Tamea

“ Tamea persisted, “it makes a great difference—to be half Kanaka. It makes a great difference to a white man like you.”
“It doesn’t make the slightest difference, sweetheart,” he cried, and wondered why he had called her sweetheart. His heart was pounding now, there was a drumming in his ears, he was atremble with the trembling that had shaken him as a zephyr shakes the leaves of a forest that evening on the Moorea after old Gaston had departed for Paliuli and the girl had clung to him, weeping and despairing. ”

“ Larrieau nodded. “Tamea’s mother, Moorea, could walk! You, my young friend, have never seen a woman walk; it is a lost art; our women mince or hop or strut. Moorea was a beautiful woman in point of features. Her hair was a wonderful seal-brown and her skin—well, her skin——”
“Was Tamea’s,” the doctor interrupted.
Gaston of the Beard smiled and nodded. “She was regal of bearing and regal of soul—and the missionaries called her a heathen. For years I kept them out of Riva, with their mummery of morals and religion. ”

“ Marrying an exotic woman like Tamea—a half aborigine—is like marrying any other aborigine, because all aborigines are pigmented. And no matter how transcendent the beauty of a pigmented aborigine—or half-breed aborigine—that beauty fades early. They degenerate physically and mentally. ”

“ An Arab is a Caucasian; so is a Hindoo; but if you marry a woman of Arabic or Hindoo blood and have children by her, your offspring will be Eurasians. Tamea is a half-breed brown white. And she’s not very brown, either—sort of old ivory. She’d pass for a white girl anywhere. People who do not know her blood will say, ‘Isn’t she a marvelous brunette type of beauty!’”
“Well?”
“If she bore you sons, how would you feel if they should grow up to be great, hearty, brown fellows, unmistakably Polynesian, with prehensile great toes, an aversion to work, a penchant for white vices? ”

“ The teachers from Rarotonga had grown into strong, good men and women. Their love for Tamate was like the love of children to a father. The little girls and boys at the village schools rushed to welcome the great white chief and his wife, and shrieked with laughter when they tried to speak the strange words of new tribes.
Many natives too had learned to love Tamate’s Master. All life was changed for them because Tamate had come to New Guinea, and they felt for him a love that was deeper and stronger than their love for life. Often they went with him when they thought it was to death. ”

“ One morning he set sail on the Nieu, which had taken the place of the Harrier, for Cape Blackwood. The natives there, and on the large island near, were very strong and fierce. Tamate knew that he might be killed, but then he knew, too, that if he could win those wild men, he would take away the great barrier between Christ and the tribes who lived round the gulf of water into which the Fly River flowed. If these men were to stop fighting and to listen to the story of Christ, other tribes would be glad to do so too. They would be grateful to be free from the fear of these cruel warriors. ”

“ IN time the natives grew friendly again. Then Tamate thought of other places. He had not come to New Guinea to teach and help the people of one little island on its shore only.
He wished to go here and there and everywhere, that far and wide he might let men know that he and those who followed him meant peace and friendship. So he would open the way. Later he would go back to leave teachers with the chiefs whose friendship he had won. In many villages his students would have been killed at once if they had gone alone. It needed a man of strong courage, quick wit, and great heart to go first. ”

“ When he went away to make peace with new tribes he would have liked to take his wife with him, and she wished very much to go. But she was as eager as Tamate was to think of others first. She was a strong woman. She did not say much, but whenever she saw what was the right thing to do she did it. She knew that the teachers would be lonely if they both went, and that the natives might not be so willing to please them as they now were to please her husband and herself. So when Tamate went away she stayed at Suau. ”

“ All the time that Tamate was in Rarotonga he was longing to be at more dangerous work amongst those who lived to fight and kill each other, and who had no one to teach them.
His thoughts were so much with these wild tribes that he made others think of them too. Many of his students had caught his spirit, and longed, as he did, to go to the island of New Guinea, where very wild men lived and fought. Some of the teachers he had trained went before him. They knew it was dangerous, but they went with joy, [Pg 29] because they too had learned how great and glad a thing it is to live for others. ”

