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Updated: June 15, 2025
Oomoa and Hanavave, the adjacent bay and village, were resorts for whalers, who brought a plague of ills that reduced the population of Fatu-hiva from many thousands to less than three hundred.
Grelet said that the conch I had heard at night sounding off Oomoa must have been in a canoe or whale-boat bound for Hanavave, a valley a dozen miles away over the mountains, but only an hour or so by sea. It might have brought a message of interest, or perhaps would be a conveyance to my own valley, so in mid-forenoon we launched Grelet's whale-boat for a journey to Hanavave.
Turning a shoulder of the cliff, we entered the Bay of Virgins and were confronted with the titanic architecture of Hanavave, Alps in ruins, once coral reefs and now thrust up ten thousand feet above the sea. Fantastic headlands, massive towers, obelisks, pyramids, and needles were an extravaganza in rock, monstrous and portentous.
We were a little company, for they had killed and eaten most of us, and others had died of the white man's curse. In the night I heard the cries of the Hanavave and Hanahouua men who had lowered themselves down the precipice and were using their war-clubs on the sleeping. "I was one man. I could do nothing but die, and I was full of life.
A canoe was waiting for Père Olivier; he climbed into it at once, his black wet robe clinging to him, and called "Adios!" as his men paddled rapidly for Hanavave, where he was to say mass and hear confessions. Lee and I took a road lined with a wall of rocks, and passing many sorts of trees and plants entered an enclosure through a gate.
Red Chicken had killed one at this very spot a few weeks earlier. The danger even to a man armed with a knife was that the shark would obstruct from a cave, or come upon him suddenly from behind. Often we had with us in the fishing a Paumotan, Pascual, the pilot of the ship Zelee, who was in Hanavave visiting a relative.
One day when the valley was crazed, a native killed the Raratonga man. You will find the murderer living on Tahuata now. Frère Fesal buried his assistant, and fled here. "That date was about the last Hanavave suffered from cannibalism and extreme sorcery. The taua, the pagan priest, was still powerful, however, and his gods demanded victims.
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.
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