I start for Tautira--A dangerous adventure in a canoe--I go by land
to Tautira--I meet Choti and the Greek God--I take up my home where
Stevenson lived.
Seeing the way the Lermontoffs lived, caused me to resolve that during
the remainder of my stay in Tahiti I would go even farther from Papeete
than Mataiea. They suggested Tautira, a village they had never visited,
but which was at the very end of the habitable part of the Presqu'île
of Taiarapu. My easiest route to Tautira was by crossing the isthmus
of Taravao, to the other side of the peninsula, as nowhere in Tahiti
except at Lake Vaihiria were there even passable trails across the
lofty spine of the island. I was for sending back the cart and horse
to Taravao and taking a canoe to Tautira. A council of the elders of
Vaieri opposed me, but yielded to my persistence by advising me at
least to ride as far as possible in the cart along the western road,
and to find, nearer to Tautira, in Maora, or farther on, in Puforatoai,
a canoe and canoeists for the risky attempt.
Tatini, who had lagged behind at Butscher's, appeared as I harnessed
the horse. She had accompanied the Tinito storekeeper of Taravao to
Vaieri, and would not permit me to go on alone. She climbed into the
vehicle, and we wended a winding road, and forded several streams until
we came to Puforatoai, having gone through Hatiti and Maora. There
was a pass in the reef admitting to a questionable shelter, Port
Beaumanoir, used by the French when little gunboats threatened to
bombard villages to force the rule of Paris.
Puforatoai was a handful of houses, hardly a village. My advent was
of importance, and its few people gathered about us. They voiced
their amazement when Tatini announced our wish to find a navigator
and vessel to Tautira. They all said it was impossible, that the
coast to Pari, with the submerged reef of Faratara, was too rough
now for any but a large power boat, and the wind would be baffling
and threatening. But as fear of the sea was unknown to them, they
expressed a will to make the attempt. We launched a large canoe,
and two sturdy natives, relations of Tatini, took the paddles. They
had made the journey more than once, but not at this season.
We got into difficulties from the start. The shores were very different
from those of Mataiea, Papeari, and Vairao, the three districts
I had come through from the house of Tetuanui. The alluvial strip
of land which in them stretched from a quarter of a mile to a mile
from the lagoon to the slopes of the hills, here was cramped to the
barest strip. The huts of the indigenes, few and far apart outside
of Puforatoai, seemed to be set in terraces cut at the foot of the
mountains which rose almost straight from the streak of golden sand
to the skies. In every shade of green, as run by the overhead sun
upon the altering facets of precipice and shelf, of fei and cocoa,
candlenut and purau, giant ferns and convolvulus, tier upon tier,
was a riot of richest vegetation. But everywhere in the lagoon were
bristling and hiding dangers from hummocks of coral and sunken banks.
Our canoe was twenty feet long, and with a very strong outrigger,
but though all four of us paddled, Teta, the chief man of Puforatoai,
in the stern, steering, the vaa labored heavily. Tatini was adept in
canoeing, and with a quartet of hoë we would have ordinarily sent the
vaa spinning through the water; but we were nearing the southernmost
extremity of the Presqu'île, and the wind and current from the
northeast swept about the broken coast in a confusion of puffs and
blasts, choppy waves and roaring breakers, and made our progress
slow and hazardous. The breeze caught up the foam and formed sheets
of vapor which whipped our faces and blinded us, while an occasional
roller broke on our prow, and soon gave Tatini continuous work in
bailing with a handled scoop.
Opposite the pass of Tutataroa our greatest peril came. The ocean swept
through this narrow channel like a mill-race. The first swell tossed
us up ten feet, and we rode on it fifty before Teta could disengage
us from its clasp, and, without capsizing, divert our course westward
instead of toward the parlous shore. One such jeopardy succeeded
another. We were in a quarter of an hour directly under black and
frowning heights from which a score of cascades and rills leaped
into the air, their masses of water, carried by the gusts, falling
upon us in showers and clouds, aiding the flying scud in shielding
the distance ahead from our view.
"Aita e ravea," shouted Teta to me. "It is impossible to go on."
We were all as wet as if in the sea, our faces and bodies stung by
the spindrift, and we were barely able to glimpse a dark and heaving
panorama of surf, rock, and bluff in the mists that now and again
were penetrated by the hot sun.
"Maitai! Hohoi!" I replied above the clangor, and raised my paddle.