“ The doctor, especially, was anxious to be off to Tamai, an inland village on the borders of a lake, where the fruits were the finest, and the women the most beautiful and unsophisticated in all the Society Islands. Epicurean Long Ghost had set his mind upon visiting this terrestrial paradise, and thither his steady chum willingly accompanied him. It was a day's journey on foot, allowing time for dinner and siesta; and the path lay through wood and ravine, unpeopled save by wild cattle. About noon they reached the heart of the island, thus pleasantly described. ”

“ This is part of it.
“Tamate, look, here is good water. It is yours and all this land is yours. Our young men will begin at once to build you a house. Go and bring your wife and leave [Pg 59] these bad murdering people you are with, and come and live with us.”
“Goira” was their word for water.
When Tamate and Beni returned to Suau the natives there could not believe that the people of Tepauri had not hurt them. ”

“ Such titles would best describe many of Alma Tadema's smaller colour creations.
And now, his own line fully found, Tadema worked on steadily, without haste or pause. In a milieu far distant indeed from the scene of their creation, a London atmosphere, a London sky, he caused to live again for a while in effigy the men and maidens of Magna Graecia, of Rome, of Parthenope, and above all of Sicily, for Tadema's out-door scenes are too southern in feeling and in tone even for the furthest shores of the Peninsula, and belong by rights to the Syren isle. ”

“ I often stood on those slopes by night and watched the dim lamps far below on Apia’s only street. As I write I seem to live again in the past. Once more Tamafanga and I stand together beneath the palms and watch the stars shining over the distant sea. All the birds of the forest are silent, only the songs of a few sailors in the beach shanty break the stillness. As I dream on, Vaea’s mountain-peak rises to the skies as the moon looms up far out at sea. Only the beautiful tavau-trees and plumed palms move as the sea winds touch them. ”

“ These three suitors, father, son, and daughter, are about to render a gift to accompany their petition, for they know it is well to conciliate even the wealthy with gifts. Behind the whole shimmers one of those wonderful effects of light and sky that Tadema rarely fails to introduce. Like his Dutch ancestors, he is never happy unless he can get some peep into the open through a window or a terrace. ”

“ Where is he?" [She answered] "He is in Samoa." The girl was sorry for his being conquered, and she said: "Let us visit him."
Taema and Tilafainga swam away, and took with them the Toa-ina-loto. They swam in the sea and reached a land called Fiji. They heard tattooers going about in the land. Taema said to Tilafainga that they should call in at that land and make trial of the tree. They went ashore. Taema covered her breasts and the two went ashore. The two women fought all the women of Fiji. Taema sprang up with the tree, and Fiji was defeated. Three times was Fiji repulsed. ”

“ The friends had not to part at once. Tamate [Pg 87] stayed some days in the island, but he was so busy seeing people and speaking that there was not much time for story-telling. Twenty-four years before this, after the ship-wreck at Savage Island, he had landed at Samoa with nothing except the clothes he wore. He had made friends there as he always did, and now many of them, as well as others who had only heard of him before, wished to see him.
A great open-air meeting was held. Hundreds and hundreds of native men and women gathered to listen to him and to their own King Malietoa. ”

“ It is a land of mountains, lakes, and rivers; its climate is a little warmer than that of England, and a little more dry, and everything that grows in the British Islands will grow in Tasmania. The banks of the Tamar reminded our friends of those of the Thames, save that they were not as well peopled, and the mountain ranges which formed the background on either side were lofty and picturesque.
As the vessel neared her destination, Frank and Fred were informed that they were at the head of the Tamar, or would be when they reached Launceston. ”

“ He loved to gather round him the young students of his craft, ever on the alert to note and welcome new talent as it appeared, and when his counsel or advice was needed, he would spare neither time nor pains to afford the aid and encouragement which his superb technical resources so well fitted him to bestow. I have heard artists of position declare that if they had reached some crux in a picture that proved difficult of solution, there was no one so helpful as Tadema ”

