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Updated: May 20, 2025
A walk in the jungle; the old woman in the breadfruit tree; a night in a native hut on the mountain. Atuona Valley was dozing, as was its wont in the afternoons, when the governor, accompanied by the guardian of the palace, each carrying a shot-gun, invited me to go up the mountain to shoot kukus for dinner.
We shouted back, saying that those men had been roasted upon the fire and eaten, and that thus we would do to all men of Atuona. And we laughed at them." Kahuiti emitted a hearty guffaw at thought of the trick played upon those devoured enemies. "But Tufetu, the grandfather of my friend Mouth of God?" I persisted. "Epo! There was war. The men of Atuona gathered at Otupoto, and rushed down upon us.
The men of the hills have a terrible custom of capturing any woman of another valley who goes alone in their district. Grelet's first companion was caught one night by forty, who for punishment built the ten kilometres of road between Haniapa and Atuona. Many Daughters, the beautiful little leper, when thirteen years old was a victim of seventeen men, some of whom were imprisoned.
While we stood in the shade of a cocoanut-palm, gazing at these, we were joined by Baufré, the shaggy and drink-ruined Frenchman, in his torn and dirty overalls. "This weather is devilish," said Baufré, with a curse. "It is not as it used to be. The world goes to the devil. There were seven hundred people in Atuona when I came here.
He took the corpse on his back and carried it to his hut in the upper valley of Hana-menu as I would carry a sack of copra. There he ate what he would, alone. "Oh, there were those who knew, but they were afraid to tell. After it became known to the people of Atuona, to the kin of those who had been eaten, they did nothing.
Jensen, the frank and handsome Dane who works for the Germans at Taka-Uka who was in the breadline in New York and swears he will never return to civilization, told me that when he kept a store in Hanamenu, near Atuona, to serve the bare handful of unexterminated tribesmen there, the people imitated him in everything, his clothes, his gestures, his least-studied actions. "I was the only white.
He could not believe in Po, the Marquesan god of Darkness, or in the Veinehae, the Ghost-Woman who watches the dying; nor did I believe in them or in Satan, but about me in my Golden Bed until midnight was long past the spirits that hate the light moaned and creaked the hut. Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son.
So I arrived in Atuona for the second time, high astride the sewed-up mattress on top of the metal parts, and so deftly did the Tahitians handle the oars that, though we rode the surf right up to the creeping jungle flowers that met the tide on Atuona beach, I was not wet except by spray.
The letter was in Marquesan, which I translate into English, seeking to keep the flavor of the original, though poorly succeeding: "I write to you, me, Pahorai Calizte, and put on this paper greetings to you, my mother, Mauitetai, who are in Atuona. "Kaoha nui tuu kui, Mauitetai, mother of me. Great love to you. "I have found in Philadelphia work for me; good work. "I have found a woman for me.
Carried from her even in the moment of meeting, he had resisted temptation until the schooner was sailing outside the Bay of Traitors, running before a breeze to the port of Tai-o-hae, and then he had flung himself naked into the sea and taken the straight course back to Atuona, reaching his sweetheart after a seven-hour's struggle with current and breaker.
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