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Updated: June 9, 2025
The Marquesan detests labor, which to him has ever been an unprofitable expenditure of life and did not gain in his eyes even when his toil might enrich white owners of plantations. Since every man had a piece of land that yielded copra enough for his simple needs, and breadfruit and fish were his for the taking, he could not be forced to work except for the government in payment for taxes.
Among these barbarous children he still played the part of the smiling father; and he was careful to observe, in all indifferent matters, the Marquesan etiquette. Thus, in the singular system of artificial kinship, the bishop had been adopted by Vaekehu as a grandson; Miss Fisher, of Hatiheu, as a daughter.
He could not believe in Po, the Marquesan god of Darkness, or in the Veinehae, the Ghost-Woman who watches the dying; nor did I believe in them or in Satan, but about me in my Golden Bed until midnight was long past the spirits that hate the light moaned and creaked the hut. Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son.
Kolory was a sort of Knight Templar—a soldier-priest; for he often wore the dress of a Marquesan warrior, and always carried a long spear, which, instead of terminating in a paddle at the lower end, after the general fashion of these weapons, was curved into a heathenish-looking little image. This instrument, however, might perhaps have been emblematic of his double functions.
But, then, she is daughter to a queen. With those 'husbands' she crosses a hundred leagues of sea in her sailing canoe. That royal canoe! To dance at another island. As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into the moonlight, the vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me.
They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae of the last Marquesan. I reached the top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent.
He had spent months, even years, in preparing for the celebration of her fête-day. "And Monsieur, by the blessed grace of Joan, only the whites got drunk. Not a Marquesan was far gone in liquor throughout the three days of the feast.
Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such remarkable importance. Praise not any man till he is dead, said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners, might be the Marquesan parody.
This stately tree, which is rarely met with upon the Sandwich Islands, and then only of a very inferior quality, and at Tahiti does not abound to a degree that renders its fruit the principal article of food, attains its greatest excellence in the genial climate of the Marquesan group, where it grows to an enormous magnitude, and flourishes in the utmost abundance.
Whereupon the long-pig was hauled on board, the boat's head turned about for Atuona, and these Marquesan braves pulled home rejoicing. Moipu was on the beach and rejoiced with them on their arrival. Poor Joe toiled at his oar that day with a white face, yet he had no fear for himself. 'They were very good to me gave me plenty grub: never wished to eat white man, said he.
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