Frederick O'Brien

“ Nature had spent its richest colors and scents, its rarest shapes and oddest forms, for bird and insect, star and sun, to look upon and rejoice in, and with no count of man. In her grandest or most subtle manifestations, nature had no thought to suit herself to man, and only as he adapted himself to her thousand smiles and frowns, could he remain alive upon an inconsequential planet which was nothing with the blazing star now going down in the west. ”

“ With what delight I returned to lazy days in Atuona Valley, lounging on the black paepae of my own small blue cabin in the shadow of Temiteu, idling on the sun-warm sands of the familiar beach, walking the remembered road between banana hedges heavy with yellowing fruit! The heart of man puts down roots wherever it rests; it is perhaps this sense of home that gives the zest to wandering, for new experiences gain their value from contrast with the old, and one must have felt the bondage, however light, of emotion and habit before he can know the joy of freedom from it. ”

“ The thrills of adventure upon the sea and in the shadowy glens, the odors of rare and sweet flowers, the memories of lovable humans, are here written to keep them alive in my heart, and to share them with my friends.
Life is not real. It is an illusion, a screen upon which each one writes the reactions upon himself of his sensory knowledge. The individual is the moving camera, and what he calls life is his projection of the panorama about him—not more actual than the figures and storms upon the cinema screen. ”

“ Drums were beating all the morning, thrilling the valley and mountain-sides with their barbaric boom-boom. The savage beat of them quickened the blood, stirring memories older than mankind, waking wild and primitive instincts. Toho's eyes gleamed, and her toes curled and uncurled like those of a cat, while she told me that the afternoon would see an old dance, a drama of the sea, of war, and feasting such as the islands had known before the whites came. ”

“ A poetic mood only could paint the swiftly changing panorama as the schooner on its seaward tacks moved slowly under the faint vesper breeze; the mood of a diarist could tell how “the sun setting behind Moorea in a brilliant saffron sky, splashed with small golden and mauve-colored clouds, threw boldly forward in a clear-cut, opaque purple mass that fantastically pinnacled island, near the summit of whose highest peak there glittered, star-like, a speck of light—the sky seen through a hole pierced in the mountain. ”

“ It was a picture of which artist's dream, the naked girl laughing in the torrents of transparent water, the wet crimson blossoms washing from her drowned hair, and beneath the striped shade of the palm-trunks her simple, savage companions waiting their turn, squatting on the sand or crowded on the canoe, their loins wrapped in crimson and blue and yellow pareus. Behind them all the mountains rose steeply, a mass of brilliant green jungle growth, and before them, across the rim of shining white sand, spread the wide blue sea. ”

“ When it comes on dark we feel the wind roaring louder about us, and we hear the cries of those who are in other trees. Then far out on the reef we hear the pounding of the sea and the waves begin more and more to come over the atoll until they cover it deeper and deeper, and each succeeding wave climbs higher and higher toward where we cling. We know that soon there will come a wave whose teeth will tear us from the tree. ”

“ Our way led up heights of marvelous beauty, along the edges of deep defiles that opened below our feet like valleys of Paradise. The candlenut, the ama, with its lilac bloom, the hibiscus and pandanus, green and glossy, the petavii, a kind of banana the curving fronds of which spread high in air, the snake-plant, makomako, a yellow-flowered shrub, and many others none of us could name, carpeted the farther mountain-sides with brilliant colors. ”

“ Time that had led man from the anthropoid to the artist had betrayed Gauguin. He had yielded to the impulse we all feel at times, and had tried to escape from the cage formed by heredity, habits, and the thoughts of his countrymen. Space he had conquered, and in these wilds was hidden from the eyes of civilization, but time he could not blot out, for he was of his age, and even its leader in the evolution of painting. The savage in man he let take control of himself, or willed it to be, and was spoiled by the inexorable grasp upon him of his forebears and his decades of Europe. ”

“ Night fishing has its attractions in these tropics, if only for the freedom from severe heat, the glory of the moonlight or starlight, and the waking dreams that come to one upon the sea, when the canoe rests tranquil, the torch blazes, and the fish swim to meet the harpoon. The night was moonless, but the sea was covered with phosphorescence, sometimes a glittering expanse of light, and again black as velvet except where our canoe moved gently through a soft and glamorous surface of sparkling jewels. ”

“ In all the world those gems had been a subject of romance, and legend had draped their search with a myriad marvels. Poets and fictionists in many tongues had embroidered their gossamer fabric with these exquisite lures, the ornament of beauty, the treasures of queen and odalisque, mondaine and dancer, image and shrine, since humans began to adorn themselves with more delicate things than the skins and teeth of animals. ”

“ That gaunt, dark shore itself recalls that the history of the Marquesas is written in blood, a black spot on the white race. It is a history of evil wrought by civilization, of curses heaped on a strange, simple people by men who sought to exploit them or to mold them to another pattern, who destroyed their customs and their happiness and left them to die, apathetic, wretched, hardly knowing their own miserable plight. ”

“ The beauty parlors of our cities were matched by the steam baths, the use of saffron, of oils, and of massage, and by weeks or even months of preparation before some great festival. To burst upon the assembled clan, white as the sea-foam, with skin as smooth as a polished calabash, hair oiled and wreathed, and body rounded from dancing practice and much sleep, and to set beating wildly the pulses of the young men, so that, strive as they might to remain mute, they would be forced to yield mad plaudits, was a result worth months of effort. ”

“ Yet all around us there was life—life in a thousand varying forms, filling the sea and the air. On calm mornings the swelling waves were splashed by myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. ”