Carefully and in a wide circle the vaa crept around to head back toward
our port, and it was after sunset before we were in Teta's house in
Puforatoai. The villagers met us with torches and incredulous aues
and we walked up the road singing the song of the "Ai Dobbebelly
Dobbebelly," which was known wherever a fisher for market dwelt in
all Tahiti. The farther from Papeete and more and more as time passed,
the words lost resemblance to English, and became mere native sounds
without any exact meaning, but with a never-forgotten sentiment of
rebellion against government and of gild alliance.
"Give us a hand-out!" had changed from "hizzandow" in Papeete, to
"Hitia o te ra!" which meant that the sun was rising. Within a year
or two the entire text would doubtless merge into Tahitian with only
the martial air of "Revive us again!" and the dimming memory of the
fish-strike to recall its origin. I had known a native who, whenever
he approached me, sang in a faltering tone, "Feery feery!"
I asked him after many weeks what he meant, and he said that that was a
himene, which a young American had sung at his potations in his village
in the Marquesas Islands. I had him repeat "Feery feery!" dozens of
times, and finally snatched at an old glee which ran through my mind:
"Shoo Fly, don't bother me!" and when I sang it,
"I feel, I feel, I feel,
I feel like a morning star!"
he struck his thigh, and said, "Ea! That is the very thing!" And to be
fair to all races, one has only to listen to an American assemblage
singing "The Starspangled Banner" to learn that after the first few
lines most patriots decline into "ah-ah-la-la-ha-la-ah-la-la."
Before our supper of fish and fei, Teta, who was a deacon in the
Protestant church, but of superior knowledge of his own tongue and
legends, asked a blessing of God, and afterward recited for me the
Tahitian chant of creation, the source of which was in the very
beginnings of his race, perhaps even previous to the migration from
Malaysia. He intoned it, solemnly, as might have an ancient prophet
in Israel, as we sat in the starlit night, with the profound notes
of the reef in unison with his deep cadence:
He abides--Taaroa by name--
In the immensity of space.
There was no earth, there was no heaven,
There was no sea, there was no mankind.
Taaroa calls on high;
He changes himself fully.
Taaroa is the root;
The rocks (or foundation);
Taaroa is the sands;
Taaroa stretches out the branches (is wide-spreading).
Taaroa is the light;
Taaroa is within;
Taaroa is, ----
Taaroa is below;
Taaroa is enduring;
Taaroa is wise;
He created the land of Hawaii;
Hawaii great and sacred,
As a crust (or shell) for Taaroa.
The earth is dancing (moving).
O foundations, O rocks,
Oh sands! here, here.
Brought hither, pressed together the earth;
Press, press again!
They do not ------
Stretch out the seven heavens; let ignorance cease.
Create the heavens, let darkness cease.
Let anxiety cease within;
Let immobility cease;
Let the period of messengers cease;
It is the time of the speaker.
Fill up the foundation,
Fill up the rocks,
Fill up the sands.
The heavens are inclosing.
And hung up are the heavens
In the depths.
Finished he the world of Hawaii.
E pau fenua no Hawaii.
The cart at my request had been driven back to Taravao; so in the
morning Tatini and I walked back to the isthmus. We drank coffee at
five, and at three we had covered the twelve miles in the sauntering
gait of the Tahitian girl, stopping to make wreaths, and to bathe in
several streams. Butscher was on his table in his after-breakfast
lethargy, and I regretted disturbing his iiii to ask him to serve
us. Again Tatini refused to sit at table with me. Evidently, she
feared the scowls of Butscher, who had none of the white's ideas of
the equality of females with males at the board. Butscher added many
francs to my bill by pouring me another bottle of Pol Roger, 1905,
which after several days of cocoanut juice took on added delight. I
made up my mind to tarry with Butscher a day, while Tatini returned
to the Tetuanui mansion by diligence, and despatched my bags to me
by the same carrier. I sent with her my love to the Tetuanui clan,
and some delicacies from the Maison des Varos for the half-blind
Haamoura. The diligence did not run farther than Taravao, and the
next day, with my impedimenta in the cart, and with a boy to drive
it, I turned my back on the road to Papeete, and began the jog trot
to the famous, but hardly ever visited, district of Tautira.
