A journey to Mataiea--I abandon city life--Interesting sights on the
route--The Grotto of Maraa--Papara and the Chief Tati--The plantation
of Atimaono--My host, the Chevalier Tetuanui.
Life in the country made me laugh at myself for having so long
stayed in the capital. The fever of Papeete had long since cooled
in my veins. A city man myself, I might have known that all
capitals are noxious. Great cities are the wens on the body of
civilization. They are aggregations of sick people, who die out
in the third generation. Greed builds them. Crowded populations
increase property values and buy more manufactured luxuries. The
country sends its best to perish in these huddlements. In America,
where money interests boom cities and proudly boast their corruption
in numbers, half the people are already in these webs in which the
spider of commerce eats its victims, but ultimately may perish for
lack of food. Brick and steel grow nothing.
I had made excursions from Papeete, but always carrying the poisons
of the town with me. At last my playmates deserted me. Lying Bill and
McHenry sailed on their schooner for the Paumotu and the Marquesas
islands, Landers left for Auckland, and Count Polonsky for a flying
visit to America. Llewellyn, though an interesting study, learned
in native ways, and with comparisons of Europe and America, was
too atrabilious, and, besides, had with his young partner, David,
abandoned himself to the night life, the cinema bars, with their
hilarious girls and men, the prize-fights, and the dancing on the
beach in the starlight. Schlyter, the tailor, an occasional companion,
was busied cutting and sewing a hundred uniforms for a war-ship's crew.
I bethought me of the letter Princess Noanoa Tiare had given me to
the chief of Mataiea, and with a bag I departed for that village at
daybreak, after taofe tau for four sous at Shin Bung Lung's Fare
Tamaaraa. The diligence was open at the sides and roofed with an
awning, and was drawn by two mules, with bells on their collars.
On the stage I paid twenty centimes a kilometre, or six and a half
cents a mile. It carried the mail, passengers, and freight. In every
district there was a mailbox on the fence of the chefferie, the chief's
office, and on the trees alongside the road at regular intervals,
and the driver took mails from people who hailed him. Arriving
at a chefferie, the stage halted, the district mutoi, or native
policeman-postman, appeared leisurely, opened the locked box on the
diligence, looked at ease over the contents, took out what he liked,
and put back the remainder, with the postings of the chefferie.
A glance at the map of Tahiti shows it shaped like a Samoan fan, or,
roughly, like a lady's hand mirror. It is really two islands, joined
by the mile-wide isthmus of Taravao. The larger island is Poroiunu
or Tahiti-nui (big Tahiti), and the smaller Taiarapu, or Tahiti-iti
(little Tahiti). Tahiti-nui is almost round; and Tahitiiti, oval. Both
are volcanic, distinct in formation. They are united by a sedimentary
piece of land long after they were raised from the ocean's bed.
Mataiea is twenty-seven miles from Papeete, and well on toward the
isthmus.
Most of our passengers were Chinese, and I realized the Asiaticizing
of Tahiti. They were store-keepers, small farmers, or laborers. The
Broom Road lay most of the way along the beach, back of the fringe of
cocoanut and pandanus-trees, and between the homes and plantations
of Tahitians and foreigners. I saw all the fruits of the islands in
matchless profusion, intermingled with magnificent ferns, the dazzling
bougainvillea, the brilliant flamboyant-tree, and a thousand creepers
and plants. Every few minutes the road rushed to the water's-edge,
and the glowing main, with its flashing reef, and the shadowy outlines
of Moorea, a score of miles away, appeared and fled. Past villages,
churches, schools, and villas, the shops of the Chinese merchants,
the sheds for drying copra, rows of vanilla-vines, beaches with
canoes drawn up and nets drying on sticks, men and women lolling
on mats upon the eternal green carpet of the earth, girls waving
hands to us, superb men, naked save for pareus, with torsos, brown,
satiny, and muscled like Greek gladiators, women bathing in streams,
their forms glistening, their breasts bare; and constant to the scene,
dominating it, the lofty, snakelike cocoanuts and their brothers of
less height and greater girth.
At Fa'a a postwoman appeared. Before opening the mail-box she tarried
to light a cigarette and to chat with the driver about the new picture
at the cinema in Papeete. She commented laughingly on the writers and
addressees of the letters, and flirted with a passenger. The former
himene-house, which had been the dance-hall of Kelly, the leader of
the fish-strike, was vacant, but I heard in imagination the strains of
his pagan accordion, and the himene which will never be forgotten by
the Tahitians, "Hallelujah! I'm a bum!" Kelly had gone over the water
to the jails of the United States, where life is hard for minstrels
who sing such droll songs.
