Mystic Isles of the South Seas. by Frederick O\'Brien

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By

Frederick O'Brien

Ia Ora Na!

This is a simple record of my days and nights, my thoughts and dreams,
in the mystic isles of the South Seas, written without authority
of science or exactitude of knowledge. These are merely the vivid
impressions of my life in Tahiti and Moorea, the merriest, most
fascinating world of all the cosmos; of the songs I sang, the dances
I danced, the men and women, white and tawny, with whom I was joyous
or melancholy; the adventures at sea or on the reef, upon the sapphire
lagoon, and on the silver beaches of the most beautiful of tropics.

In this volume are no discoveries unless in the heart of the human. I
went to the islands below the equator with one thought--to play. All
that I have set down here is the profit of that spirit.

The soul of man is afflicted by the machine he has fashioned through
the ages to achieve his triumph over matter. In this light chronicle
I would offer the reader an anodyne for a few hours, of transport
to the other side of our sphere, where are the loveliest scenes the
eyes may find upon the round of the globe, the gentlest climate of
all the latitudes, the most whimsical whites, and the dearest savages
I have known.

"Mystic Isles of the South Seas" precedes in experience my former book,
"White Shadows in the South Seas," and will be followed by "Atolls of
the Sun," which will be the account of a visit to, and a dwelling on,
the blazing coral wreaths of the Dangerous Archipelago, where the
strange is commonplace, and the marvel is the probability of the hour.

These three volumes will cover the period I spent during three
journeys with the remnants of the most amazing of uncivilized races,
whose discovery startled the old world, and whom another generation
will cease to know.

Tirara!

Maru-tane.

Kaoha, Sausalito, California.

In this book the reader may be tempted to stumble over some foreign
words. I have put them in only when necessary, to give the color and
rhythm of Tahiti. The Tahitian words are very easily pronounced and
they are music in the mouth of any one who sounds them properly. Every
letter and syllable is pronounced plainly. The letters have the Latin
value and if one will remember this in reading, the Tahitian words
will flow mellifluously. For instance, "tane" is pronounced "tah-nay,"
"maru" is pronounced "mah-ru." "Tiare" is "tee-ah-ray." The Tahitian
language is dying fast, as are the Tahitians. Its beauties are worth
the few efforts necessary for the reader to scan them.

Frederick O'Brien.

Contents

Chapter I

Departure from San Francisco--Nature man left behind--Fellow-passengers
on the Noa-Noa--Tragedy of the Chinese pundit--Strange stories of
the South Seas--The Tahitian Hula

Chapter II

The Discovery of Tahiti--Marvelous isles and people--Hailed by a
wind-jammer--Middle of the voyage--Tahiti on the horizon--Ashore
in Papeete

Chapter III

Description of Tahiti--A volcanic rock and coral reef--Beauty of
the scenery--Papeete the center of the South Seas--Appearance of
the Tahitians

Chapter IV

The Tiare Hotel--Lovaina the hostess, the best-known woman in the
South Seas--Her strange menage--The Dummy--A one-sided tryst--An
old-fashioned cocktail--The Argentine training ship

Chapter V

The Parc de Bougainville--Ivan Stroganoff--He tells me the history
of Tahiti--He berates the Tahitians--Wants me to start a newspaper

Chapter VI

The Cercle Bougainville--Officialdom in Tahiti--My first visit to the
Bougainville--Skippers and merchants--A song and a drink--The flavor
of the South Seas--Rumors of war

Chapter VII

The Noa-Noa comes to port--Papeete en fete--Rare scene at the Tiare
Hotel--The New Year celebrated--Excitement at the wharf--Battle of
the Limes and Coal

Chapter VIII

Gossip in Papeete--Moorea, a near-by island--A two-days' excursion
there--Magnificent scenery from the sea--Island of fairy folk--Landing
and preparation for the feast--The First Christian Mission--A canoe
on the lagoon--Beauties of the sea-garden

Chapter IX

The Arearea in the pavilion--Raw fish and baked feis--Llewellyn,
the Master of the Revel; Kelly, the I. W. W. and his himene--The
Upaupahura--Landers and Mamoe prove experts--The return to Papeete

Chapter X

The storm on the lagoon; making safe the schooners--A talk on missing
ships--A singular coincidence--Arrival of three of the crew of the
shipwrecked El Dorado--The Dutchman's Story--Easter Island

Chapter XI

I move to the Annexe--Description of the building--The baroness
and her baby--Evoa and Poia--The corals of the lagoon--The Chinese
shrine--The Tahitian sky

