Description of Tahiti--A volcanic rock and coral reef--Beauty of
the Scenery--Papeete the center of the South Seas--Appearance of
the Tahitians.
Tahiti was a molten rock, fused in a subterranean furnace, and cast in
some frightful throe of the cooling sphere, high up above the surface
of the sea, the seething mass forming into mountains and valleys, the
valleys hemmed in except at their mouths by lofty barriers that stretch
from thundering central ridges to the slanting shelf of alluvial
soil which extends to the sand of the beach. It is a mass of volcanic
matter to which the air, the rain, and the passage of a million years
have given an all-covering verdure except upon the loftiest peaks,
have cut into strangely shaped cliffs, sloping hills, spacious vales,
and shadowy glens and dingles, and have poured down the rich detritus
and humus to cover the coral beaches and afford sustenance for man
and beast. About the island countless trillions of tiny animals have
reared the shimmering reef which bears the brunt of the breaking
seas, and spares their impact upon the precious land. These minute
beings in the unfathomable scheme of the Will had worked and perished
for unguessed ages to leave behind this monument of their existence,
their charnel-house. Man had often told himself that a god had inspired
them thus to build havens for his vessels and abodes of marine life
where man might kill lesser beings for his food and sport.
Always, in the approach to the island in steamship, schooner, or
canoe, one is amazed and transported by the varying aspect of it. A
few miles away one would never know that man had touched it. His
inappreciable structures are erased by the flood of green color, which,
from the edge of the lagoon to the spires of La Diadème, nearly eight
thousand feet above the water, makes all other hues insignificant. In
all its hundred miles or so of circumference nature is the dominant
note--a nature so mysterious, so powerful, and yet so soft-handed,
so beauty-loving and so laughing in its indulgences, that one can
hardly believe it the same that rules the Northern climes and forces
man to labor in pain all his days or to die.
The scene from a little distance is as primeval as when the first
humans climbed in their frail canoes through the unknown and terrible
stretches of ocean, and saw Tahiti shining in the sunlight. A mile
or two from the lagoon the fertile land extends as a slowly-ascending
gamut of greens as luxuriant as a jungle, and forming a most pleasing
foreground to the startling amphitheater of the mountains, darker,
and, in storm, black and forbidding.
Those mountains are the most wonderful examples of volcanic rock on
the globe. Formed of rough and crystalline products of the basic fire
of earth, they hold high up in their recesses coral beds once under
the sea, and lava in many shapes, tokens of the island's rise from
the slime, and of mammoth craters now almost entirely obliterated by
denudation--the denudation which made the level land as fertile as
any on earth, and the suitable habitation of the most leisurely and
magnificent human animals of history.
A thousand rills that drink from the clouds ever encircling the
crags, and in which they are often lost from view, leap from the
heights, appearing as ribbons of white on a clear day, and not
seldom disappearing in vapor as they fall sheer hundreds of feet,
or thousands, in successive drops. When heavy rains come, torrents
suddenly spring into being and dash madly down the precipitous cliffs
to swell the brooks and little rivers and rush headlong to the sea.
Tahiti has an unexcelled climate for the tropics, the temperature for
the year averaging seventy-seven degrees and varying from sixty-nine
to eighty-four degrees. June, July, and August are the coolest and
driest months, and December to March the rainiest and hottest. It is
often humid, enervating, but the south-east, the trade-wind, which
blows regularly on the east side of the islands, where are Papeete
and most of the settlements, purifies the atmosphere, and there are
no epidemics except when disease is brought directly from the cities
of America or Australasia. A delicious breeze comes up every morning
at nine o'clock and fans the dweller in this real Arcadia until past
four, when it languishes and ceases in preparation for the vesper
drama of the sun's retirement from the stage of earth.
Typhoons or cyclones are rare about Tahiti, but squalls are frequent
and tidal waves recurrent. The rain falls more than a hundred days
a year, but usually so lightly that one thinks of it as liquid
sunshine. In the wet quarter from December until March there are
almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to water, the land
and sea are hidden by the screen of driving rain, and the thunder
shakes the flimsy houses, and echoes menacingly in the upper valleys.
