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Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the French as an indemnity for the robberies at Taahauku. But the Ile Masse was only suitable for cattle; and his two chief stations were Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva- oa, some hundred miles to the southward, and facing the south-west.
It is said as the most wonderful put of the tale that over her body he gave way to an outburst of sombre and violent grief. His luck left him, too, very soon after. He lost his ship on some rocks off Malaita, and disappeared for a time as though he had gone down with her. He is heard of next at Nuka-Hiva, where he bought an old French schooner out of Government service.
I had given myself over to musing upon the past, but suddenly in the narrowest part of the trail the beast I rode turned and took my canvas-covered toes in his yellow teeth. A vague momentary flash of horror came over me. Did I bestride a metempsychosized man-eater, a revenant from the bloody days of Nuka-hiva?
Liha-Liha had spent thirty years making money. He had coined the sweat and blood and lives of a thousand Marquesans into a golden fortune, and he had left behind him that fortune, a marble tomb, and Mlle. A journey to Nuka-hiva; story of the celebration of the fête of Joan of Arc, and the miracles of the white horse and the girl.
"Twenty years ago they roamed in immense herds all over the islands. I have chased them out of the trail to Hanamenu with a stick. Like the goats left by the American captain, Porter, on Nuka-hiva, they thrived and multiplied, but like the goats they are being massacred.
For two hundred years after the discovery of the southern group the islands we had left behind us the northern group was still unknown to the world. Captain Ingraham, of Boston, found Nuka-hiva in 1791, and called the seven small islets the Washington Islands.
Père Victorien read his breviary or told his beads in abstracted contemplation, and I, lying on the bottom of the boat with my hat shielding my eyes from the beating rays of the sun, pondered on what I knew of Tai-o-hae, the port on the island of Nuka-hiva, to which we were bound.
Captain Pincher lit his pipe, and the glasses were refilled. McHenry attempted to pick up the thread of the tragedy, and began: "Me, too, I'm with Bill drivin' the Fetia for Nuka-Hiva when David croaks himself. I drank as much as he did ashore, and I 'm no slouch with the vahines; but I can hold my booze, I can."
"He had no wife or woman, but he took one in the way of the white man here now and then. He lived alone, save for a half-Chinese boy who cooked and cleaned for him. He never said he was sick. There was no doctor on this island, for the government was then at Nuka-hiva, and he had no time to go there. He suffered terribly, but he never complained.
A year earlier an American, Ingraham, had sighted this same group and given it the name of his own beloved hero, Washington. Had not Captain Porter failed to establish American rule in 1813 in the island of Nuka-hiva, which he called Madison, the Marquesas might have been American. Porter's name, like that of Mendaña, is linked with deeds of cruelty.
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