Chapter XII

The princess suggests a walk to the falls of Fautaua, where Loti went
with Rarahu--We start in the morning--The suburbs of Papeete--The Pool
of Loti--The birds, trees and plants--A swim in a pool--Arrival at
the cascade--Luncheon and a siesta--We climb the height--The princess
tells of Tahitian women--The Fashoda fright

Chapter XIII

The beach-combers of Papeete--The consuls tell their troubles--A bogus
lord--The American boot-blacks--The cowboy in the hospital--Ormsby,
the supercargo--The death of Tahia--The Christchurch Kid--The Nature
men--Ivan Stroganoff's desire for a new gland

Chapter XIV

The market in Papeete--Coffee at Shin Bung Lung's with a prince--Fish
the chief item--Description of them--The vegetables and fruits--The
fish strike--Rumors of an uprising--Kelly and the I. W. W.--The
mysterious session at Fa'a--Hallelujah! I'm a Bum!--the strike
is broken

Chapter XV

A drive to Papenoo--The chief of Papenoo--A dinner and poker on the
bench--Incidents of the game--Breakfast the next morning--The chief
tells his story--The journey back--The leper child and her doll--The
Alliance Francaise--Bemis and his daughter--The band concert and the
fire--The prize-fight--My bowl of velvet

Chapter XVI

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

Chapter XVII

My life in the house of Tetuanui--Whence came the Polynesians--A
migration from Malaysia--Their legends of the past--Condition of
Tahiti when the white came--The great navigator, Cook--Tetuanui tells
of old Tahiti

Chapter XVIII

The reef and the lagoon--Wonders of marine life--Fishing with spears
and nets--Sponges and hermit crabs--Fish of many colors--Ancient
canoes of Tahiti--A visit to Vaihiria and legends told there

Chapter XIX

The Arioi, minstrels of the tropics--Lovaina tells of the
infanticide--Theories of depopulation--Methods of the Arioi--Destroyed
by missionaries

Chapter XX

Rupert Brooke and I discuss Tahiti--We go to a wedding feast--How the
cloth was spread--What we ate and drank--A Gargantuan feeder--Songs
and dances of passion--The royal feast at Tetuanui's--I leave for
Vairao--Butscher and the Lermantoffs

Chapter XXI

A heathen temple--The great Marae of Oberea--I visit it with Rupert
Brooke and Chief Tetuanui--The Tahitian religion of old--The wisdom
of folly

Chapter XXII

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

Chapter XXIII

My life at Tautira--The way I cook my food--Ancient Tahitian
sports--Swimming and fishing--A night hunt for shrimp and eels

Chapter XXIV

In the days of Captain Cook--The first Spanish
missionaries--Difficulties of converting the heathens--Wars over
Christianity--Ori-a-Ori, the chief, friend of Stevenson--We read the
Bible together--The church and the himene

Chapter XXV

I meet a sorcerer--Power over fire--The mystery of the fiery
furnace--The scene in the forest--Walking over the white-hot
stones--Origin of the rite

Chapter XXVI

Farewell to Tautira--My good-bye feast--Back at the Tiare--A talk
with Lovaina--The Cercle Bougainville--Death of David--My visit to
the cemetery--Off for the Marquesas

MYSTIC ISLES OF THE SOUTH SEAS

Chapter I

Departure from San Francisco--Nature man left behind--Fellow-passengers
on the Noa-Noa--Tragedy of the Chinese pundit--Strange stories of
the South Seas--The Tahitian Hula.

The warning gong had sent all but crew and passengers ashore, though
our ship did not leave the dock. Her great bulk still lay along the
piling, though the gangway was withdrawn. The small groups on the
pier waited tensely for the last words with those departing. These
passengers were inwardly bored with the prolonged farewells, and
wanted to be free to observe their fellow-voyagers and the movement
of the ship. They conversed in shouts with those ashore, but most of
the meanings were lost in the noise of the shuffling of baggage and
freight, the whistling of ferries, and the usual turmoil of the San
Francisco waterfront. I was glad that none had come to see me off,
for I was curious about my unknown companions upon the long traverse
to the South Seas, and I had wilfully put behind me all that America
and Europe held to adventure in the vasts of ocean below the equator.

