow
about 'ell?"
I slept on the deck. It was sickeningly hot below. The squalls had
passed, and as we neared Hiva-oa the sea became glassy smooth, but
the leagues-long, lazy roll of it rocked the schooner like a cradle.
The night before the islands were to come into view the sea was lit
by phosphorescence so magnificently that even my shipmates, absorbed
in écarté below, called to one another to view it. The engine took
us along at about six knots, and every gentle wave that broke was a
lamp of loveliness. The wake of the _Morning Star_ was a milky path
lit with trembling fragments of brilliancy, and below the surface,
beside the rudder, was a strip of green light from which a billion
sparks of fire shot to the air. Far behind, until the horizon closed
upon the ocean, our wake was curiously remindful of the boulevard of
a great city seen through a mist, the lights fading in the dim
distance, but sparkling still.
I went forward and stood by the cathead. The blue water stirred
by the bow was wonderfully bright, a mass of coruscating
phosphorescence that lighted the prow like a lamp. It was as if
lightning played beneath the waves, so luminous, so scintillating
the water and its reflection upon the ship.
The living organisms of the sea were _en fete_ that night, as though
to celebrate my coming to the islands of which I had so long dreamed.
I smiled at the fancy, well knowing that the minute _pyrocistis_,
having come to the surface during the calm that followed the storms,
were showing in that glorious fire the panic caused among them by
the cataclysm of our passing. But the individual is ever an egoist.
It seems to man that the universe is a circle about him and his
affairs. It may as well seem the same to the _pyrocistis_.
Far about the ship the waves twinkled in green fire, disturbed even
by the ruffling breeze. I drew up a bucketful of the water. In the
darkness of the cabin it gave no light until I passed my hand
through it. That was like opening a door into a room flooded by
electricity; the table, the edges of the bunks, the uninterested
faces of my shipmates, leaped from the shadows. Marvels do not seem
marvelous to men to live among them.
I lay long awake on deck, watching the eerily lighted sea and the
great stars that hung low in the sky, and to my fancy it seemed that
the air had changed, that some breath from the isles before us had
softened the salty tang of the sea-breeze.
Land loomed at daybreak, dark, gloomy, and inhospitable. Rain fell
drearily as we passed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands
sighted from the south. We had climbed from Tahiti, seventeen degrees
south of the equator, to between eleven and ten degrees south, and
we had made a westward of ten degrees. The Marquesas Islands lay
before us, dull spots of dark rock upon the gray water.
They are not large, any of these islands; sixty or seventy miles is
the greatest circumference. Some of the eleven are quite small, and
have no people now. On the map of the world they are the tiniest
pin-pricks. Few dwellers in Europe or America know anything about
them. Most travelers have never heard of them. No liners touch them;
no wire or wireless connects them with the world. No tourists visit
them. Their people perish. Their trade languishes. In Tahiti, whence
they draw almost all their sustenance, where their laws are made,
and to which they look at the capital of the world, only a few men,
who traded here, could tell me anything about the Marquesas. These
men had only the vague, exaggerated ideas of the sailor, who goes
ashore once or twice a year and knows nothing of the native life.
Seven hundred and fifty miles as the frigate flies separates these
islands from Tahiti, but no distance can measure the difference
between the happiness of Tahiti, the sparkling, brilliant loveliness
of that flower-decked island, and the stern, forbidding aspect of the
Marquesas lifting from the sea as we neared them. Gone were the
laughing vales, the pale-green hills, the luring, feminine guise of
nature, the soft-lapping waves upon a peaceful, shining shore. The
spirit that rides the thunder had claimed these bleak and desolate
islands for his own.
While the schooner made her way cautiously past the grim and rocky
headlands of Fatu-hiva I was overwhelmed with a feeling of solemnity,
of sadness; such a feeling as I have known to sweep over an army the
night before a battle, when letters are written to loved ones and
comrades entrusted with messages.
That gaunt, dark shore itself recalls that the history of the
Marquesas is written in blood, a black spot on the white race. It is
a history of evil wrought by civilization, of curses heaped on a
strange, simple people by men who sought to exploit them or to mold
them to another pattern, who destroyed their customs and their
happiness and left them to die, apathetic, wretched, hardly knowing
their own miserable plight.