Papeete, the seat of government and trade capital of all the French
possessions in these parts of the world, is a sprawling village
stretching lazily from the river of Fautaua on the east to the cemetery
on the west, and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It
is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an aboriginal
village, the slow response of a century to the demand of official and
trading white, of religious group and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor
and tourist. Here flow all the channels of business and finance,
of plotting and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and
art and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the London
and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles
and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making
the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and
injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity
to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the archipelagoes
in these seas.
The French, who have domination in these waters of a hundred islands
and atolls between 8º and 27º south latitude, and between 137º and 154º
west longitude, a stretch of about twelve hundred miles each way,
make them all tributary to Papeete; and thus it is the metropolis
of a province of salt water, over which come its couriers and its
freighters, its governors and its soldiers, its pleasure-seekers and
its idlers. From it an age ago went the Maoris to people Hawaii and
New Zealand.
Papeete has a central position in the Pacific. The capitals of Hawaii,
Australia, New Zealand, and California are from two and a half to
three and a half thousand miles away. No other such group of whites,
or place approaching its urbanity, is to be found in a vast extent
of latitude or longitude. It is without peer or competitor in endless
leagues of waves.
Yet Papeete is a little place, a mile or so in length and less in
width, a curious imposition of European houses and manners upon a
Tahitian hamlet, hybrid, a mixture of loveliness and ugliness, of
nature savage and tamed. The settlement, as with all ports, began at
the waterfront, and the harbor of Papeete is a lake within the milky
reef, the gentle waters of which touch a strip of green that runs
along the shore, broken here and there by a wall and by the quay at
which I landed. Coral blocks have been quarried from the reef and
fitted to make an embankment for half a mile, which juts out just
far enough to be usable as a mole. It is alongside this that sailing
vessels lie, the wharf being the only land mooring with a roof for
the housing of products. A dozen schooners, small and large, point
their noses out to the sea, their backs against the coral quay, and
their hawsers made fast to old cannon, brought here to war against
the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of
commerce to this shore. Where there are no embankments, the water
comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of grass, moss,
and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide to the roadway.
Following the contour of the beach, runs a fairly broad road, and
facing this original thoroughfare and the sea are the principal
shops of the traders and a few residences. French are some of
these merchants, but most are Australasian, German, American and
Chinese. France is ten thousand miles away, and the French unequal
in the struggle for gain. Some of the stores occupy blocks, and in
them one will find a limited assortment of tobacco, anchors, needles,
music-boxes, candles, bicycles, rum, novels, and silks or calicos. Here
in this spot was the first settlement of the preachers of the gospel,
of the conquering forces of France, and of the roaring blades
who brought the culture of the world to a powerful and spellbound
people. Here swarmed the crews of fifty whalers in the days when
"There she blows!" was heard from crows'-nests all over the broad
Pacific. These rough adventurers, fighters, revelers, passionate
bachelors, stamped Tahiti with its first strong imprint of the white
man's modes and vices, contending with the missionaries for supremacy
of ideal. They brought gin and a new lecherousness and deadly ills and
novel superstitions, and found a people ready for their wares. An old
American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one
time ashore off ships in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia
of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights in twenty-four hours.
As more of Europe and America came and brought lumber to build houses,
or used the hard woods of the mountains, the settlement pushed back
from the beach. Trails that later widened into streets were cut through
the brush to reach these homes of whites, and the thatched huts of the
aborigines were replaced by the ugly, but more convenient, cottages
of the new-comers. The French, when once they had seized the island,
made roads, gradually and not too well, but far surpassing those of
most outlying possessions, and contrasting advantageously with the
neglect of the Spanish, who in three hundred years in the Philippines
left all undone the most important step in civilization. One can
drive almost completely around Tahiti on ninety miles of a highway
passable at most times of the year, and bridging a hundred times the
streams which rush and purl and wind from the heights to the ocean.
