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The queen regent carried the little king Pomaré III. in her arms, and beside her walked his sister, a pretty child of ten years old. The royal infant was dressed in European style, like his subjects, and like them, he wore nothing on his feet. At the request of the ministers and great people of Otaheite, Kotzebue had a pair of boots made for him, which he was to wear on the day of his coronation.
Tetuanui ended with a line of Brault's song about Pomaré: "Puisqu'il est mort ... N'en parlons plus!" Mataiea was the farthest point on Tahiti from Papeete I had reached, and wishing to see more of the island, I set out on foot with Tatini, my handmaid. We bade good-bye to Tetuanui and Haamoura and all the family after the dawn breakfast.
Not far away was the mausoleum of the last king of the Society Islands, Pomaré the Fifth, with whose wide-awake widow, the queen, I had smoked a cigarette a day ago. It was a pyramid of coral, a red funeral-urn on top, and a red P on the façade. Pillars and roof were of the same color, and a chain surrounded it.
Two years before, a small vessel, having on board the king, Pomare, Mr Wilson, the missionary, and several Tahitians, had been driven by a storm from her anchorage at Eimeo down to Raiatea. Here they were hospitably received, and continued three months, the whole of which time was employed by Mr Wilson and the king in preaching the Gospel to the inhabitants.
The article te often stands before proper names; also before God, Te Atua; sometimes o, which then appears to be an article; as, O Pomare, O Huaheine, O Tahaiti. Sometimes this o is placed before the personal pronouns in the nominative case. O vau, I; o oe, thou; o oia, she, he, it. In these pronouns the Tahaitian, and those languages to which it bears affinity, are particularly rich.
The battle ended in the complete victory of Pomare, and for the first time in the sanguinary history of the island no butchery of the vanquished followed, nor any devastation of the country.
Nothing could be more hopeless than this mission now seemed. Pomare, although he befriended the missionaries, remained still seemingly as dark and determined a heathen as at first, and he had now indeed no longer the power of helping them. He had, however, received a considerable amount of instruction from them.
Many of the natives wore, on this occasion, broad white trousers, with a shirt over them; but there were others who had no other garments than the ordinary short shirt and the pareo. One of the chiefs who appeared in this costume, and was afflicted with Elephantiasis, offered a most repulsive spectacle. This evening I saw Queen Pomare for the first time.
The good king Pomaré would keep up the upaupa, the hula dance, for a a week at a time, until they were nearly all dead from drink and fatigue. Mon dieu! La vie est triste maintenant." Before we parted we sang the "Marseillaise" and the "Star-Spangled Banner."
But when he saw that mass of stiff, crackling dry-goods, of Palais-Royal finery, alight at his door, and all the extraordinary outfit that followed her, he had a vague impression of a Queen Pomare in exile. The difficulty was that he had seen some genuine women of fashion and he made comparisons. He had planned a grand ball to celebrate her arrival, but he prudently abstained.
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