The French have had their flag over the Marquesas since 1842. In
1521 Magellan must have passed between the Marquesas and Paumotas,
but he does not mention them. Seventy-three years later a Spanish
flotilla sent from Callao by Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, viceroy
of Peru, found this island of Fatu-hiva, and its commander, Mendaña,
named the group for the viceroy's lady, Las Islas Marquesas de
Mendoza.
One hundred and eighty years passed, and Captain Cook again
discovered the islands, and a Frenchman, Etienne Marchand,
discovered the northern group. The fires of liberty were blazing
high in his home land, and Marchand named his group the Isles of the
Revolution, in celebration of the victories of the French people. A
year earlier an American, Ingraham, had sighted this same group and
given it the name of his own beloved hero, Washington.
Had not Captain Porter failed to establish American rule in 1813 in
the island of Nuka-hiva, which he called Madison, the Marquesas
might have been American. Porter's name, like that of Mendaña, is
linked with deeds of cruelty. The Spaniard was without pity; the
American may plead that his killings were reprisals or measures of
safety for himself. Murder of Polynesians was little thought of.
Schooners trained their guns on islands for pleasure or practice,
and destroyed villages with all their inhabitants.
"To put the fear of God in the nigger's hearts," were the words of
many a sanguinary captain and crew. They did not, of course, mean
that literally. They meant the fear of themselves, and of all whites.
They used the name of God in vain, for after a century and more of
such intermittent effort the Polynesians have small fear or faith
for the God of Christians, despite continuous labors of missionaries.
God seems to have forgotten them.
The French made the islands their political possessions with little
difficulty. The Marquesans had no king or single chief. There were
many tribes and clans, and it was easy to persuade or compel petty
chiefs to sign declarations and treaties. But it was not easy to
kill the independence of the people, and France virtually abandoned
and retook the islands several times, her rule fluctuating with
political conditions at home.
There were wars, horrible, bloody scenes, when the clansmen slew the
whites and ate them, and the bones of many a gallant French officer
and sea-captain have moldered where they were heaped after the orgy
following victory. But, as always, the white slew his hundreds to
the natives' one, and in time he drove the devil of liberty and
defense of native land from the heart of the Marquesan.
Before the French achieved this, however, the white had sowed a crop
of deadly evils among the Marquesans that cut them down faster than
war, and left them desolate, dying, passing to extinction.
As I looked from the deck of the _Morning Star_ I was struck by the
fittingness of the scene. Fatu-hiva had been left behind and Hiva-oa,
our destination, was before us, bleak and threatening. To my eyes it
appeared as it had been in the eyes of the gentler Polynesians of
old time, the abode of demons and of a race of terrible warriors.
Hence descended the Marquesans, Vikings of the Pacific, in giant
canoes, and sprang upon the fighting men of the Tahitians, the
Raiateans and the Paumotans, slaughtering their hundreds and carrying
away scores to feast upon in the High Places.
"Mauri i te popoi a ee i te au marere i hiti tovau.
Ia tari a oe. Tari a rutu mai i hea?
A rutu mai i toerau i hitia!
O te au marere i hiti atu a Vaua a ratu i reira
A rutu i toerau roa!
Areare te hai o Nu'u-hiva roa.
I te are e huti te tai a Vavea."
"The spirit of the morning rides the flying vapor that rises salt
from the sea.
Bear on! Bear on! And strike--where?
Strike to the northeast!
The vapor flies to the far rim of the Sea of Atolls.
Strike there! Strike far north!
The sea casts up distant Nuka-Hiva, Land of the War Fleet,
where the waves are towering billows."
This was the ancient chant of the Raiateans, sung in the old days
before the whites came, when they thought of the deeds that were
done by the more-than-human men who lived on these desolate islands.
[Illustration: Harbor of Tai-o-hae]
[Illustration: Schooner _Fetia Taiao_ in the Bay of Traitors
The little isle behind the schooner is Hanake]