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Updated: June 9, 2025
The white men in the islands, like exploiters of weaker races everywhere in the world, were unwilling to share their profits with the native. They were reduced to pleading with or intoxicating the Marquesan to procure a modicum of labor.
At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of a house, ringing the changes on its three notes, with an effect like Que le jour me dure, repeated endlessly. Or at times, across a corner of the bay, two natives might communicate in the Marquesan manner with conventional whistlings. All else was sleep and silence.
The French law prohibited selling, exchanging, or giving to any Marquesan any alcoholic beverage. But the law was a dead letter, for only with rum and wine could work be urged upon the Marquesans, and I failed to reprove them even in my mind for their love of drink. One who has not seen a dying race cannot conceive of the prostration of spirit in which these people are perishing.
Unable to find enemies to keep their numbers down, exempt from the epidemics and endemics of Europe and Asia, unacquainted with the contraceptives known until recently only by our rich, but now preached by organized societies to the humblest, the Tahitian, Marquesan, and Hawaiian came to consider the blotting out of lives just begun worthy deeds.
The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the polite Samoan none of these can be compared with the Marquesan paepae-hae, or dwelling platform.
Yet neither were they the wretched huts of straw and thatch which I had seen in the valley and supposed to be the only remnants of the native architecture. As I drew nearer, I saw that I had stumbled upon such a house as the Marquesan had known in the days of his strength, when pride of artistry had created wonderful and beautiful structures of native wood adorned in elegant and curious patterns.
But the art of printing the tappa is unknown upon the Marquesan Islands. In passing along the valley, I was often attracted by the noise of the mallet, which, when employed in the manufacture of the cloth, produces at every stroke of its hard, heavy wood, a clear, ringing, and musical sound, capable of being heard at a great distance.
Ethnologists believe that the name refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed. Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no suffering, either for good or bad souls.
Marquesan die too fast." If T'yonny revered his father's countrymen, his horse did not. These island horses are unhappy-looking skates, though good climbers and sliders. "You don't need person go with you," said the son of the former living picture. "That horsey know. You stay by him."
Dropping three out of the fifteen, there remained for the other twelve the comfortable ratio of 50 births to 32 deaths. Long habits of hardship and activity doubtless explain the contrast with Marquesan figures. But the Paumotuan displays, besides, a certain concern for health and the rudiments of a sanitary discipline.
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