The streets of Papeete have no plan. They go where they list and
in curves and angles, and only once in a mile in short, straight
stretches. They twist and stray north and south and nor'nor'west
and eastsou'east, as if each new-comer had cleft a walk of his own,
caring naught for any one else, and further dwellers had smoothed it
on for themselves.
I lost myself in a maze of streets, looked about for a familiar
landmark, strolled a hundred paces, and found myself somewhere
I thought a kilometer distant. Everywhere there are shops kept
by Chinese, restaurants and coffee-houses. The streets all have
names, but change them as they progress, honoring some French hero
or statesman for a block or two, recalling some event, or plainly
stating the reason for their being. All names are in French, of course,
and many are quaint and sonorous.
As the sea-wall grew according to the demands of defense or commerce
the sections were rechristened. The quai des Subsistences tells its
purpose as does the quai de l'Uranie. The rue de l'Ecole and the rue
de la Mission, with the rue des Remparts, speak the early building
of school and Catholic church and fortifications.
Rue Cook, rue de Bougainville and many others record the giant figures
of history who took Tahiti from the mist of the half-known, and wrote
it on the charts and in the archives. Other streets hark back to that
beloved France to which these French exiles gaze with tearful eyes,
but linger all their years ten thousand miles away. They saunter
along the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, and see again the magnificence
of the Tuileries, and hear the dear noises of la belle Paris. They
are sentimental, these French, patriots all here, and overcome at
times by the flood of memories of la France, their birthplaces,
and their ancestral graves. Some born here have never been away, and
some have spent a few short months in visits to the homeland. Some
have brown mothers, half-islanders; yet if they learn the tripping
tongue of their French progenitor and European manners, they think
of France as their ultimate goal, of Paris their playground, and the
"Marseillaise" their himene par excellence.
One might conjure up a vision of a tiny Paris with such names in
one's ears, and these French, who have been in possession here nearly
four-score years, have tried to make a French town of Papeete.
They have only spoiled the scene as far as unfit architecture can,
but the riot of tropical nature has mocked their labors. For all
over the flimsy wooden houses, the wretched palings, the galvanized
iron roofing, the ugly verandas, hang gorgeous draperies of the giant
acacias, the brilliant flamboyantes, the bountiful, yellow allamanda,
the generous breadfruit, and the uplifting glory of the cocoanut-trees,
while magnificent vines and creepers cover the tawdry paint of the
façades and embower the homes in green and flower. If one leaves the
few principal streets or roads in Papeete, one walks only on well-worn
trails through the thick growth of lantana, guavas, pandanus, wild
coffee, and a dozen other trees and bushes. The paths are lined with
hedges of false coffee, where thrifty people live, and again there
are open spaces with vistas of little houses in groves, rows of tiny
cabins close together. Everywhere are picturesque disorder, dirt,
rubbish, and the accrued wallow of years of laissez-aller; but the
mighty trade-winds and the constant rains sweep away all bad odors,
and there is no resultant disease.
"My word," said Stevens, a London stockbroker, here to rehabilitate
a broken corporation, "if we English had this place, wouldn't there
be a cleaning up! We'd build it solid and sanitary, and have proper
rules to make the bally natives stand around."
The practical British would that. They have done so in a dozen of
their far-flung colonies I hare been in, from Singapore to Barbadoes,
though they have failed utterly in Jamaica. Yet, I am at first sight,
of the mind that only the Spanish would have kept, after decades of
administration, as much of the simple beauty of Papeete as have the
Gauls. True, the streets are a litter, the Government almost unseen
as to modern uplift, the natives are indolent and life moves without
bustle or goal. The republic is content to keep the peace, to sell
its wares, to teach its tongue, and to let the gentle Tahitian hold
to his island ways, now that his race dies rapidly in the spiritual
atmosphere so murderous to natural, non-immunized souls and bodies.