I counted it the third stage in my pilgrimage in Tahiti. The first
had been in and about the capital, mingling mostly with white men,
and living in a public inn; the second at Mataiea had taken me far
from those rookeries, and had introduced me to the real Tahitians,
to their language, their customs, and their hearts; but still I had
been a guest, and a cared-for and guarded white among aborigines. Now
I wanted to cut off entirely from the main road, to sequester myself
in a faraway spot, and to live as close to the native as was possible
for me. My time was drawing near for departure. I must see all of the
Etablissements Français de l'Oceanie, the blazing Paumotu atolls,
and the savage Marquesas, and I must make the most of the several
months yet remaining for me in Tahiti.
The highway along the eastern portion of the Presqu'île was much
like that between Taravao and Puforatoai, tortuous, constricted,
and often forced to hang upon a shelf carved out of the precipice
which hemmed it. The route hugged the sea, but at every turn I
saw inland the laughing, green valleys, deserted of inhabitants,
climbing slowly between massive walls of rock to which clung great
tree ferns, with magnificent vert parasols, enormous clumps of feis,
with huge, emerald or yellow upstanding bunches of fruit; candlenut-
and ironwood-trees. Uncounted, delicious odors filled the air,
distilled from the wild flowers, the vanilla, orchids, and the forests
of oranges, which, though not of Tahiti, were already venerable in
their many decades of residence. Not a single path struck off from the
belt road, except that as we came toward the centers of Afaahiti and
Pueu districts the inevitable store or two of the Chinese appeared,
the cheferie, a church or two, and the roofs of the Tahitians. These
were always near the beach, set back a few hundred feet from the
road in rare instances, but mostly only a few steps from it. The
Tahitian never lived in hamlets, as the Marquesan and the Samoan,
but each family dwelt in its wood of cocoanuts and breadfruit, or
a few families clustered their inhabitants for intimacy and mutual
aid. The whites, missionaries, conquerors, and traders found this
system not conducive to their ends. Churches demand for prosperity
a flock about the ministrant, business wants customers close to the
store, and government is more powerful where it can harangue and
proclaim, parade before and spy upon its subjects. Individualistic
and segregated domestic circles give rise to tax evasions, feuds,
and moonshining, plots and the growth of strong men. The city is
the corral where humans mill like cattle in a panic, are more easily
ridden down en masse, and become habitual buyers of unnecessary things.
The French, after their bold seizure of the island in the name of
liberty for the earnest friars, and sealing their brave conquest in
the blood of the obstinate Polynesian who had hated to learn a new
liturgy and to unlearn his old Protestant songs, feared that the
dispersion of the people upon their little plantations, to which
they were greatly attached, would make their Frenchifying a long
task. So, about sixty years ago, a governor, who, ten thousand miles
from his superiors, with an exchange of letters taking many months,
was an autocrat, decided that all the people of the same region must
be huddled in a village. His name was Gaultier de la Richerie. His
office was snatched from him by another politician before he could
carry out his plan, and only one village exemplified it. In all the
districts I had passed through from Papeete, while in each was the
knot of chefferie, churches, stores, and perhaps a house or two, the
other residences stretched along the entire length of the political
divisions, from six to eight miles.
I was approaching the exception, Tautira, which, though farthest of
all from the palace of the governor, had been chosen for the first
experiment, and which had adapted its life to the paternal will of
M. de la Richerie, now long since laid in the bosom of Père Lachaise.
The estimable troubadour, Brault, had advised me of the history of
Tautira. It was seldom visited by white tourists, as even the post
brought by the diligence ended at Taravao, and letters for farther
on were carried afoot by the mutoi, or postman-policeman of the
adjoining district, who handed on to his contiguous confrère those
for more distant confines. But for centuries Tautira was known as a
focus of the wise, of priests, sorcerers, and doctors, and, said the
knowing Brault, especially of the dancers, and those who, he explained,
under the banner of Venus.
Ont vu maintes batailles
Et reçu nombre d'entailles
Depuis les pieds jusqu'au front.
The little boy and I chatted as the horse ambled at will, occasionally
urged to a trot by a shaking of the reins. The country as we progressed
became far more beautiful than that behind. A new wildness, not fierce
and rugged as between Vaiere and Puforatoai, but gentler and more
inviting, preluded the exquisite setting of the village. We had to
ford a stream three or four feet deep, the Vaitapiha, and the struggle
through it was a rare pleasure, the child on the back of the animal,
and I with the reins and a purau twig directing and commanding in
vain. We had to leap into the water and remove a boulder or two that
stymied the wheels. When we had pulled through to the opposite shore,
I was reduced to a dry pareu, and in it alone, barefooted, I reached
the rustic paradise, the loveliness of which was to content me more
than any spot except the strangely fascinating valley of Atuona in
the sad isle of Hiva-Oa.
