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Updated: June 20, 2025
I visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me. Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva.
I know little, but what I do know is my own." Now I learned from the lips of Le Moine that this man had lived and died in my own valley of Atuona, had perhaps sat on this paepae where we were breakfasting. Imagination kindled at the thought. "I will take you to his house," said Le Moine.
Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa Tahuku, say the slovenly whites may be called the port of Atuona. It is a narrow and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points, and opening above upon a woody valley: a little French fort, now disused and deserted, overhangs the valley and the inlet.
With all this fine plenty of men and fruit, death is at work here also. The population, according to the highest estimate, does not exceed six hundred in the whole vale of Atuona; and yet, when I once chanced to put the question, Brother Michel counted up ten whom he knew to be sick beyond recovery.
With what delight I returned to lazy days in Atuona Valley, lounging on the black paepae of my own small blue cabin in the shadow of Temiteu, idling on the sun-warm sands of the familiar beach, walking the remembered road between banana hedges heavy with yellowing fruit!
"The nonos never stop biting," she said in French. These nonos are the dread sand-flies that Père Victorien had run from to get some sleep in Atuona. They are a kind of gadfly, red-hot needles on wings.
It was my fortune to see, in the valley of Atuona on Hiva-oa, a series of incidents which were at the time a whirl of unbelievable merriment, yet which slowly clarified themselves into a parable, while I sat later considering them on the leaf-shaded paepae of the House of the Golden Bed.
Skeeing, tobogganing, skating, all land sports fade before the thrills of this; nor will anything give such abounding health and joy in living as surf-riding in sunny seas. A hundred afternoons on Atuona Bay I spent in this exhilarating pastime. To it we added embellishments, multiplying excitements.
I, at least, felt immeasurable relief, that quickly turned to exhilaration as we hoisted sail and drove at a glorious speed straight through the breakers to the welcoming beach of Atuona. The Marquesans at ten o'clock mass; a remarkable conversation about religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his idea of the devil.
This obligation, rendered sacred by an association that extended back to the days of Steinberg and Bully Hayes, when in the Moroa and the Eugenie we had slept under the same mats and had played our part together in the stirring times of Stewart and the great Atuona Plantation this obligation, I say, I met easily enough so long as Rosalie was a child and safe in the convent at Savalalo.
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