But the whistle I awaited to sound our leaving was silent. Officers
of the ship rushed about as if bent on relieving her of some
pressing danger, and I caught fragments of orders and replies which
indicated that until a search was completed she could not stir on
her journey. Then I heard cries of anger and protest, and caught
a glimpse of a man whose appearance provoked confusing emotions of
astonishment, admiration, and laughter. He was dressed in a Roman
toga of rough monk's-cloth, and had on sandals. He was being hustled
bodily over the restored gangway, and was resisting valiantly the
second officer, purser, and steward, who were hardly able to move him,
so powerfully was he made. One of his sandals suddenly fell into the
bay. He had seized hold of the rail of the gangway, and the leather
sandal dropped into the water with a slight splash. His grasp of the
rail being broken, he was gradually being pushed, limping, to the
dock. His one bare foot and his half-exposed and shapely body caused
a gale of laughter from the docks and the wharf.

The gangway was quickly withdrawn, and our ship began to move from
the shore. The ejected one stood watching us with sorrow shadowing
his large eyes. He was of middle size; with the form of a David
of Michelangelo, though lithe, and he wore no hat, but had a long,
brown beard, which, with his brown hair, parted in the middle and
falling over his shoulders, and his archaic garb, gave me a singular
shock. It was as if a boyhood vision, or something seen in a painting,
was made real. His eyes were the deepest blue, limpid and appealing,
and I felt like shouting out that if it was a matter of money,
I would aid the man in the toga.

"Christ!" yelled the frantic dock superintendent. "Get that line cast
off and let her go! Are you ceemented to that hooker?"

Instantly before me came Munkacsy's picture of the Master before
Pilate, evoked by the profanity of the wharf boss, but explaining
the vision of a moment ago. The Noa-Noa emitted a cry from her iron
throat. The engines started, and the distance between our deck and
the pier grew as our bow swung toward the Golden Gate. The strange
man who had been put ashore, with his one sandal in his hand, and
holding his torn toga about him, hastened to the nearest stringer of
the wharf and waved good-by to us. It was as if a prophet, or even
Saul of Tarsus, blessed us in our quest. He stood on a tall group of
piles, and called out something indistinguishable.

The passengers hurried below, to return in coats and caps to meet the
wind that blows from China, and the second officer and the surgeon
came by, talking animatedly.

"Oh, yus," said the seaman, chuckling, "'e wuz 'auled out finally. The
beggar 'ad 'id 'imself good and proper this time. 'E wuz in the
linen-closet, and 'ad disguised 'imself as a bundle o' bloomin'
barth-towels. 'E wuz a reg'lar grand Turk, 'e wuz. Blow me, if you'd
'a' knowed 'im from a bale of 'em, 'e wuz so wrapped up in 'em. 'E
almost 'ad us 'ull down this time. The blighter made a bit of a
row, and said as 'ow he just could n't 'elp stowin' aw'y every boat
for T'iti."

"He's a bally nut," said the surgeon. "I say, though, he did take me
back to Sunday school."

I recalled a man who walked the streets of San Francisco carrying a
small sign in his upraised hand, "Christ has come!" He looked neither
to the right nor the left, but bore his curious announcement among the
crowds downtown, which smiled jestingly at him, or looked frightened
at the message. If many had believed him, the panic would have been
illimitable. He was dressed in a brown cassock, and looked like the
blue-eyed man who had been refused passage to my destination. Probably,
that American in the toga and sandals, exiled from the island he loved
so well, had a message for the Tahitians or others of the Polynesian
tribes of the South Seas; Essenism, maybe, or something to do with
virginal beards and long hair, or sandals and the simple life. I
wished he were with us.

We were in the Golden Gate now, that magnificent opening in the
California shores, riven in the eternal conflict of land and water,
and the rending of which made the bay of San Francisco the mightiest
harbor of America. Before our bows lay the immense expanse of the
mysterious Pacific.

The second officer was directing sailors who were snugging down
the decks.

"What did the queer fellow want to go to Tahiti for?" I asked him.

He regarded me a moment in the stolid way of seamen.

"The blighter likes to live on bananas and breadfruit and that kind
of truck," he replied. "The French won't let 'im st'y there. 'E's
too bloomin' nyked. 'E's a nyture man. They chysed 'im out, and
every steamer 'e tries to stow 'imself aw'y. 'E's a bleedin' trial
to these ships."

That was puzzling. Did not these natives of Tahiti themselves wear
little clothing? Who were they to object to a white man doffing the
superfluities of dress in a climate where breadfruit and bananas
grow? Or the French, the governors of Tahiti? Were they, in that
isle so distant from Paris, their capital, practising a puritanism
unknown at home? Was nature so fearful? The figure of the barefooted
man often arose as I watched the Farallones disappear, the last of
land we would see until we arrived at Tahiti, nearly two weeks later.