In a delta formed by the Vaitapiha the settlement lay among tents
of verdure. For a mile it sprawled around a small point of land
which thrust out into the sea, and which was guarded by the most
wonderful of walls, a reef of madrepore, as solid as granite and sixty
feet wide. The road was arched by splendid trees of many kinds, and
facing it, every several hundred feet, was a home. Many of these were
cottages in modern style, but a dozen or so were the true Tahitian
faré, of bamboo and thatch. All were covered with flowering vines,
and surrounded by many fruiting trees.
"Tautira nei!" announced my coachman. "Tautira is here!"
He pulled up the horse. I had not given any thought to my lodging,
and I jumped out and looked around. The brook curved about a mango
grove, and under its high trees was a new native house, a replica
of the commodious dwellings of old days. I walked into the grove,
and was admiring the careful, but charming, arrangements of ferns
and orchids, which, though brought from the forests, had been fitted
into the scene to simulate a natural environment. All of a sudden
a something I could not see hurled itself from a limb upon my head,
and two affrighting paws seized my right ear and my hair, grown long
at Mataiea, and tried to tear them out by the roots, while at the
same time many fierce teeth closed, though without much effect, on
my tough and weathered shoulder. In horror at the attack, I covered
yards in two bounds, and my assailant was torn from its hold upon me.
I then turned and saw that it was a monkey tied to a rope fastened to
the limb of the tree. He stood upright on the ground, his jaws agape,
and a look of devilish glee upon his uncannily manlike face. At the
same moment a white man ran from the house and called in English:
"You damned little scoundrel! How often have I whipped you for
that same trick! I would better have left you in the slums in San
Francisco."
And then apologetically to me:
"I ought to kill him for that. He's a devil, that monkey. He has
bitten all the children around here, has killed all my chickens,
and raised more hell in this village than the whole population put
together. I swear, I believe he just enjoys being mean. Come in and
have a snifter after that greeting! Did he hurt you?"
My would-be host was himself a very striking somebody. He wore only
a pareu, as I, of scarlet muslin, with the William Morris design,
but he had wound his about so that it was a mere ornamental triangle
upon his tall, powerful, statuesque body. His chest and back had a
growth of red-gold hair, which, with his bronzed skin, his red-gold
beard, dark curls over a high forehead, handsome nose, and blue
eyes, made him all of the same color scheme. He was without doubt as
near to a Greek deity in life, a Dionysus, as one could imagine. He
had two flaming hibiscus blossoms over his ears, and he looked in
his late twenties. Accustomed as I was to semi-nudity and to white
men's return to nature, I had never seen a man who so well fitted
into the landscape as the owner of the ape. He was the faun to the
curling locks and the pointed ears, with not a trace of the satyr;
all youth and grace and radiance.
He walked on before me to the faré, and, opening the door, bade me
welcome. The house differed from the aboriginal in a wooden floor and
three walls of wire screen above four feet of wainscot. The roof was
lofty, of plaited pandanus-leaves, with large spaces under the eaves
for the circulation of air; but the immediate suggestion was of an
aviary, a cage thirty feet square. Attached to this room was a lean-to
kitchen, and near by, hidden behind the cage, was another native
house for sleeping. The aviary was the living- and dining-quarters,
protected from all insect pests, and an arbor covered with vines led
to the water.
Many canvases were about, on an easel an unfinished group of three
Tahitian boys, and a case of books against the one solid wall.
Half a dozen Tahitian youths were lolling outside in the shade, and
one, at the request of the host, led up the horse and the boy who
guarded it. The child skirted the circumference of the monkey's swing,
and then, a few feet away, squatted to regard the animal with intense
surprise and interest.
"Uritaata," he said; "I never saw one before, but I have read in my
school-book that they have those dogmen in French colonies."
Uri means dog and taata man, and the compound name was that which
sprang to the lips of the Tahitians on seeing a monkey, just as they
called the horse puaa horo fenua, the pig that runs on the earth, and
the goat, horo niho, the pig with horns. The pig and the dog were the
only land mammals they knew before the white arrived. The race-track
near Papeete was puaa horo fenua faa titi auraa. If a pig could talk,
he would say that man was a wickeder and stronger pig. Jehovah has
whiskers like a Rabbi. The Rabbis made him like themselves. Man has
no other ideal.