“ An all-inclusive tombstone, for there was no other, but, instead, banana-plants, badamiers, vi-apples, and chile peppers, the fiery-red pods of the latter bright against the green and black. Behind the burial-place were two great aoa trees, giant banyans that must have been there when the first adventurous white cast anchor in these waters. In the lessening light, they had a mysterious air of life in death; they were moribund with age, twisted and gnarled like those century-old Mission Indians of California who sit outside their adobe hovels and show a thousand wrinkles on their naked bodies. ”

“ There they were met by arriving guests, and the sound of laughter and splashing came up to us as darkness closed upon the paepae and the torches were lit.
Lights were coming out like stars up the dark valley as each household made its vesper fire to roast breadfruit or broil fish, and lanterns were hung upon the bamboo palisades that marked the limits of property or confined favorite pigs. A cool breeze rose and rustled the fronds of cocoanut and bamboo, bringing from forest depths a clean, earthy odor. ”

“ We lived simply, becoming near-to-nature folk, but we had plenty. First, we ate popo, tiny fish we had snared in our traps, and which we swallowed raw, after a soaking in the juice of limes. With our bonito steak we had broiled cocoanut-meat, and for drink we opened the wondrous chalices of the green nuts and enjoyed the cool wine. There was no breadfruit, for these islands of stone afforded no nourishment to such delicate and rich plants. But we had ship’s biscuit from the schooner, and for desert a pot of loganberry jam. Nohea, his stomach full, sat contemplatively on his haunches. ”

“ Slowly we crept into the wide Bay of Traitors and felt our way into the anchorage of Taha-Uka, a long and narrow passage between frowning cliffs, spray-dashed walls of granite lashed fiercely by the sea. All along the bluffs were cocoanut-palms, magnificent, waving their green fronds in the breeze. Darker green, the mountains towered above them, and far on the higher slopes we saw wild goats leaping from crag to crag and wild horses running in the upper valleys. ”

“ I looked from my mat upon the paepae of Seventh Man Who Wallows to see Vanquished Often by the Vai Puna, the spring of Vaitahu. She had taken off her ahu or tunic of pink muslin and bent over to receive the full stream of cool water from the hills which flowed through the bamboo pipes. Her beautiful body, the blood mantling under her silken skin, perfect in development at thirteen years, glowed in the dazzling light and under the silvery cascade, and her long, unconfined hair shone red-gold in the sunbeams. ”

“ One stiff ache from head to foot, I lay ignominiously on the sand, and watched Exploding Eggs, with a piece of box not bigger than a fat man's shirt-front, take wave after wave, standing on the board, dashing far across the breakers to the shore, with never a failure, while Gedge's little half-breed daughter, a beautiful fairy-like creature, darted upon the sea as a butterfly upon a zephyr. ”

“ The crash of the surf upon the outer reef, the waving of the breeze-stirred cocoanuts, the flight of a solitary bird, contrasted with the marvelous fabrication of man, the metal ship, thrown by a toss of the sea and a puff of the wind among these evidences of a beautiful yet deadly design.
The Saint François crept along the coast of the atoll and anchored opposite the pass, a good mile from the breakers. Everybody was on deck, the black-gowned nuns with Mademoiselle Narbonne—she also in a tunic of religious hue. Since we had left Nuku-hiva they had not appeared. ”

“ We who have become refined and diverse in our musical expression, using a dozen or scores of instruments to interpret our subtle emotions, cannot know the primitive and savage exaltation that surges through the veins when the war-drum beats. To the Marquesans it has ever been a summons to action, an inspiration to daring and bloody deeds, the call of the war-gods, the frenzy of the dance. Born of the thunder, speaking with the voice of the storm and the cataract, it rouses in man the beast with quivering nostrils and lashing tail who was part of the forest and the night. ”

“ After so many months in the frowning islands of the war fleet, with their thunderous headlands, gleaming streams, and green and black valleys, the spectacle of 483the slender ring of white sand and coral, the verdant banners of this first of the Low Islands lying flat upon the jeweled waters, aroused in me again sensations of wonder at the ineffable variety of creation; the myriad-mindedness of the Creator. ”

“ Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows In The Mire. A laughing Juno of thirty years, large and rounded as a breadfruit-tree, more than six feet in height, with a mass of blue-black hair and teeth that flashed white as a fresh-opened cocoanut, she rose from her mat on the paepae and rubbed my nose ceremoniously with hers. Clothed in a necklace of false pearls and a brilliantly scarlet loincloth, she was truly a barbaric figure, yet in her eye I beheld that instant preoccupation with household matters that greets the unexpected guest the world over. ”

“ A belle might think it ungenerous to cover too much, and an old or homely woman find the entire surface too scant. When human nature has freest fling, prudery is the fig-leaf of ugliness, here, as in the salon of Mayfair, or behind the footlights of Broadway.
For the men, while the pareu, always as now, was the common apparel, they had a hundred ornaments, in a diversity more numerable than those of the females. Whenever man has not sacrificed his masculine craving for adornment to religious or economic pressure, he is the gaudier of the sexes. ”

“ Marvels do not seem marvelous to men to live among them.
I lay long awake on deck, watching the eerily lighted sea and the great stars that hung low in the sky, and to my fancy it seemed that the air had changed, that some breath from the isles before us had softened the salty tang of the sea-breeze.
Land loomed at daybreak, dark, gloomy, and inhospitable. Rain fell drearily as we passed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands sighted from the south. ”

“ Well might the Paumotuan in his frail fishing-canoe dread the sea-devil! He had known him rise beneath his pirogue, and with a blow of his fearful fins shatter fisherman and craft. Not vicious in pursuit of man as the shark, or lithe and able to impale his victims as the swordfish, yet more terrible when aroused by the impotent Paumotuan, the “winged devil of the deep passes” stood for all that was perilous and awesome among the beasts of the ocean. ”