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Updated: June 9, 2025
The Tahitian never lived in hamlets, as the Marquesan and the Samoan, but each family dwelt in its wood of cocoanuts and breadfruit, or a few families clustered their inhabitants for intimacy and mutual aid. The whites, missionaries, conquerors, and traders found this system not conducive to their ends.
The varied dances of the Marquesan girls are beautiful in the extreme, but there is an abandoned voluptuousness in their character which I dare not attempt to describe. Our ship was now wholly given up to every species of riot and debauchery.
It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to enforce them, rights of private property. Thus a man, weary of the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to this day you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great- grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn. Or take another case.
Since the escapade already mentioned the holiday occurs at a different period for the girls and for the boys; so that a Marquesan brother and sister meet again, after their education is complete, a pair of strangers. It is a harsh law, and highly unpopular; but what a power it places in the hands of the instructors, and how languidly and dully is that power employed by the mission!
"Many young men, Marquesan men and all the white men, and George Washington, the black American, tried to capture Anna, but Père Simeon, the priest, had given her to the blessed Maria Peato, and the Sisters guarded her carefully.
And he will win out. He will be grinning when I am dust. Also, as a preliminary, we attended a feast, where one Taiara Tamarii, the son of an Hawaiian sailor who deserted from a whaleship, commemorated the death of his Marquesan mother by roasting fourteen whole hogs and inviting in the village.
There are a great variety of these dances, in which, however, I never saw the men take part. They all consist of active, romping, mischievous evolutions, in which every limb is brought into requisition. Indeed, the Marquesan girls dance all over, as it were; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.
The priests could bring no inspiration sufficient to overcome the degradation caused by the traders. The Marquesan saw that Jesus had small influence over their rulers. Civilization lost its opportunity because it gave precept, but no example. Even to-day, one white man in a valley sets the standard of sobriety, of kindness, and honor.
He had an accurate knowledge of forty harbors and anchorages, and spoke English fluently, French, Paumotan, Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian tongues. From boyhood until he took up pilotage he was a diver in the lagoons for shell and in harbors for the repair of ships. "I have killed many sharks," he said, "and have all but fed them more than once. I had gone one morning a hundred feet.
The Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one of the tallest the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and not even handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to religion, childishly self-indulgent the Paumotuan greedy, hardy, enterprising, a religious disputant, and with a trace of the ascetic character.
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