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Updated: June 20, 2025
He was a master, my friend!" "Paul Gauguin lived here?" I exclaimed. I had known, of course, that the great modernist had died in the Marquesas, but I had never heard in which valley, and no one in Atuona had spoken of him. In Florence I had met an artist who possessed two glass doors taken from Madame Charbonnier's house and said to have been painted by Gauguin in payment for rent.
In the lovely, timeless valley of Vait-hua the calendar had dropped below the horizon of memory as my native land had dropped below the rim of the sea. Here in Atuona, whose life was colored by the presence of whites, the days must take up their constricted regular march again.
It tastes like a sour, acid custard. Yet white men learn to eat it, even to yearn for it. Captain Capriata, of the schooner Roberta, which occasionally made port in Atuona Bay, could digest little else. Give him a bowl of popoi and a stewed or roasted cat, and his Corsican heart warmed to the giver. As bread or meat are to us, so was popoi to my tawny friends.
He gave orders to clear the grounds, and Bauda issued commands from the veranda while Song and Flag lugged away the drums and drove the excited mob out of the garden and across the bridge. All in all, this Sunday was typical of Atuona under the new régime. After a quiet bath in the pool below my cabin I got my own dinner, unassisted by Exploding Eggs, and went early to bed to forestall visitors.
The Jeanne d'Arc, a beautiful, long, curving craft manned by twelve oarsmen, came like a white bird over the blue waters of the Bay of Traitors one Saturday afternoon, bringing Père Victorien to Atuona. He was from Hatiheu, on the island of Nuka-hiva, seventy miles to the north.
Both the mother and Flower argued with me that I should make Many Daughters my wife during my stay in Atuona, and if not the leper lass, then another friend they had chosen for me. Flower herself had done me the honor of proposing a temporary alliance, but I had persuaded her that I was not worthy of her beauty and talents.
She climbed the rigging, and the captain ordered two men to go aloft and bring her to him. "Every one came to look, with yells and with songs. The sailors climbed after her, and she went higher and higher, until near the top of that tall mast, taller than the greatest cocoanut-tree in Atuona. There she held to the wood, calling upon Maria Peato. The captain was like a man mad with namu.
Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already some time in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on Tauata. Mr. Stewart was somewhat averse to the adventure, having some acquaintance with Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu. He had once landed there, he told me, about dusk, and found the remains of a man and woman partly eaten.
I sailed from Tai-o-hae for an unknown port, carried by the schooner Roberta, which had brought the white mare from Atuona and whose skipper had bore so well the white banner of Joan in the procession that did her honor.
He would bathe on the beach in the bay of Tai-o-hae, and the little Anna would swim to him through the deep water. He gave her a small silver box with a silver chain, for the tiki of Bernadette, on the day that he sailed away. "He did not come again to Tai-o-hae, nor Atuona, nor Hanavave. We heard that he traded with Tahiti, and had given up the chase of the paaoa. I have never been in Tahiti.
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