The days fell away from the calendar; they obliterated themselves
as quietly as our ship's wake to the north, as we planed over the
smooth waters toward the equator. Gradually the passengers took on
character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite
impressions which are almost always right and which, though we modify
them or reverse them by acquaintance, we return to finally.

There was a Chinese, the strangest figure of an Asiatic, with a thin
mustache, and wearing always a black frock-coat and trousers, elastic
gaiters, and a stiff, black hat. His face was long and oval and the
color of old ivory. He had tried to gain admission to Australia and New
Zealand, and then the United States, and had been excluded under some
harsh laws. He was plainly a scholar, but had brought with him from
China a store of curios, probably to enable him to earn money in the
land of the white. Australia had refused him; he had been shut out of
San Francisco, and the very steamship that brought him was compelled
to take him away. He had failed to bring a necessary certificate,
or something of the sort, and the inexorable laws of three Christian
countries had sent him wandering, so that it was inevitable he must
return to China by the route he had come. He was the most mournful of
sights, sitting most of the day in a retired spot, brooding, apparently
over his fate. He never smiled, though I who have been much in China,
tried to stir him from his sadness by exclamations and gestures. His
race has a very keen sense of humor. They see a thousand funny things
about them, and laugh inwardly; but they never see anything amusing
in themselves. The individual man conceives himself a dignified figure
in a world of burlesque.

This man's face was rid of any self-pity. I think he was stunned by
the horror of the thing, that he, a man of Chinese letters, who had
departed from the centuried custom of his pundit caste of remaining
in their own country, who had left his family or clan to increase
his store of lesser knowledge, should be denied the door by these
inferior nations of the West. He might have recalled Chien Lung, a
Manchu emperor, who, when apologized to in writing by a Dutch governor
of Batavia who had murdered almost all the Chinese there, replied that
China had no interest in wretches who had left their native land. A
thousand years ago the Chinese put the soldier lowest in the scale and
the scholar highest, with the man of business as of no importance. And
yet these commercial peoples barred their gates to him! For a number
of days he took his place in the shade of a davited boat, and now
and again he read from a quaint book the Analects of Confucius.

We sailed on Wednesday, and on Sunday made the first tropic, nearly
twenty-three and a half degrees above the line. No rough weather
or unkindly wind had disturbed us from the hour we had left the
"too nyked" man upon the wharf, and Sunday, when I went to take my
bath before breakfast, I felt the soft fingers of the South caress my
body, and looking out upon the purple ocean, whose expanse was barely
dimpled by gleams of silver, I saw flying-fish skimming the crests
of the swinging waves. The officers and stewards appeared in white;
the passengers, too, put off their temperate-zone clothes, and the
decks were gay with color. We all seemed to feel that we must be in
consonance with the loving nature that had made the sky so blue and
the sea so still.

The Chinese--he was Leung Kai Chu on the list--did not change his
melancholy black. The deck sports were organized, ship tennis, quoits,
and golf, and the disks rattled about his feet; but though he often
moved his chair to aid those seeking a lost quoit or ring, and bowed
ceremoniously to those who begged his pardon for bothering him, he
kept his position. I felt a somber sense of gathering tragedy. In
his face was a growing detachment from everything about him; he
hardly knew that we were there, that he ate and slept, and took his
seat by the boat. All of us felt this, but with many it meant merely
remarking that "the Chink is getting off his head," and a wish that
he would not obtrude his grief when we were filled with the joy of
sunny skies and a merry company.

The tragedy came sooner than expected by me. I had cast a thought to
my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate
self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and wonder that
it was so.

It was dusk of Monday. The sun had sunk behind the glowing rim of
the western horizon, and the air was suffused with a trembling rose
color, when Leung Kai Chu tapped at my cabin-door, which gave on the
boat-deck. I opened it, and he bowed, and handed me an image. It was
of porcelain, precious, and I was at a loss to know whether he had
felt the need of a little money and had brought it to sell, or had
been impelled to give it to me because of my feeble efforts to cheer
him. I made a gesture which might have meant payment, but he raised
his hand deprecatingly, and for the first time I saw him smile,
and I was afraid. He bowed, and in the mandarin language invoked
good fortune upon me. He had the aspect of one beyond good and evil,
who had settled life's problem. When he left me I stood wondering,
holding in my hands the majestic god seated upon the tiger, the symbol
of the conquest of the flesh.

