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Nineteen able labourers are all the trader at Taiohae can muster for the loading of copra on shipboard, and in their veins runs the blood of English, American, Dane, German, French, Corsican, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Paumotan, Tahitian, and Easter Islander. There are more races than there are persons, but it is a wreckage of races at best.
The children, with clasped hands, stared at the immense rollers and cried piteously. Chickens and cats, wading perturbedly in the water, as by common consent, with flight and scramble took refuge on the roof of the captain's house. A Paumotan, with a litter of new-born puppies in a basket, climbed into a cocoanut tree and twenty feet above the ground made the basket fast.
Pae filled the pipe and the bowls and joined in the chorus, while the Paumotan boys, in a shadowy recess, sipped their rum and rolled their eyes in astonished appreciation of the first joviality of their lives. When the leader began the ancient cannibal chant, the song of war and of feasting at the High Place, the tattooed men forgot even the rum.
He was the very highest physical and mental type of the Paumotan, a honey-comb of good-nature, a well of laughter, and a seaman beyond compare. To be a pilot in the Isles of the Labyrinth demands many strong qualities, but to be the pilot of the only warship in this sea was the very summit of pilotry.
When she was three he sent her to the convent at Papeete. When she was seven or eight he sent her to France. You begin to glimpse the situation. The best and most aristocratic convent in France was none too good for the only daughter of a Paumotan island king and capitalist, and you know the old country French draw no colour line.
Pae had locked up the song-maker, and all the tattooed men slumbered where they sat, the Paumotan boys with sunbonnets tied about their heads lay in their corner, dreaming, perhaps, of their loved home on Pukaruha. I woke again to find the garden green and still in the gray morning, and the veranda vacant.
He had an accurate knowledge of forty harbors and anchorages, and spoke English fluently, French, Paumotan, Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian tongues. From boyhood until he took up pilotage he was a diver in the lagoons for shell and in harbors for the repair of ships. "I have killed many sharks," he said, "and have all but fed them more than once. I had gone one morning a hundred feet.
Haupupuu, who built the boat, a young man with the features of Bonaparte and a blase expression, was at the bow, and three other Marquesans, with the two Paumotan boys, handled the oars. There was no wind and they rowed all the way, spurting often for love of excitement.
A half ounce of rum, a pint of cocoanut-milk from a very young nut, the juice of half a lime just from the tree, two lumps of sugar, and I had an invigorating draught, long enough for a golf player after thirty-six holes, and delicate enough for a debutante after her first cotillion. The Paumotan boys and Pae looked on in horror, saying that I was spoiling good rum.
"Old Parlay arrived after that with his pearls. There was one single one of them, they say, worth sixty thousand francs. Peter Gee saw it, and has told me he offered that much for it. The old man went clean off for a while. They had him strait-jacketed in the Colonial Club two days " "His wife's uncle, an old Paumotan, cut him out of the jacket and turned him loose," the supercargo corroborated.
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