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Updated: June 9, 2025
At that time I was ignorant of the fact that by the operation of the “taboo,” the use of canoes in all parts of the island is rigorously prohibited to the entire sex, for whom it is death even to be seen entering one when hauled on shore; consequently, whenever a Marquesan lady voyages by water, she puts in requisition the paddles of her own fair body.
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 beach of Taha-Uka was a mile from where we lay and not available for traffic, but around a shoulder of the bluffs was hidden the tiny bay of Atuona, where goods could be landed. While we discussed this, around those jutting rocks shot a small out-rigger canoe, frail and hardly large enough to hold the body of a slender Marquesan boy who paddled it.
Her Marquesan blood was speaking in that cry of the heart, unrestrained and passionate. They are not the cold, chaste women of other climes, these women of the Marquesas; with blood at fever heat and hearts beating like wild things against bars, they listen when love or its counterfeit pours into their ears those soft words with nothing in them that make a song.
America might have been responsible for the death of the Marquesan race had not the young nation been engaged in a deadly struggle with Great Britain when an American naval captain, David Porter, seized Nuka-hiva. A hundred years ago the Stars and Stripes floated over the little hill above the bay, and American cannon upon it commanded the village of Tai-o-hae.
The civil power, in its crusade against man- eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript list.
Never was there such a noise here since the days of battle between the whites and the natives. There were four choirs of fifty voices each, the natives from all these nearby islands, each with a common chant in French and particular himines in Marquesan.
Now, she's got the con from him, I suppose, and it would be a shabby trick to leave her when she's dying and will be a mother in two months, according to Doctor Cassiou!" He made a wry face and lit his pipe. The girl could not understand a word and sat immovable. "She's Marquesan," he went on.
My hearers screamed in an agony of delight, and others dwelling far away, or passing laden with breadfruit and bananas, gathered while I chortled and leaped, and made the mountain-side ring with Marquesan bravos. With difficulty I made my escape, but my success pursued me.
The tendency of the Marquesans, however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very common letter l, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will you find such names as Haaii and Paaaeua, when each individual vowel must be separately uttered.
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