Tahitian

“ He will see on this trip Paea Grotto and cave, also picnic-grounds, eighteen miles from Papeete, Papara, six miles further, is noted for native singing, chanting and dancing. The real Tahitian life is met at Pari and Tautira. On the other side of the island, the road skirts along the coast and ascends five hundred feet above the level of the sea. The drive is a charming one, as the traveler never loses the sight of mountains and hills, and only very seldom, and at long intervals, of the blue Pacific Ocean. ”

“ Little Tahiti cannot boast of such mountains, but its tower-like peaks are very striking. The flat land of the Tahitian coast, extending to a width of several miles — with its chain of villages, its fertile gardens, and its belt of palms, sometimes intersected by stream-fed valleys which open on the sea-shore — forms a most pleasing foreground to the grand amphitheatre-like mountain ranges. A good road surrounds the entire island, which is divided into eighteen districts, each under a chief and a municipal council of which he is president. ”

“ In one of the larger and more pretentious style of native huts, apparently that of a district chief, we read a proclamation, printed in French and Tahitian on opposite columns, announcing to the inhabitants the definitive annexation of the island and its dependencies; and, after pointing out in glowing colours the great advantages accruing to the natives from the complete establishment of French rule, it wound up with, "Vive la France. Vive Tahiti."
One is much struck by the great scarcity of birds in Tahiti. ”

“ A chief difficulty of the makers of the written Polynesian languages was the adjectives. Primitive peoples have not the wealth of these that civilized nations possess, and fine shadings here are often expressed by intonation, grimace, or gesture.
There is no available Tahitian-English lexicon. The London Missionary Society published one before the French seized Tahiti in the forties. It is out of print, and as obsolete as to present-day Tahitian as Dr. Johnson’s once-famous tome is as to English. ”

“ Many are the lives that have been lost gathering the “fei,” but the Tahitian, like all islanders, is something of a fatalist, and the death of one fruit gatherer never stops another from going a-hunting in the very same place next day. ”

“ For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. ”

“ In stature the Tahitian compares well with any other race. The face is expressive of more than ordinary intelligence. The color of the skin varies from almost black to a light yellow. The aquiline nose is commonly seen among them, and there are many varieties of hair and complexion. ”

“ Certainly the Tahitians, as we now see them, are as gentle and affectionate as it is possible for a people to be. Most kind and hospitable, always cheerful and good-natured, easily pleased and amused, finding matter for mirth in every trifle; so that angry words or recriminations are rarely heard, but rather a sound of rippling laughter, which seems here to pervade the very air. A messenger is just going across to Tahiti to take letters, and to fetch any that may have arrived by the schooner from San Francisco. ”

“ They made monumental errors in their monumental toil, errors unavoidably due to their not being philologists, nor even well educated—errors perpetuated and incorporated in the language as finally written. This Tahitian dictionary and grammar formed the basis of all similar books in the Marquesan, Hawaiian, and other dialects. What store of ancient tongues the missionaries had, they put into linguafacturing religious words for the Tahitians. ”

“ These calculations are merely approximative. The Custom House at Papeete has sufficient documents, but it keeps them secret, apparently for political reasons, if we may credit the remark of a Tahitian. "It is not wished to let all the world know that we are not in a prosperous state."
[94] Letter concerning the actual state of the island of Tahiti, addressed to H.M. the Emperor Napoleon III., by Alexander Salmon. London, Effingham Wilson, 1858.
[95] The French garrison in Tahiti and Eimeo (Morea) , including the administrative officials, numbers about 400 men. ”

“ The majority of Tahitian women in pagan days spoke openly, and without the slightest shame, of having put to death half-a-dozen helpless innocents, while some confessed to ten or twelve; and when the missionaries and their wives implored these women to spare their little ones, yet unborn, their words were heard with derision, and the cruel mothers would return to boast how they had obeyed the custom of the isles, in defiance of white men's counsel. ”

“ McHenry and I were the only passengers, and the crew of six Tahitians was ample for all tasks. They were Piri a Tuahine, the boat-steerer; Peretia a Huitofa, Moe a Nahe, Roometua a Terehe, Piha a Teina, and Huahine, with Tamataura, the cook.
The whole forward deck of the schooner was crowded with native men, women, and children, the families of church leaders who were returning to their Paumotu homes after attending a religious festival in Tahiti. They lay huddled at night, sleeping silently in the moonlight and under the stars. ”

“ The Tahitians can hardly ever be said to reflect: they are all impulse; and so, instead of expounding dogmas, the missionaries give them the large type, pleasing cuts, and short and easy lessons of the primer. Hence, anything like a permanent religious impression is seldom or never produced.
In fact, there is, perhaps, no race upon earth, less disposed, by nature, to the monitions of Christianity, than the people of the South Seas. ”

“ Several elements in the foreign population were causing trouble to the natives, these being the traders who sought to bleed the Tahitians of all the little wealth they possessed, the degenerate deserters from ships and other parasitic whites who were a constant source of demoralization, and the sons of the missionaries, who, in general, lacked the altruism of their parents and sought to acquire land and to exploit the Island at the expense of the natives. ”

“ Nothing could persuade the coast natives to venture farther, and Sheldon, with his four Tahitians, knew that it was madness to go on alone. So he stood waist-deep in the grass and looked regretfully across the rolling savannah and the soft-swelling foothills to the Lion’s Head, a massive peak of rock that upreared into the azure from the midmost centre of Guadalcanal, a landmark used for bearings by every coasting mariner, a mountain as yet untrod by the foot of a white man. ”

