Marquesas Islands

“ About a month later, in June 1791, the French navigator Marchand visited the same islands, and in 1797 the first missionary, William Crook, was landed from the missionary ship Duff. The whole archipelago is now known as the Marquesas, a name which the Spanish Admiral Mendana bestowed on the islands discovered by him in honour of the Marquess de Canete, Viceroy of Peru, by whose order the voyage had been undertaken. [1] [Pg 329]
The islands are of volcanic formation, lofty and mountainous. ”

“ Like most of the Polynesian Islands, the Marquesas are surrounded with coral reefs; but these are not so large as is generally the case, so that, although the navigation among them is not so difficult as in many islands, the ships do not find that protection from storms which is afforded by the great coral reefs of other islands.
The inhabitants are splendid specimens of humanity, the men being remarkable for their gigantic size, great strength, and fine shape, which emulates those of the ancient Greek statues. ”

“ Finding it impossible to obtain the number of pigs he required at this port, the captain decided upon visiting the remaining bays of Santa Cristina Island, which he found better populated, more fertile, and more picturesque than that of Madre-de-Dios.
The stay of the English in the Marquesas Islands had been too short to allow of accurate observations of the manners and customs of the inhabitants. We will therefore make a few extracts from the description given by Etienne Marchand.
"These natives are tall, strong, and active. ”

“ Christina, which is most convenient for obtaining wood and water.
It is remarkable, with respect to the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands, that collectively taken, they are, without exception the finest race of people in this sea. Perhaps they surpass all other nations in symmetry of form, and regularity of features. It is plain, however, from the affinity of their language to that of Otaheite and the Society Isles, that they are of the same origin. Of this affinity the English were fully sensible, though they could not converse with them; but Oedidee was capable of doing it tolerably well. ”

“ The principal groups of islands included in Polynesia are New Zealand, the Friendly or Tonga Islands, the Samoan or Navigators Islands, the Hervey or Cook Islands, the Society Islands, including Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Hawaii or the Sandwich Islands. ”

“ It would be materially impossible, we are told, unless at enormous and ruinous cost, to make a road or even a mule-path round any of the Marquesas Islands, as has been done in Tahiti. [5]
Despite their situation in the heart of the tropics, the Marquesas enjoy an extremely healthy climate subject to none of the inconveniences usually incidental to countries in the same latitude; endemic and epidemic diseases are alike unknown. European soldiers can work in the sun without accident and without exhaustion. [6] The climate has been described as an eternal spring, without winter or even autumn ”

“ Marprelate Tracts, a series of clever but scurrilous tracts published under the name of Martin Marprelate, but which are the work of different writers in the time of Elizabeth against prelacy, and which gave rise to great excitement and some inquisition as to their authorship.
Marque. See Letter of Marque.
Marquesas Islands (5) , a group of 13 small volcanic mountainous islands in the S. Pacific, 3600 m. W. of Peru, under French protection since 1842, are peopled by a handsome but savage race, which is rapidly dying out; Chinese immigrants grow cotton ”

“ The fresh breath of nature was too foul with the worst of civilization.
482 CHAPTER XXIII McHenry gets a caning—The fear of the dead—A visit to the grave of Mapuhi—En voyage.
IMAGINE my delight when the captain of the Saint François set our course for Takaroa, the atoll of Mapuhi, Nohea, and the crippled diver who had possessed the great pearl of Pukapuka! The Marquesas Islands are only eight hundred miles from the Society Islands, of which Tahiti is one, and between the Marquesas and the Society Islands lie the strewn eighty atolls of the Iles Dangereuses or Paumotu group. ”

“ We should not kill and eat a man or two whom we caught on board our ship; but if it suited our purposes, we should very likely take possession of a whole island or group of islands, and kill the people in a legal way, if they resisted; as is being done even now, by enlightened France, at the Marquesas and Society Islands. ”

“ The working-tools of these people are but very mean, and, like those of all the other islanders we have visited in this ocean, made of stone, bone, shells, &c. They set but little value on iron or iron tools, which is the more extraordinary, as they know their use; but the reason may be, their having but little occasion for them.
CHAPTER IX. The Passage from Easter Island to the Marquesas Islands. Transactions and Incidents which happened while the Ship lay in Madre de Dios, or Resolution Bay, in the Island of St Christina. ”

“ Man-eating among kindly men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm. And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in the Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter Island, we find the same race perishing like flies. ”

“ The Marquesas, discovered by Mandana, were visited by Captain Cook in 1774, by the French in 1789, and particularly and carefully examined during the missionary voyage of Captain Wilson in 1797. Captain Wallis, who sailed with Captain Carteret in 1766, but was afterwards separated from him in his course across the South Pacific, discovered several islands, particularly Otaheite; to this and the neighbouring islands the name of Society Isles was given. Such are the most important discoveries that have been made in Polynesia during the last century ”

“ They are generally divided into two groups, the Northern and Southern, and the Island of Nookaheeva, where we are going, is in the Northern group. Altogether there are thirteen of the islands, with an area of less than five hundred square miles and a population of about ten thousand.
"Properly the name Marquesas belongs to the Southern group only, as they alone were visited by Mendaña; the Northern group was not known until the American captain discovered it, and therefore we shall insist that they are the Washington Islands." ”

“ Thus in the Marquesas or Washington Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield a supernatural power over the elements; they could give abundant harvests or smite the ground with barrenness; and they could inflict disease or death. Human sacrifices were offered to them to avert their wrath. There were not many of them, at the most one or two in each island. ”