In Punaauia, the next district to Fa'a, was a schoolhouse and on it
a sign: 2 x 2 = 4.
M. Souvy, a government printer of Tahiti, had given the site out of his
humble savings. By the sign, in his blunt way, he struck at education
which does not teach the simple necessity of progress--common sense.
"Cela saute aux yeux," he had said.
He was long dead, but his symbol provoked a question from every
new-comer, and kept alive his name and philosophy. I never saw it but
I thought of an article I had once written that led to the overturning
of the educational system of a country. How all guide-posts point to
oneself! Near the school-house, a dozen yards from the salt water,
was a native house with a straw roof, a mere old shell, untenanted.
M. Edmond Brault, the government employee and musical composer,
a passenger on the diligence, had with him his violin, intending to
spend the day in company with it in a grove. He remarked the tumbledown
condition of the house, and said:
"I have sat under that toil de chaume, that straw roof, and talked
with and played for a painter who was living there quite apart from
the world. He was Monsieur Paul Gauguin, and he had a very distingué
establishment. The walls of his atelier were covered with his canvases,
and in front of the house he had a number of sculptures in wood. That
was about 1895, I think. I can see the maitre now. He wore a pareu
of red muslin and an undershirt of netting. He said that he adored
this corner of the world and would never leave it. He had returned
from Paris more than ever convinced that he was not fitted to live
in Europe. Yet, mon ami, he ran away from here, and went to the
savage Marquesas Islands, where he died in a few years. He loved the
third étude of Chopin, and the andante of Beethoven's twenty-third
sonata. You know music says things we would be almost afraid to put
in words, if we could. If Flaubert might have written 'Madame Bovary'
or 'Salambô' in musical notes, he would not have been prosecuted by
the censor. We musicians have that advantage."
"In America," I replied, "we have never yet censored musical
compositions, and many works are played freely because the censors
and the reform societies' detectives cannot understand them. But if
our inquisitors take up music, they may yet reach them. For instance,
the prelude of 'Tristan and Isolde,' and Strauss' 'Salome.'"
"No," returned the Frenchman, quickly; "music would make them
liberals."
A little farther on, in the valley of Punaruu, the amiable violinist
and pianist showed me the ruins of defense works thrown up by the
French to withstand the attacks of the great chieftain, Oropaa of
Punaauia, who with his warriors had here disputed foot by foot the
advance of the invaders. These Tahitians were without artillery,
mostly without guns of any sort, but they utilized the old strategy
of the intertribal wars, and rolled huge rocks down upon the French
troops in narrow defiles.
We saw from our seats through the shadows of the gorge of Punaruu
two of the horns of Maiao, the Diadem. In the far recesses
of those mountains were almost inaccessible caves in which the
natives laid their dead, and where one found still their moldering
skeletons. M. Brault touched my shoulder.
"Rumor has it that the body of Pomaré the Fifth is there," he said;
"that it was taken secretly from the tomb you have seen near Papeete,
and carried here at night. There are photographs of those old skeletons
taken in that grotto of the tupapaus, as the natives call the dead
and their ghosts. The natives will not discuss that place."
It was from Punaauia that Teriieroo a Teriierooterai had gone to
Papenoo to be chief. This was the seat of his ancienne famille. Here
he had been a deacon of the church, as he was in Papenoo, because
it meant social rank, and was possible insurance against an unknown
future. The church edifice was the gathering-place, as once had been
the marae, the native temple. This was Sunday, and I passed a church
every few miles, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant vying. They
had matched each other in number since the French admiral had exiled
the British missionary-consul, and compelled the queen to erect a
papal church for every bethel.
Along the road and in the churchyards the preachers and deacons were
in black cloth, sweating as they walked, their faces beatudinized as
in America.
Many carried large Bibles, and frowned on the merry, singing crew
who went by on foot, in carriages and automobiles. Everywhere, in
all countries, the long, black coat and white or black cravat are
the uniforms of evangelism. In Tahiti I saw ministers of the gospel,
white and brown, appareled like circuit-riders in Missouri; hot,
dusty, and their collars wilted, but their souls serene and sure in
their mission. They associated God and black, as night and darkness.
The sound of sermons echoed from chapels as we progressed, the voices
raised in the same tone one heard in a Methodist camp-meeting in
Kansas, and the singing, when in French, having much the same effect,
a whining, droning fashion; without spirituality or art.
