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With a people incurably idle, dispirited by what can only be called endemic pestilence, and inflamed with ill- feeling against their new masters, crime and convict labour are a godsend to the Government. Theft is practically the sole crime. Originally petty pilferers, the men of Tai-o-hae now begin to force locks and attack strong- boxes.
The rain had not refreshed, nor could the wind invigorate, the dwellers of Tai-o-hae: away at one end, indeed, the commandant was directing some changes in the residency garden beyond Prison Hill; and the gardeners, being all convicts, had no choice but to continue to obey.
Her mother is O Take Oho, whose father was eaten by the men of Tai-o-hae, I said, and looking at his face I saw that his eyes were the color of the mio, the rosewood when freshly cut.
"That night the boats of the ship could not land on the beach of Tai-o-hae, for the sea was too great, so that they came and went from Peikua, the staircase in the rocks. The sailors had leave to do what they wished and they had plenty of rum given them by the captain who was born that day forty years before. I went then to the ship to drink the captain's rum and to buy tobacco.
"At night there was nobody on the ship not drunk. Some of the men had seized several women on the road that leads to Tai-o-hae, and had forced them to the boat and carried them aboard. Among these women was Anna, who had fled from the nuns to seek word of her father.
Artists, if they had the same sense of humour with the Augurs, would smile like them on meeting, but the smile would not be scornful. I had occasion to see much of this excellent man. He sailed with us from Tai-o-hae to Hiva-oa, a dead beat of ninety miles against a heavy sea.
Return in a canoe to Atuona; Tetuahunahuna relates the story of the girl who rode the white horse in the celebration of the féte of Joan of Arc in Tai-o-hae; Proof that sharks hate women; steering by the stars to Atuona beach. The canoe we had followed to Hanavave stopped in Oomoa on its way to Hiva-oa, my home, for I had bargained with Tetuahunahuna, its owner, for my conveyance to Atuona.
While we were in Tai-o-hae a thief was under prevention. He had entered a house about eight in the morning, forced a trunk, and stolen eleven hundred francs; and now, under the horrors of darkness, solitude, and a bedevilled cannibal imagination, he was reluctantly confessing and giving up his spoil.
But his mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he dodged in and out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and white, of skipper and shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn; he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating festival; perhaps he would summon up the form of that island princess for the love of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange a figure of a European.
At length the mate himself despaired, scrambled on board again from his unrestful perch, and announced that we had missed our destination. He was the only man of practice in these waters, our sole pilot, shipped for that end at Tai-o-hae. If he declared we had missed Takaroa, it was not for us to quarrel with the fact, but, if we could, to explain it. We had certainly run down our southing.
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