Many streets and roads are shaded by spreading mango-trees, a fruit
brought in the sixties from Brazil, and perfected in size and flavor
here by the patient efforts of French gardeners and priests. The trees
along the town ways are splendid, umbrageous masses of dark foliage
whose golden crops fall upon the roadways, and which have been so
chosen that though they are seasonal, the round mango is succeeded
by the golden egg, and that by a small purple sort, while the large,
long variety continues most of the year. Monseigneur Jaussen, the
Catholic bishop who wrote the accepted grammar and dictionary of the
Tahitian language, evolved a delicious, large mango, with a long,
thin stone very different from the usual seed, which occupies most
of the circumference of this slightly acidulous, most luscious of
tropical fruits. Often the pave is a spatter of the fallen mangos,
its slippery condition of no import to the barefooted Tahitian,
but to the shod a cause of sudden, strange gyrations and gestures,
and of irreverence toward the Deity.
Scores of varieties of fruits and flowers, shade-trees, and ornamental
plants were brought to Tahiti by ship commanders, missionaries,
officials, and traders, in the last hundred years, while many of
the indigenous growths have been transplanted to other islands and
continents by those whose interests were in them. The Mutiny of
the Bounty, perhaps the most romantic incident of these South Seas,
was the result of an effort to transport breadfruit-tree shoots from
Tahiti to the West Indies. It is a beautiful trait in humankind, which,
maybe, designing nature has endowed us with to spread her manifold
creations, that even the most selfish of men delight in planting in
new environments exotic seeds and plants, and in enriching the fauna of
faraway islands with strange animals and insects. The pepper- and the
gum-tree that make southern California's desert a bower, the oranges
and lemons there which send a million golden trophies to less-favored
peoples, are the flora of distant climes. Since the days of the white
discoverers, adventurers and priests, fighting men and puritans,
have added to the earth's treasury in Tahiti and all these islands.
Walking one morning along the waterfront, I met two very dark
negresses. They had on pink and black dresses, with red cotton
shawls, and they wore flaming yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly
heads. They were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this
setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their importance, for they
were of the few good cooks of French dishes here. They spoke a French
patois, and guffawed loudly when one dropped her basket of supplies
from her head. They were servants of the procureur de la République,
who had brought them from the French colony of Martinique.
Many races have mingled here. One saw their pigments and their lines
in the castes; here a soupçon of the French and there a touch of the
Dane; the Chileño, himself a mestizo, had left his print in delicacy
of feature, and the Irish his freckles and pug, which with tawny
skin, pearly teeth, and the superb form of the pure Tahitian, left
little to be desired in fetching and saucy allurement. Thousands of
sailors and merchants and preachers had sowed their seed here, as did
Captain Cook's men a century and a half ago, and the harvest showed
in numerous shadings of colors and variety of mixtures. Tahiti had,
since ship of Europe sighted Orofena, been a pasture for the wild
asses of the Wanderlust, a paradise into which they had brought their
snakes and left them to plague the natives.
There were phonographs shrieking at one from a score of verandas. The
automobile had become a menace to life and limb. There were two-score
motor-cars in Tahiti; but as the island is small, and most of them
were in the capital, one met them all the day, and might have thought
there were hundreds. Motor-buses, or "rubberneck-wagons," ran about the
city, carrying the natives for a franc on a brief tour, and, for more,
to country districts where good cheer and dances sped the night. A
dozen five- and seven-passenger cars with drivers were for hire. Most
nights until eleven or later the rented machines dashed about the
narrow streets, hooting and hissing, while their care-free occupants
played accordions or mouth-organs and sang songs of love. Louis de
Bougainville, once a French lawyer, and afterward soldier, sailor,
and discoverer and a lord under Bonaparte, had a monument in a tiny
green park hard by the strand and the road that, beginning there,
bands the island. He is best known the world about because his name is
given to the "four-o'clock" shrub in warm countries, as in Tahiti,
which sends huge masses of magenta or crimson blossoms climbing
on trellises and roofs. I walked to this monument from the Tiare
along the mossy bank of a little rivulet which ran to the beach. It
was early morning. The humble natives and whites were about their
daily tasks. Smoke rose from the iron pipes above the houses, coffee
scented the air, men and women were returning from the market-place
with bunches of cocoanuts, bananas, and breadfruit, strings of fish
and cuts of meat in papers. Many of them had their heads wreathed in
flowers or wore a tiare blossom over an ear.