But why look for a moment at these unfortunates or listen to their dull
chants when marvels of nature unfolded at every step! There was never
such luxuriant vegetation, never such a riot of color and richness of
growth as on every side. The wealth of the bougainvillea's masses of
lustrous magenta was matched by the dazzling flamboyant, trees forty
feet high, and their foliage a hundred in circumference, a sheen of
crimson. Clumps of bamboo as big as a city lot and towering to the
sky, with the yellow allamanda framing the bungalows, and a tangle
of bananas, lantana, tafeie, cocoas, and a hundred other fruits,
flowers and creepers, made the whole journey through a paradise.
Around many cocoanut-palms were bands of tin or zinc ten or twenty feet
from the earth. These were to foil the rats or crabs which climb the
trees and steal (can a creature steal from nature?) the nuts. Every
available piece of thin metal was used for this. The sheets were
often flattened kerosene- and gasoline-cans and were drawn taut and
smooth. These are impasses for the wily climbers.
"Ils ne passeront pas," said the French; "Aita haere!" the Tahitians.
The road was good, but narrow, in few places room for two to pass
except by turning out, skirting the beach at the water's-edge,
crossing causeways over inlets, and in admirable curves clinging to
the hillsides, which bathed in the sea. Moving over a small levee we
came to the pointe de Maraa, where was the Grotto of Maraa, a gigantic
recess worn in the solid wall of rock, a dark mysterious interior,
which gave me a momentary surge of my childhood dread and love of
caves and secret entrances to pirates' lairs. The diligence halted
at the request of M. Brault, and he and I jumped out and ran to the
grotto. In it was a lake with black waters, and down the face of the
cliff, which rose hundreds of feet straight, dripped a million drops of
the waters of the hills, so that the ground about was in puddles. The
inside walls and arched ceiling were covered with a solid texture of
verdant foliage, wet and fragrant. We found a little canoe fastened
to a stone, and adventured on the quiet surface of the pond until at
about eighty yards of penetration we came to a blind curtain of stone.
"This grot," said M. Brault, "was for centuries the retreat of those
conquered in war, sacred to gods, and a sanctuary never violated, like
those cities of refuge among the Hebrews and Greeks. Now it is a picnic
rendezvous, very dear to Papeete whites and to tourists. C'est la vie."
Tahitian women passengers were adorning their heads with wreaths of
maiden-hair and rare ferns from the cavern. Great lianas hung down
the walls, and these they climbed to reach the exquisite draperies of
the chamber. The farther we left behind the capital, the more smiling
were the faces, the less conventional the actions and gestures of
the people.
Papara was at hand, the richest and most famous of all the districts
of Tahiti. The village was a few Chinese stores, a Catholic and
a Protestant church, a graveyard, and a scattered collection of
homes. I bade au revoir to my delightful companion, Edmond Brault,
having determined to walk the remaining kilometers, and to send on
my inconsiderable bag of clothing.
Lovaina had given me a note to the chief of Papara, Tati, whose father
was Salmon, an English Jew, and whose sister was Marao, the relict of
the late king, and known as the queen. His father was the first white
to marry formally a Tahitian noblewoman. Pomaré IV had generously
granted permission for the high chiefess of Papara to ally herself
with the shrewd descendant of the House of David, and their progeny
had included the queen, Tati, and others celebrated in Tahitian life.
Tati welcomed me with the heartiness of the English gentleman and
the courtesy of the Tahitian chief. He was a man of large parts
himself, limited in his hospitality only by his means, he, like all
natives, having thrown away most of his patrimony in his youth. He
was the best-known Tahitian next to Prince Hinoe, but much abler than
he. He knew the Tahitian history and legends, the interwoven tribal
relations, the descents and alliances of the families, better than
any one else. Such knowledge was highly esteemed by the natives,
for whom chiefly rank still bore significance. The Tatis had been
chiefs of Papara for generations, and had entertained Captain Cook.