“ Fair as Tahiti was and Paradise as the French regarded it, they were the first to curse it with that infliction which "civilization" has for centuries brought upon the "savage." Sad Tahiti, land of mountain mist, and murmuring stream, of coral reef and tropic palm, and smiling skies was to be henceforth a pest-house for the simple race that knew her for their home. ”

“ Tahiti is a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker green, in which you divine silent valleys; there is mystery in their sombre depths, down which murmur and plash cool streams, and you feel that in those umbrageous places life from immemorial times has been led according to immemorial ways. ”

“ Tahiti is by far the most famous island in the South Seas; indeed, a variety of causes has made it almost classic. Its natural features alone distinguish it from the surrounding groups. Two round and lofty promontories, whose mountains rise nine thousand feet above the level of the ocean, are connected by a low, narrow isthmus; the whole being some one hundred miles in circuit. From the great central peaks of the larger peninsula--Orohena, Aorai, and Pirohitee--the land radiates on all sides to the sea in sloping green ridges. ”

“ EVERY traveler has extolled the beauty of Tahiti. The Society Islands, of which Tahiti is the principal, are among the most picturesque in the world, and form one of the earliest posts of the London Missionary Society, which began work there in 1796. ”

“ From the days of Bougainville, its discoverer, down to those of "the Earl and the Doctor," who recently visited it, Tahiti has moved the admiration of voyagers by the charms of its scenery. It lifts the summit of its pyramidal mass out of a wealth of luxuriant vegetation, which sweeps down to the very margin of a sea as blue as the sky above it. Cool verdurous valleys slope gently into its mountain recesses, their swelling declivities loaded with groves of bread-fruit and cocoa-nut trees. The inhabitants, physically speaking, are not unworthy of their island-home ”

“ Nothing on earth seems farther away than-the warm blue waves, and flowers that never fade, and shining coral sands of Tahiti. But... there is a steamer running southward before long, and a great sunny city on the other side of the world where the island boats lie waiting at the quays. And one of those island boats, in a month or two, will carry a passenger back to Tahiti—a passenger who ate of the fei three years ago, and went away for ever, but on whom the spell of the magic fruit has worked—after all. ”

“ IT is not easy to analyze the magic which cozens every traveler into believing that he is the first to see Tahiti with clear eyes—one feels that it is made up of nature in a mood of unearthly loveliness; of a sense of ancient and unalterable life; of a realization that strange beliefs persist under a semblance of Christianity; of the lure of a race whose confidence the white man can never fully gain. The mail steamers, the wireless, the traders, the scattering of French officials—these things are a mere play of shadows on the surface. ”

“ You have seen something of the outer islands, where the people are half savage even to-day, still swayed by what we call heathen superstition. Now consider Tahiti, where the people for more than a hundred years have been subjected to exhortations of an intensity almost unparalleled. ”

“ For Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a lovely woman graciously prodigal of her charm and beauty; and nothing can be more conciliatory than the entrance into the harbour at Papeete. The schooners moored to the quay are trim and neat, the little town along the bay is white and urbane, and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt their colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an unashamed violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd that throngs the wharf as the steamer draws alongside is gay and debonair; it is a noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd. ”

“ Fair weather and foul; sunlight, moonlight, and starlight; moments of confidence; oaths of eternal fidelity; plans for the future long enough to crowd a century uncomfortably; relapses, rows, recoveries; then, after many days, the water subsided, and we saw land at last.
Land, God bless it! Long, low coral reefs, with a strip of garden glorifying them; rocks towering out of the sea, palm-crowned, foam-fringed; wreaths of verdure cast upon the bosom of the ocean, for ever fragrant in their imperishable beauty; and, beyond and above them all, gorgeous and glorious Tahiti. ”

“ The visions of Tahiti—clean, sweet Tahiti—were coming to him more frequently. And there were the low Paumotus, and the high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari’s flower-garlanded daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland him with flowers. ”

“ But Tahiti has gone ahead so fast, that I cannot answer for how things are done nowadays. I know that, instead of vegetable plates—i.e., layers of large round hybiscus-leaves—we ate off foreign plates, with knives and forks of best electro-plate, and drank our red wine from clearest crystal glasses, and snowy napkins were not forgotten.
There was a considerable consumption of raw fish, which is considered a very great delicacy, and one for which many foreigners acquire a strong liking. There is no accounting for tastes. ”

“ Morea Island Seen from Tahiti after a Storm. work of washing away the softer rocks, leaving imposing pinnacles of hard basalt such as the sheer precipice Maiao, "The Diadem," at the head of Fautaua valley which lifts its unconquered crest thousands of feet above the soft corroding lavas of the lowlands.
In other places the valleys are spanned by dykes of basalt forming precipices over which the mountain torrents dash in a multitude of graceful cataracts.
The seductive charm of Tahiti is all its own for everywhere the beautiful is wedded to the grand. ”

“ Indeed, it is not where the peaks are highest that Tahiti is loveliest for nowhere in the Pacific do the mountains meet the sea in fairer grace of form and color than at Tautira on the eastern coast of Tahiti-iti. The charmed memory of Tahiti lives only to die with the beholder. ”

“ The burning shores of India and the islands of the South Pacific are the natural homes of the cocoa-palm. It has a special predilection for the sandy beach of Tahiti and the innumerable atoll islands near to and far from this gem of the South Seas. The giant nuts often drop directly into the sea and are carried away by waves and currents from their native soil to strange islands, where they are cast upon the sandy shore, to sprout and prosper for the benefit of other native or visiting tribes. ”