“ The people of this island are of ordinary stature: they have amongst them people white and red, some in colour like those of the Indies, others woolly-headed blacks and mulattoes. Slavery is in use amongst them. Their food is yams, fish, cocoa-nuts, and they have hogs and fowls.
This island is named Taomaco and the name of the chief, Tomai. We departed from hence with four Indians whom we took, at which they were not much pleased: and as we here got wood and water, there was no necessity for us to go to the island Santa Cruz, which, as I have said, is in this parallel sixty leagues further on. ”

“ The Hot Springs near Tambia.—These extensive springs, situate 11⁄2 to 2 miles inland, and rather under 100 feet above the sea, lie near the Mathuata or north coast of the island, some four miles west of the Wailevu river. They rise up in the midst of level country about a mile from the town of Tambia, and near the village of Ngovungovu. Although situated in the valley of the Tambia river, these springs are not adjacent to the river, and in this respect they differ from nearly all the inland hot springs. ”

“ Tasmania, reached the south coast of that island, and landed there on 10 March, 1773, finding the soil very rich and the country well clothed with woods, and plenty of water falling from the rocks in brilliant cascades 200 or 300 feet perpendicularly into the sea. They were the second white men to land in Tasmania. The Adventure anchored for five days in the bay since called after her. The trees of the forest they found mostly burnt or scorched near the ground, owing to the natives setting fire to the underwood, so as to make passage easy through the forest. ”

“ Relying upon the reports of Tasman, he considered New Zealand and "la terre de Diemen"--that is, Tasmania--too distant and too little known for an experiment; whilst the narratives of Dampier did not make those parts of New Holland that he had visited--the west and north of Australia--appear attractive. On the whole, he favoured the island to the east of Papua-New Guinea--known as New Britain (now New Pomerania) , and the Austrialia del Espiritu Santo of the Spanish navigator Quiros as very suitable. ”

“ Till I went to Ashanti, between Christiansborg and Accra was the only bit of good road I had seen on the English coast of Guinea, and that was probably made by the Danes, for there is along part of it an avenue of fine old tamarind trees, which only this careful people would take the trouble to plant. They are slow-growing trees, I believe, and must be planted for shelter between other trees which may be cut down when the beautiful tamarinds grow old enough to take care of themselves. ”

“ There he set up a post on which he hoisted the Dutch flag. Quitting Van Diemen's Land on the 5th of December, Tasman steered E. for the Solomon Islands, and on the 13th of December discovered (in 42° 10′ S., as he reckoned) a " high mountainous country," which he called Staten landt ("Land of the States," i.e., of Holland, now New Zealand) . Tasman and his company believed the newly discovered land to form part of the same great antarctic continent as the other Staten landt which Schouten and Lemaire had sighted and named to the east of Tierra del Fuego. ”

“ Abel Janszen Tasman, who, in the year 1642, had made the two great discoveries of south Van Diemen’s Land—in these days more correctly named after himself, Tasmania,—and of New Zealand, was again sent out in 1644, for the express purpose of examining the north and north-western shores of New Holland. His instructions, of which we have already repeatedly spoken, say, that “after quitting Point Ture, or False Cape, situate in 8 degrees on the south coast of New Guinea, you are to continue eastward along the coast to 9 degrees south latitude, crossing prudently the cove at that place. ”

“ Look where they would, in every direction, this white woman and the two men were completely surrounded by an unbroken mass of wild and armed savages, who stood gazing upon the strange apparitions in their midst.
Tamate, without a pause, perfectly calm, and showing no signs of fear, spoke to Pouta and his men through old Vaaburi and Iko.
"We have come," he said, "so that we may be friends. We have come without weapons. We have brought with us a woman of our tribe, for we come in peace. We are strangers. But we come with great things to tell. ”

“ And so, by way of the long Maori story, the one solitary example of volcano-legendry the writer has heard from the South Island, we come to the Rapaki peak’s guardian name, Te Poho-o-Tamatea. The explorer bestowed his name upon the height, tapa-ing it after himself and his sacred breast, much as a present-day traveller justly might claim the right to map-name some peak after himself. Tamatea’s travels led him far after he turned his back on the Port Hills. ”