He lived in a bungalow near the beach, handsome, spreading, and with
a mixed European and indigenous arrangement and furnishing that was
very attractive. I met his sons and daughters, and had luncheon with
them. Tati, of course, spoke English fluently, yet with the soft
intonation of the Tahitian. Some of the dishes and knives and forks
had belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson, who, said Tati, had given them
to him when he was departing from Tahiti. Tati's sister, a widow, was
of the party, and together we went to the Protestant churchyard to her
husband's tomb. It was imposing and costly, and the inscription read:
In Memory of Dorence Atwater, beloved husband of arii inoore Moetia
Salmon. Born at Terryville, Conn., Feb. 3, 1845. Died at San Francisco,
Cal., November 28, 1910. As a last tribute to his name there was
erected in his native state a monument with this inscription:
This memorial is dedicated to our fellow townsman, Dorence Atwater,
for his patriotism in preserving to this nation the names of 13,000
soldiers who died while prisoners at Andersonville, Ga.
He builded better than he knew; some day, perchance, in surprise he
may wake to learn:
He builded a monument more enduring than brass.
Tupuataroa.
The name given Atwater when he married Moetia Salmon was Tupuataroa,
which means a wise man. Mrs. Atwater was rich and melancholy. She
mourned her dead. Atwater had come to Tahiti as American consul, and
had piled franc on franc in trade and speculation, with great dignity
and success. He had been the leading American of his generation in
the South Seas, and had left no children.
Tati said that when the church was dedicated--it was a box-like
structure of wood and coral, whitewashed and red-roofed--three thousand
Tahitians had feasted in a thatched house erected for the arearea. The
himene-chorus was made up of singers from every district in Tahiti
and Moorea. Tati had presided.
"We ate for three days," he related to me. "More than two hundred
and fifty swine, fifteen hundred chickens, and enough fish to equal
the miraculous draft on the shores of Galilee. We Polynesians were
always that way, Gargantuan eaters at times, but able to go fifty
miles at top speed on a cocoanut in war."
Tati would have me stay indefinitely his guest, but I had written to
Mataiea of my intended arrival there, and though there were insistent
cries that I return soon, I said farewell.
Tati himself walked with me to the bridge over the Taharuu River,
one of the hundred and fifty streams I crossed in a circuit of Tahiti.
"My ancestor, the old chief Tati," he told me, "cut down the sacred
trees of our clan marae near by, the aitos, tamanus, and miros. He
had become a Christian, as was fashionable, and at the instigation of
the English missionaries destroyed many beautiful and ancient trees,
statues, carvings, and buildings. The Tahitians who mourned his
iconoclasm had a chant which said that the Taharuu River ran blood
when their gods were dishonored."
From the stream the vast domain of the plantation of Atimaono stretched
to Mataiea. It had been planted in the sixties, when British demands
for cotton, and the blockade and laying waste of the South in the
American Civil War caused a thousand such speculations all over
the world.
It was for this plantation, the most celebrated in Tahiti, that
Chinese were imported, and a thousand had their shanties where now
is brush. Those were the times that the Marquesas had their cotton
boom, and lapsed, too. Upon a hill of this plantation the English
manager, a former cavalry officer, had built himself a palatial
mansion, and lived like a feudal lord, the most powerful resident
of Tahiti. Travelers from all the world were his guests. Fair ladies
danced the night away upon his broad verandas and drank the choicest
wines of France. Scandal wove a dozen strange stories of intrigues,
of a high official who sold his wife to him, of Arioian orgies, and all
the associations of semi-regal rule and accountability to none. Cotton
prices declined, the bubble burst in bankruptcy, the miserable death
of the aristocrat, and the fury of cheated English investors.
The plantation was now owned by a storekeeper of Tahiti, prosy and
disliked, who had fattened by ability to outwit the natives; but the
glory had departed, and the place languished, ruins and jungle, the
prey of guava and lantana. The neighborhood was known as Ati-Maono,
"The Clan of Maon."
The lines between village and country were not rigid, and often
the hamlet straggled along the road for much of the district. Every
kilometer there was a stone marking the distance from Papeete. One
knew the villages more by the Chinese stores than by any other feature.
"You will find the Papara country full of oranges," Fragrance of the
Jasmine had said.
The fruit was as sweet and delicious as any I had eaten, and the trees
larger than their parents of Sydney, Australia. I strolled along the
road eating, speaking all who passed or were in sight within their
gardens, and came to Mataiea, where I was to live months and to learn
the Tahitian mind and language.
Ariioehau Amerocarao, commonly known as Tetuanui Tavana, or Monsieur
le Chef de Mataiea, Tetuanui, and his wife, Haamoura, were the salt of
the earth. The chief was a large man, molded on a great frame, and very
corpulent, as are most Polynesians of more than thirty years. He was
about sixty, strong and sweet by nature, brave and simple. His vahine
was very stout, half blind from cataracts, but ever busied about her
household and her guests. As chief and roadmaster of his district,
Tetuanui received a small compensation, but not enough for the wants
of his dependents, so a few paying white guests were sent to him by
Lovaina. The house was set back from the Broom Road in a clearing
of a wood of cocoanuts, breadfruits, badamiers, and vi-apples. The
father of Haamoura had given the land to his daughter, and they had
built on it a residence of two high stories, with wide verandas.