The Tahitian youth addressed the Greek god as T'yonni, which was
an effort to say John, and I adopted it instanter, as he did my
own Maru. T'yonni said that Uritaata was the bane of his existence
at Tautira. After building his faré he had been called to America,
and had danced in Chinatown the night before his steamship departed
for his return to Papeete. He remembered obscurely drinking grappo
with a deep-sea sailor, and had awakened in his berth, the vessel
already at sea, and Uritaata asleep at his feet. Many Tahitians, he
said, had never seen such a fabulous brute, and T'yonni had stirred
in them a mood of dissatisfaction by telling that their forefathers
had descended from similar beings.
"How about Atamu and Eva?" they had asked the pastors.
Those conservatists had replied emphatically that Adam and Eve, the
first man and woman, were created by God, which agreed thoroughly with
the Tahitian legends, and after that T'yonni's generosity was ranked
higher than his knowledge. He laughed over the stories as we sat at
breakfast with my coachman in the kitchen. T'yonni said that the deacon
of the Protestant church expressed a belief that the Paumotuans or
even the French might have followed the Darwinian course of descent,
but that Tahitians could not swallow a doctrine that linked them in
relationship with Uritaata. The Tongans, Polynesians like themselves,
had a tradition that God made the Tongan first, then the pig, and
lastly the white man.
"He quoted the Tongan with compassion for me," said T'yonni. "And now
about a place where you can live. Choti, a painter, whose pictures
you see around here, lives with the school-teacher up the road, and
he might find you a place. He's an American, as I am, and I suppose
you, too."
I raised my glass to our native land, and finding that the boy of
Taravao had eaten his fill of fei and fish, I said ariana to T'yonni,
and drove to Choti's. The painter was on the veranda of a cottage,
finishing the late breakfast. He received me with enthusiasm. Tall,
very spare, and his skin pale despite his wearing only a pareu
and never a hat, Choti's black eyes shone under long, black hair,
and over a Montmartre whisker that covered his boyish face from his
chiseled nose.
"Hello!" he said. "Come and have déjeuner?"
The manner of both T'yonni and Choti, while hospitable, and their
glances at my bags, showed a probable wonderment of my intentions.
Was I an average tourist or loafer come to put an unknown quantity in
their smoothly working problem of a pleasant life in this Eden? The
artist must have looked me over for indications of familiarity with
brush and palette.
I replied to Choti that I had breakfasted with T'yonni, and he smiled
at my knowledge of his friend's Tautira name.
"How about getting an apartment or a suite of rooms?" I inquired.
Choti sucked the last particle of poi from his forefinger,
dipped it into a shell of water, shook hands, and against my
pleadings, accompanied me to the house of Ori-a-Ori, the chief of
the district. The chief, an excessively tall man, quite six and a
half feet and big all over, but not fat, like many natives, was very
dark and slightly grizzled. He had a singular solemnity of address,
a benignity and detachment which were the externals of a thoughtful,
simple, generous nature, no longer interested deeply in trifles. His
house was toward the farther end of the main street, and set upon a
spacious lawn a hundred feet from the street, which, by the same token,
was also a lawn, for there was no sign of the unadorned earth. So
little wheeled traffic was there that bare feet walked on a matting
of grass and plants as soft as seaweed on the beach. The street was
bordered with cocoanuts and pandanus, and the chief's dwelling had
about it breadfruit, papayas, and cocoanuts. The grounds were divided
from neighbors' parks by hedges of tiare Tahiti, gardenias, roses,
and red and white oleanders. I drew in their perfume as Ori-a-Ori said,
"Ia ora na!" and took and held my hand a moment, while his grave eyes
studied my face in all kindliness.
Choti put him the question of my habitation, and he instantly offered
me either a room in his own house or a small, native building on the
opposite side of the road and nearer the beach. We walked over, and
found it unoccupied. It was a bird-cage, all one room, with a thatch
of pandanus and a floor of dried grass covered with mats. The walls
were of split bamboo, like reeds, and the sun and air penetrated it
through and through; but hanging mats were arranged, one as a door,
and others to keep out the rain. It was exactly suited for sleeping and
lounging purposes, and the chief said that I could cook in a convenient
hut. I brought in my belongings, which included bedding, and in half
an hour was enough at home to dismiss the coachman and his equipage,
and to lie down, as was my wont during the heat of the day. I put my
bed in the doorway, and before I fell into my first sleep at Tautira,
filled my eyes with the blue of the shimmering lagoon and the hoary
line of the reef. I sank into dreams, with the slumbrous roar upon
the coral barrier like the thunder of a sea god's rolling drum.