I heard a shout, and dropping the image, I rushed aft. Leung Kai
Chu had thrown himself over the rail just by the purser's office. A
steward had seen him fling himself into the white foam. I tore a
gas-buoy from its rack and tossed it toward the screw, in which
direction he must have been swept. A sailor ran to the bridge, the
whistle blew, and the ship shook as the engines ceased revolving,
and then reversed in stopping her. Orders were flung about fast. A man
climbed to the lookout as the first officer began to put a boat into
the water. The crew of it and the second officer were already at the
oars and the tiller as the ropes slid in the blocks. The passengers
came crowding from their cabins, where they were dressing for dinner,
and there were many expressions of surprise and slight terror. Death
aboard ship is terrible in its imminence to all. The buoy, with its
flaming torch, had drifted far to leeward, and the lookout could do no
more than follow its fainting light as the dark of the tropics closed
in. An hour the Noa-Noa lay gently heaving upon the mysterious waters
in which the despairing pundit had sought Nirvana, until the boat
returned with a report that it had picked up the buoy, but had seen no
sign of the man. Doubtless he had been swept into the propellers, but
if not quickly given release in their cyclopean strokes, he may have
watched for a few minutes our vain attempt to negative his fate. If so,
I imagine he smiled again, as when he gave me the god upon the tiger.

As they hoisted the boat to its davits, I found in the lantern light
his ancient volume, the "Analects of Confucius," and claimed it for
my own. It was the very boat he had been accustomed to sit under, and
he must have laid down the ancient philosopher to procure the gift for
me, his grim determination already made. I had caught a glimpse of him
Sunday morning listening to the Christian services conducted by the
captain in the social hall, and when I told the brooding captain that,
he was struck by the idea that perhaps some word of his preachment
might have come to Leung Kai Chu's mind in his agony in the waters,
and that at the last moment he might have repented and been saved.

"One aspiration, and he might be washed as white as snow. 'This day
thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,'" said the commander, who was
known as the parson skipper, dour, but ever on the watch for the
first sign of repentance.

On the other hand, Hallman more nearly stated the general feeling:

"By God, he spoiled sport, that black ghost on deck. He was like a
tupapau, a Polynesian demon."

Hallman was in his early forties, with twenty years of South-Seas
trading, a tall, strong, well-featured, but hard-faced, European,
with thin lips over nearly perfect teeth, and cold, small,
pale-blue eyes. He talked little to men, but isolated young women
whenever possible, and bent over them in attempted gay, but earnest,
converse. He was one of those cold sensualists whose passion is as
that of some animals, insistent, prowling, fierce, but impersonal. An
English South-Sea trader aboard gave me an astonishing light upon him:

"Some dozen years ago," he said, "I made a visit of a few weeks to the
Marquesas Islands. Hallman had kept a store there then for more than
ten years, and had a good part of the business of buying and shipping
copra and selling supplies to the natives and a few whites. He lived
in a shack back of his little store, with his native woman and four or
five half-naked children. They told me queer stories about his madness
for women. They said he would go out of his house and into the jungle
near the trails and would lie in wait. If a woman he coveted passed,
he would seize her, and even if her husband or consort was ahead of
her, in the custom of these people, he would grab her feet, and make
her call out that she was delaying a minute, that her companion was
to go along, and she would catch up in a minute. He had some funny
power over those women. Anyhow, that's the story they told me in those
cannibal islands. And yet, you know, there's something different in
him, because he sent two of his sons to school, and afterward to a
university in Europe. To make it queerer yet, one of them is here
on this ship, in the second class, and wouldn't dare to speak to
his father without being asked. Of course he's a half-Marquesan--the
son--and looks it. I know them all, and only yesterday I heard Hallman
call his son on the main-deck, away from where any one could see him,
and threaten him with 'putting him back in the jungle, where he came
from,' if he appeared again near the first-class space. I tell you,
I'd hate to be in his hands if I was in his way."

Fictionists who take the South Seas for their scenery too often
paint their characters in one tone--black, brown, or yellow, or even
white. Their bad men are super-villains, and yet there are no men
all bad. I know there are no supermen at all, bad or good, but only
that some men do super acts now and then; none has the grand gesture
at all times. Napoleon had a disgraceful affliction at Waterloo,
which rid him of strength, mental and physical; the thief on the
cross became wistful for an unknown delight.

Hallman had said to me in the smoking-room that he never drank alcohol
or smoked tobacco, because "it took the edge off the game." Now,
a poet might say that, or even a moralist, but he was neither.

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