The chief and his wife had no children, but had adopted
twenty-five. They had brought most of these to manhood and womanhood,
and many were married. Perhaps their care, dots for the daughters,
and estates for the sons, had made the parents poor. One was the
blood son of Prince Hinoe, and was now a youth, and worked about the
plantation of the chief. His christened name was Ariipaea Temanutuanuu
Teariitinorua Tetuanui a Oropaa Pomare. He was a prince and very
handsome and gentle, but he gathered the leaves from the volunteer
lawn for the horses. There was an atmosphere of affection and happiness
about the home I have not sensed more keenly anywhere else.
The Duke of Abruzzi's photograph and one of the Italian war-ship
Liguria, were on a wall in the drawing-room, with others of notable
people whom the chief had entertained. He himself wore the cross of
the Legion of Honor, which had been presented to him in Paris when
he visited there many years before.
The house was raised ten feet from the earth, and the ground below
was neatly covered with black pebbles from the shore. Shaded by the
veranda-floors, which formed the ceilings of their open rooms, the
family sat on mats, and made hats, sewed, sang, and chatted. They
laughed all day. A dozen children played on the sward where horses,
ducks, geese, chickens, and turkeys fed and led their life. When rice
or corn was thrown to them, the mina-birds flocked to share it. These
impudent thieves pounced on the best grains, and though the chickens
fought them, they appeared to be afraid only of the ducks. These
hated the minas, and pursued them angrily. But the minas can fly, and,
when threatened, lazily lifted themselves a few feet out of reach of
the bills, and returned when danger was over.
The chief's plantation extended from the sea to the mountain,
altogether about ten acres, which in Tahiti is a good-sized single
holding. Cocoanuts, breadfruit, limes, oranges, badamiers, mangoes,
and other trees made a dense forest, and a hectare or more was planted
with vanilla-vines that grew on the false coffee of which hedges were
usually made. A hundred yards away a stream meandered toward the sea,
and there women of the household sat and washed clothes.
They had no taro planted, though there was much about. Taro, the
staple food of Hawaiians, either simply boiled or fermented as poi,
was not a decided favorite in Tahiti. The natives thought it tasteless
compared with the fei, so rich in color and flavor. The taro is a lily
(Arum), and its great bulbs are the edible part, though the tops of
small taro-plants are delicious, surpassing spinach, and we had them
often on our table.
Our customary meals at eleven and at six were of raw oysters,
shrimp, crabs, craw-fish, or lobsters; fish of many kinds, chicken,
breadfruit, vi-apples stewed, bananas, oranges, feis, cocoanuts,
and sucking pigs. The family ate sitting or squatting on the ground,
but I had a table and silver, glass and linen. It is the way of the
Tahitian. The big house, well furnished, was not inhabited by the
chief's family. It was their monument of success. They slept in one
of several houses they had near by, and their elegant dishes were
unused except for white guests.
On the beach at the river's mouth the heron sat or stalked solemnly,
and the tern flew about the reef. The white iitae lived about the
cocoanut-trees.
From the broad veranda in front was a view of the sea, and all day
and night the breakers beat upon the reef a mile away, now as soft
as the summer wind in the lime-trees of Seville, and again loud as
winter in the giant pine forests of Michigan. The fleecy surf gleamed
and shimmered in the sun as it rolled over the coral dam, and when the
sea was strong, there was another sound, the lapping of the waves on
the sand a hundred yards from me. A little wharf had been built there
by the Government, and a schooner arrived and departed every few days,
with people and produce.
I ate alone mostly, at a table on the veranda in front of my chamber,
waited on by Tatini, a very lovely and shy maiden of fourteen years. To
her I talked Tahitian, as with all the family, in an effort to perfect
myself in that tongue.
I was happy that I had pulled up anchor in Papeete, and as contrast is,
after all, comparative, I felt like a New-Yorker who finds himself in
Arcadia, though I had thought Papeete, on first sight, the garden of
Allah. In Mataiea I realized the wonder of the Polynesian people, and
found my months with the whites of the city a fit background for study
of and ardent delight in the brown islanders I was to know so well.