Louis Becke

“ When I came back to Tahiti my guardian took me to Raiatea, where he had a business, and said I must marry him, the beast!”
“Oh, shut up, Tāloi!” growled the deep-voiced Pallou, who sat beside me. “What the deuce does this man care about your doings?”
“Shut up yourself, you brute! Can’t I talk to any one I like, you turtle-headed fool? Am I not a good wife to you, you great, over-grown savage? Won’t you let a poor devil of a woman talk a little? Look here, Tom, do you see that flash jacket he’s wearing? ”

“ A month later we all three left Rotoava, and Pallou and Tāloi went ashore at one of the Hervey Group, where I gave him charge of a station with a small stock of trade, and we sailed away eastward to Pitcairn and Easter Islands.
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Pallou did a good business, and was well liked; and some seven months afterwards, when we were at Maga Reva, in the Gambier Group, I got a letter from him. “Business goes well,” he wrote, “but Tāloi is ill; I think she will die. You will find everything square, though, when you come.” ”

“ PALLOU’S TALOI A MEMORY OF THE PAUMOTUS I stayed once at Rotoava—in the Low Archipelago, Eastern Polynesia—while suffering from injuries received in a boat accident one wild night. My host, the Rotoava trader, was a sociable old pirate, whose convivial soul would never let him drink alone. He was by trade a boat-builder, having had, in his early days, a shed at Miller’s Point, in Sydney, where he made money and married a wife. But this latter event was poor Tom Oscott’s undoing, and in the end he took his chest of tools on board the Thyra trading brig, and sailed away to Polynesia. ”