The way in which one wears a flower supposedly signifies many
things. If one wore it over the left ear, one sought a sweetheart;
if over the right, it signified contentment, and though it was as
common as the wearing of hats, there were always jokes passing about
these flowers, exclamations of surprise or wishes of joy.
"What, you have left Terii?"
"Aita. No."
"Aue! I must change it at once."
Now, really there was no such idea in the native mind. It was invention
for tourists. The Tahitian wears flowers anywhere, always, if he can
have them, and they do express his mood. If he is sad, he will not put
them on; but if going to a dance, to a picnic, or to promenade, if he
has money in his pocket, or gaiety in his heart, he must bloom. Over
one ear, or both, in the hair, on the head, around the neck, both sexes
were passionately fond of this age-old sign of kinship with nature. The
lei in Hawaii around the hat or the neck spells the same meaning, but
the flood of outsiders has lost Hawaii all but the merest remnant of
its ancient ways, while here still persisted customs which a century
of European difference and indifference has not crushed out. Here,
as there, more lasting wreaths for the hat were woven of shells or
beads in various colors.
As I strolled past the houses, every one greeted me pleasantly.
"Ia ora na," they said, or "Bonjour!" I replied in kind. I had not
been a day in Tahiti before I felt kindled in me an affection for
its dark people which I had never known for any other race. It was
an admixture of friendship, admiration, and pity--of affection for
their beautiful natures, of appreciation of the magnificence of their
physical equipment, and of sympathy for them in their decline and
inevitable passing under the changed conditions of environment made
by the sudden smothering of their instinctive needs in the sepia of
commercial civilization. I saw that those natives remaining, laughing
and full of the desire for pleasure as they were, must perish because
unfit to survive in the morass of modernism in which they were sinking,
victims of a system of life in which material profits were the sole
goal and standard of the rulers.
The Tahitians are tall, vigorous, and superbly rounded. The men,
often more than six feet or even six and a half feet in height, have
a mien of natural majesty and bodily grace. They convey an impression
of giant strength, reserve power, and unconscious poise beyond that
made by any other race. American Indians I have known had much of this
quality when resident far from towns, but they lacked the curving,
padded muscles, the ease of movement, and, most of all, the smiling
faces, the ingratiating manner, of these children of the sun.
The Tahitians' noses are fairly flat and large; the nostrils dilated;
their lips full and sensual; their teeth perfectly shaped and very
white and sound; their chins strong, though round; and their eyes
black and large, not brilliant, but liquid. Their feet and hands are
mighty--hands that lift burdens of great weight, that swing paddles
of canoes for hours; feet that tread the roads or mountain trails
for league on league.
The women are of middle size, with lines of harmony that give them a
unique seal of beauty, with an undulating movement of their bodies,
a coordination of every muscle and nerve, a richness of aspect in
color and form, that is more sensuous, more attractive, than any
feminine graces I have ever gazed on. They have the forwardness of
boys, the boldness of huntresses, yet the softness and magnetism of
the most virginal of their white sisters. One thinks of them as of old
in soft draperies of beautiful cream-colored native cloth wound around
their bodies, passed under one arm and knotted on the other shoulder,
revealing the shapely neck and arm, and one breast, with garlands upon
their hair, and a fragrant flower passed through one ear, and in the
other two or three large pearls fastened with braided human hair.
The men never wore beards, though mustaches, copying the French custom,
are common on chiefs, preachers, and those who sacrifice beauty and
natural desires to ambition. The hair on the face is removed as it
appears, and it is scanty. They abhor beards, and their ghosts, the
tupapau, have faces fringed with hair. The usual movements of both
men and women are slow, dignified, and full of pride.