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Updated: May 20, 2025
Presently you turn a sharp angle in the hills and enter a broad, land-locked bay, inclosed on every side by ranges of hills with numerous points and promontories jutting into the tranquil water, leaving deep little coves behind them, all fringed with cocoa-palms.
Several native huts now peep out from the bananas and cocoa-palms on the right bank; they stand on piles a few feet above the low damp ground, and their owners enter them by means of ladders. The soil is wonderfully rich, and the gardens are really excellent.
Farther inland, tall grapes, lianes, aloes, and cactus formed impenetrable thickets, out of which rose, like fluted columns, gigantic cocoa-palms, and the most graceful trees on earth, areca-palms.
The place had changed in some subtle manner; everything was there as before, yet everything seemed different the lagoon seemed narrower, the reef nearer, the cocoa-palms not nearly so tall. She was contrasting the real things with the recollection of them when seen by a child. The black speck had vanished from the reef; the storm had swept it utterly away.
The village consisted of clean, well-built huts, surrounded by pandanus and cocoa-palms; the fields were well cultivated, and under Adams' tuition the young people had made implements of agriculture of really extraordinary excellence. The faces of these half breeds were good-looking and pleasant in expression, and their figures were well-proportioned, showing unusual muscular development.
We were rounding a lofty headland crowned with groves of cocoa-palms and bananas and with trailing skirts of flowers and vines, when we saw ahead of us a pretty little bay, and on the shore a human being plainly not a Polynesian. Up the hillside that rose suddenly from the beach was a thatched dwelling, not built open all round like most native houses, and apparently having but one doorway.
The finest orchard of cocoa-palms I know, and the only plantation of them I ever saw at the islands, is one that stands right upon the southern shore of Papeetee Bay. They were set out by the first Pomaree, almost half a century ago; and the soil being especially adapted to their growth, the noble trees now form a magnificent grove, nearly a mile in extent.
When the sun was low I looked down upon a broad and beautiful river, with hills and mountains on its farther side, a village on the shores of a promontory, and above that a grassy hill with a bungalow under cocoa-palms at its top, which I knew must be the Residency, from the scarlet uniforms at the door.
Gibney, anxious to preserve peace, "is a search of this island for water." They searched all forenoon. At intervals they caught glimpses of the two cannibals skulking behind sand-dunes, but they found no water. Toward the centre of the island, however, the soil was less barren, and here a grove of cocoa-palms lifted their tufted crests invitingly.
The crowns of the cocoa-palms were all alive with monkeys, big and little, which skipped from one to the other with surprising agility, seeming to be curious about us and disturbed at our appearance, and I was at first surprised when my companions after collecting stones began to throw them at the lively creatures, which seemed to me quite harmless.
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