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One man, whose tattooing striped his body like the blue bands of a convict's suit, said that it was the custom on Fatu-hiva for the leader or chief on each side to challenge the enemy champion. "Our army stood thirty or forty feet away from the other army," said he, "and our chief stood still while the other threw his spear.
While the schooner made her way cautiously past the grim and rocky headlands of Fatu-hiva I was overwhelmed with a feeling of solemnity, of sadness; such a feeling as I have known to sweep over an army the night before a battle, when letters are written to loved ones and comrades entrusted with messages.
Disease, of course, is the weapon that kills them, but it finds its victims unguarded by hope or desire to live, willing to meet death half way, the grave a haven. In the old days this island of Fatu-hiva was the art center of the Marquesas. The fame of its tattooers, carvers in wood and stone, makers of canoes, paddles, and war-clubs, had resounded through the archipelago for centuries.
"That man," said Le Brunnec, "is the worst devil in the Marquesas." Between blows of the axe, the trader told me something of his history: The madman was Mohuho, whose name means Great Moth of the Night. He is the chief whom Lying Bill saw shoot three men in Tahuata for sheer wantonness. He was then chief of Tahuata, and the power in that island, in Hiva-oa and Fatu-hiva.
We were soon so high that I saw below only a big basin, in which was a natural temple, the vast ruin of a gigantic minster, it seemed, and across the basin a rugged, saw-like profile of the mountain-top. Eons ago the upper valley was a volcano, when the island of Fatu-hiva was under the sea.
Before the French achieved this, however, the white had sowed a crop of deadly evils among the Marquesans that cut them down faster than war, and left them desolate, dying, passing to extinction. As I looked from the deck of the Morning Star I was struck by the fittingness of the scene. Fatu-hiva had been left behind and Hiva-oa, our destination, was before us, bleak and threatening.
Rain fell drearily as we passed Fatu-hiva, the first of the Marquesas Islands sighted from the south. We had climbed from Tahiti, seventeen degrees south of the equator, to between eleven and ten degrees south, and we had made a westward of ten degrees. The Marquesas Islands lay before us, dull spots of dark rock upon the gray water.
Said the soldier to the sailor, 'Will you give me a chew? Said the sailor to the soldier, 'I'll be damned if I do! Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks, And you'll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box." Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the paepae of the six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my disordered trousers.
Across the bottom of the letter was written in English: "The kid disappeared from the leper settlement. They think he drowned himself." Thirty-seven days at sea; life of the sea-birds; strange phosphorescence; first sight of Fatu-hiva; history of the islands; chant of the Raiateans. Thirty-seven days at sea brought us to the eve of our landing in Hiva-oa in the Marquesas.
The six oarsmen took turns in bailing, using a heavy carved wooden scoop, but in the frequent flurries the waves poured over the side. The island of Fatu-hiva faded behind us, and raised Moho-Tani, the Isle of Barking Dogs, a small, but beautifully regular, islet, like a long emerald. No soul dwells there. The Moi-Atiu clan peopled it before a sorcerer dried up the water sources.
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