Tahitians

“ The Tahitians, fitting so well into the beauty of their island, gold of skin and crowned with flowers, carrying themselves with dignity, were as far removed as could be imagined from the idea of pagan men. ”

“ Had religion never affected the Paumotuans, their food would have made them a distinct and a restrained people. We all are creatures of our nourishment. The Tahitians had a plentitude of varied and delicious food, a green and sympathetic landscape, a hundred waterfalls and gentle rills. The inhabitants of these low isles had cocoanut and fish as staples, and often their only sustenance for years. ”

“ For instance, the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, in the extreme S.W. part of the Polynesian area, present some differences in physique from the Tahitians, who are, as a rule, taller, fairer, and better looking. In their happy isle, nature provides for most of their wants with very little aid from themselves: the breadfruit, coconut, and
Women of Tahiti, Polynesian type. ”

“ The Sabbath is no ordinary day with the Tahitians. So far as doing any work is concerned, it is scrupulously observed. The canoes are hauled up on the beach; the nets are spread to dry. Passing by the hen-coop huts on the roadside, you find their occupants idle, as usual; but less disposed to gossip. After service, repose broods over the whole island; the valleys reaching inland look stiller than ever.
In short, it is Sunday—their “Taboo Day” ”

“ I was pleased with nothing so much as with the inhabitants. There is a mildness in the expression of their countenances which at once banishes the idea of a savage; and an intelligence which shows that they are advancing in civilisation. The common people, when working, keep the upper part of their bodies quite naked; and it is then that the Tahitians are seen to advantage. They are very tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, and well-proportioned. It has been remarked that it requires little habit to make a dark skin more pleasing and natural to the eye of a European than his own colour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Tahitians are by nature kind, affectionate, and their opinions are easily moulded for good or bad, but many of their customs and habits cling to them in spite of civilization and Christianization, for "how many unjust and wicked things are done from mere habit!" ”

“ It was my privilege during my brief stay in Tahiti to meet Tati Salmon, chief of the Papara district. He is a direct descendant of one of the two noble families of the island, the Tevas, and one of the most prominent and influential citizens of the island. I asked him to what race the Tahitians belonged. To this question he had a ready reply. He said: "We belong to no race; man was created here ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was in this bay that the ships of the early voyagers found a resting-place, and where on its shore the first white men touched the soil of Tahiti and came face to face with a people who had never heard of a world outside of the islands of the Pacific. The scenery all along this drive is truly tropical. The floral wealth is great and its variety endless. ”

“ Wherefore, because of the blight cast upon Tahiti’s wonderful beauty by the spidery human vermin that infest it, I am minded to write, not of Tahiti, but of the Nature Man. He, at least, is refreshing and wholesome. The spirit that emanates from him is so gentle and sweet that it would harm nothing, hurt nobody’s feelings save the feelings of a predatory and plutocratic capitalist. ”

“ In Tahiti, it was often noticed that men who in the natural state showed neither ability nor eloquence, would in such convulsive delirium burst forth into earnest lofty declamation, declaring the will and answers of the gods, and prophesying future events, in well-knit harangues full of the poetic figure and metaphor of the professional orator. ”

“ The visitor who remains long enough in Tahiti to become acquainted with the natives will find that their greeting, iorana, is verified by their actions. The natives, educated and ignorant, young and old, are polite, friendly and hospitable to a fault. They are fond of making little gifts to strangers, and if these are reciprocated, they are really and honestly grateful. ”

“ Nine Englishmen, mostly rude sailors, with ten Tahitian 143women and a girl, and six Tahitian men,—unevenly divided as to sex, whites and Polynesians unable to converse except meagerly, with totally different inheritance and habits,—were there as the experimenters, with no restraint upon passions or covetings except the feeble check of mutual interests. A hamlet in the ripest civilization has difficulty to govern by these. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death. ”

“ I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity which is found at Tahiti; and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society. Neither is the country itself attractive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A grown person in Tahiti has an eating hour allotted to him twice a day, at 10 A. M. and 5 P. M. My time being up, I returned to the store in an indifferent frame of mind, and upon entering the presence of my employer, who had arrived a moment before me, I was immediately covered with the deep humiliation of servitude and withdrew to an obscure corner, while Monsieur and some naval guests took absinthe unblushingly, which was, of course, proper enough in them. ”

“ Nature did not gift us with a mighty Mekong like Thailand and Vietnam, with their vast and naturally fertile plains. Nature instead put our islands ahead of our neighbours in the path of typhoons from the Pacific. ”

“ The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. ”

“ We must also sympathize with the Whites in Kenya Colony in their opposition to a filling of their country with cheap Hindu labor. As Americans we can understand the Negro and recognize his cheerful qualities, but we can have little sympathy with the Hindu whom we have expressly barred from our Pacific Coast. These Hindus, with the Chinese, have ruined the native races of many of the Polynesian Islands. They have been for ages in contact with the highest civilizations, but have failed to benefit by such contact, either physically, intellectually, or morally. ”

“ On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—when there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. ”

“ The Philippine races, like all the Malays, do not succumb before the foreigner, [60] like the Australians, the Polynesians and the Indians of the New World. ”

“ He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning. ”

“ "I suppose that, after visiting the curious coasts of Arabia and Egypt, the Nautilus will go down the Indian Ocean again, perhaps cross the Channel of Mozambique, perhaps off the Mascarenhas, so as to gain the Cape of Good Hope." ”

“ From a zoological point of view Africa north of the Sahara is now and has been since early Tertiary times a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians while the ancient Egyptians and their modern descendants, the fellaheen, are merely well-marked varieties of this Mediterranean race. ”

“ As I write these lines I lift my eyes and look seaward. I am on the beach of Waikiki on the island of Oahu. Far, in the azure sky, the trade-wind clouds drift low over the blue-green turquoise of the deep sea. Nearer, the sea is emerald and light olive-green. Then comes the reef, where the water is all slaty purple flecked with red. Still nearer are brighter greens and tans, lying in alternate stripes and showing where sandbeds lie between the living coral banks. Through and over and out of these wonderful colours tumbles and thunders a magnificent surf. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Thus, at eighteen, we find him, an English lordling, who could speak no English, and yet who could read and write his native language. Never had he seen a human being other than himself, for the little area traversed by his tribe was watered by no greater river to bring down the savage natives of the interior.
High hills shut it off on three sides, the ocean on the fourth. It was alive with lions and leopards and poisonous snakes. Its untouched mazes of matted jungle had as yet invited no hardy pioneer from the human beasts beyond its frontier. ”