Frederick O'Brien

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tahauku was a lonely, beautiful place, typical of the Marquesas, isolated, gloomy, but splendid. There were no craft in the bay except two small cutters moored near the foot of the stone stairs. A group of wooden buildings in an extensive clearing lined the road that led along the cliffs, and about it were thousands and thousands of palms, the finest cocoanut-grove that I had ever seen in the South Seas or Asia or India. They were planted regularly, not crowded, but with space for roots and for air. ”

“ Everywhere were the tombs or skeletons of the myriad creatures who had labored and died to construct these footstools of Might. Could man assume that these eons of years and countless births, efforts, and deaths, were for any concern of his? But else, he asked, why were they? To show the boundless power and caprice of the Creator? Was not the world made for humanity?
An atoll was to an island as a comet to a star—a freak or sport in the garden of the sea-gods. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even the patrons of the Palace must have had some vision of this man Mapuhi on the deck of his schooner, his vast chest and arms bare, his hair blown by the wind. Or, emerging from the waters of the lagoon, arising from the plunge to the coral cave where the lethal shark looks for prey. This was what he spoke in face and form to me.
“I had seven nights,” said Mapuhi, “in your great house, and seven days in your streets. The people were like the fish in the lagoon of Pukapuka, where no man seeks them, and where they crowd each other until they kill. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was to these fêtes that the pot-boilers, fakers, and beginners among the talent came; men who would make a sitter a scrawl for a heap of pipi, shells and gewgaws, a few squealing pigs, a roll of tapa, or, most precious of all, a whale’s tooth. Like our second- and third-class painters, our wretched daubers who turn out canvases by the foot (though hand-painted) , these tramps, who, by a dispensation of the priests and a mocking providence, were tapu, not to be attacked in any valley, strolled from tribe to tribe, promising much and giving little. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Volcano and insect combined to make these coral blossoms of the South Seas so different from any other mundane formations that the man with any dreaming in his soul stood awe-struck at the wonder and artistry of nature. ”

“ More than seventy years of wrestling with the devils of the sea and lagoon, and the outcasts of Europe and America, had failed to bow him an inch or to take from him apparently a single attribute of his vigorous manhood except that across his broad face ran a score of wrinkles, which criss-crossed his forehead into diamond panes, and made one know he had learned the secrets of man and wind and water by fearful experience. ”

“ It was set in a cocoanut-grove, the trees so close together that their huge fronds joined and roofed out sky and light. The narrow road along the grove had been raised later, and formed a dike so that with the heavy rains of the season the land all about was a gloomy marsh to which the sun seldom penetrated. The dingy gallery of the house fronting the road had a broken rail and dilapidated stairs, and in the shallow swamp and about the entrance were cast-off articles of household and plantation. ”

“ As I sat under the pandanus thatch of Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire, I recalled what that eminent moralizer, Lecky, had said:
The intense esthetic enthusiasm that prevailed was eminently fitted to raise the most beautiful to honor. In a land and beneath a sky where natural beauty developed to the highest point, supreme physical perfection was crowned by an assembled people. In no other period of the world’s history was the admiration of beauty in all its forms so passionate or so universal. ”