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In 1521 Magellan must have passed between the Marquesas and Paumotas, but he does not mention them. Seventy-three years later a Spanish flotilla sent from Callao by Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, viceroy of Peru, found this island of Fatu-hiva, and its commander, Mendaña, named the group for the viceroy's lady, Las Islas Marquesas de Mendoza.
These crabs are called by the scientists Birgos latro, by the Marquesans tupa, by the Paumotans kaveu, and by the Tahitians, ua vahi haari. It was a never-failing entertainment on my walks in the Paumotas to observe these great creatures, light-brown or reddish in color, more than two feet in length, stalking about with their bodies a foot from the ground, supported by two pairs of central legs.
Ten years ago many men were brought here to work on the plantations, from Puka-Puka and Na-Puka in the Paumotas, and they talked with the people. "Aue! They were the children's children of the Piina of Fiti-nui. In those low islands to which their fathers and mothers went, they kept the words and the names of old. They had kept the memory of the journey.
I have another plan in my head. Arnold Jackson has a small island in the Paumotas, about a thousand miles from here, a ring of land round a lagoon. He's planted coconut there. He's offered to give it me." "Why should he do that?" asked Bateman. "Because if Isabel releases me I shall marry his daughter." "You?" Bateman was thunderstruck. "You can't marry a half-caste.
That vision melted after eons, and I was in the Oti dance in the Paumotas, where those old women who pose and move by the music of the drums, in the light of the burning cocoanut husks, leap into the air and remain so long that the white man thinks he sees the law of gravitation overcome, remaining fixed in space three or four feet from the ground while one's heart beats madly and one's brain throbs in bewilderment.
This made all Marquesans sad, and those in the crew talked to Earth Worm, who had also been wronged, and urged him to rise and strike. But he said nothing. "The ship came to the Paumotas, and the governor sat all day long on a stool on the deck, watching the islands as they passed. Earth Worm sat in his place, watching the governor.
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