“ The great interest with which the important events lately occurring at the Sandwich, Marquesas, and Society Islands, have been regarded in America and England, and indeed throughout the world, will, he trusts, justify a few otherwise unwarrantable digressions. ”

“ We may allow some consideration to these moral causes in the phenomena which occur in Tahiti, the Sandwich Islands and [430] New Zealand. But how can we apply this explanation to those archipelagoes where the local race has remained dominant, and where, with its ancient mode of life, it has preserved all the traditions of its ancestors? Now this was the case in the Marquesas during the time that M. Jouan and P. Mathias were there; European inhabitants are still rare in the Samoan and Tongan Islands. ”

“ Their chief island is intersected by a mountain-ridge; and the mountain-ridge (like most mountain-ridges) supplies a fierce body of quarrellers.
The natives of the Marquesas speak a greater variety of dialects (or sub-dialects) than the natives of any other group. This has engendered the doctrine that they were colonized from more quarters than one.
Distant though it be the Nukahiva group is the nearest point to—
THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.
Names of islands according to the dialect or orthography followed by Prichard.—Hawaii, Maui, Tahaurawe, Morokini, Ranai, Morokai, Oahu, Tauai, Niihau, Taura. ”

“ This island, although generally called one of the Marquesas, is by some navigators considered as forming one of a distinct cluster, comprising the islands of Ruhooka, Ropo, and Nukuheva; upon which three the appellation of the Washington Group has been bestowed. They form a triangle, and lie within the parallels of 8° 38′′ and 9° 32′′ South latitude and 139° 20′ and 140° 10′ West longitude from Greenwich. ”

“ Sea birds were tolerably numerous, and a few sand snipe were seen. On the weather side of the island, we found a cocoa-nut tree, that, to all appearance, had but recently drifted on shore. Besides the cocoa-nut tree, we found two articles of Indian furniture. That they came from an inhabited island, there can be no doubt, and it is equally certain that the island has never been discovered, as there is none laid down upon the chart, in the direction of the trade winds, from Caroline Island, nearer than the Society Islands. The Marquesas are the nearest to Caroline, of any land known ”

“ Fig. 47.—British Bone Implements.
Isolated in the little island-worlds of the Pacific Ocean, man is found again and again, in a condition which seems to involve all but absolute privation of the materials on which his constructive faculty can operate. The extensive archipelago interposed between the Society and Gambier Islands and the Marquesas, consists exclusively of coral islands. There the native arts are mostly of an inferior character; though their small and slight canoes are propelled with great rapidity by means of a paddle ingeniously formed with a curved blade. ”

“ These are coral islands, slowly raised, but continuous, created by the daily work of polypi. Then this new island will be joined later on to the neighboring groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia, and from thence to the Marquesas.
One day, when I was suggesting this theory to Captain Nemo, he replied coldly:
"The earth does not want new continents, but new men." ”

“ The missionary, alarmed at a disposition that evinced so little respect for his character and personal rights, took his departure by the first opportunity, since which no attempt has been made to convert the natives of the Marquesas to Christianity.
The men of the Marquesas, were, in general, quite naked. But few ornaments were worn by either sex. The women frequently had no other ornament than a small flower, stuck through a slit in their ears. Some of the men wore polished whale's teeth round their necks, and some shell bracelets, but they were not in common use. ”

“ But from all we can learn it will be a long time before his hopes are realized. The Queen is a devout Catholic, while the King is a nominal one, and each missionary has a small flock of followers; but the great majority are as much heathen as ever, and cling firmly to their old superstitions.
"One of the curious customs of the South Sea Islands is the tabu, and it prevails much more strongly at the Marquesas at the present time than anywhere else. ”

“ The huts of the natives were very small, and although in the midst of cultivation and fertility, the inhabitants seemed to be wretchedly poor. They did not appear much more civilized than the natives of the Marquesas; their habitations were certainly less comfortable. Returning to the village, we saw a number of people scraping sticks that looked like our elder, and preserving the inner bark. Upon inquiring its use, they told us it was to catch fish with. ”

“ Some day—perhaps in a future less remote than we like to fancy—nature's careless hand may once more set the stage for a similar experiment, but the people sequestered in those gloomy islands will be of another blood, and the result can never be the same. The Marquesans themselves—if one is to believe the students of antique mankind—were the result of a racial retrogression; their continental forebears knew iron and pottery and the culture of rice—things lost in the eastward push which brought them to the Nine Islands of Iva. ”

“ We have gained political strength, by the increase of our reputation; we have gained real strength, by the reputation of our navy; we have shown Europe, that ten years of war have not exhausted us; and we have enforced our settlement on an island on which, twenty years ago, we durst not venture to look.
These are the gratifications only of honest minds; but there is a time, in which home comes to all. From the present happiness of the publick the patriots themselves may derive advantage. To be harmless though by impotence obtains some degree of kindness ”

“ Markland need not be conceived as of equal size, for in truth it represents at most only the wild and wooded interval between the hopelessly void and barren north and the great habitable, comfortable, and fruitful region stretching far below; but so much of parallelism holds as will forbid us to anchor the name to any one locality on the Newfoundland shore. Doubtless the long sea front of the great island as a whole is entitled to the name. ”

“ Such is the loss of Spain; let us now compute the profit of Britain. We have, by obtaining a disavowal of Buccarreli's expedition, and a restitution of our settlement, maintained the honour of the crown, and the superiority of our influence. Beyond this what have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island, thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island, which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia ”