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They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana his kingdom in the Marquesas Islands, eight hundred miles from here, northward, Temoana had been a singer of psalms at the Protestant mission in his valley of Tai-o-hae, in the island of Nukahiva, a victim of shanghaiers, a cook on a whaler, a tattooed man in English penny shows, a repatriate, a protege of the Catholic archbishop of the Marquesans, and finally, through the influence of the Roman church, a king.
Five men and several other dogs followed the wounded hound, and I went with them. The Marquesans had war-clubs and long knives like undersized machetes. Every Islander carries such a knife for cutting underbrush or cocoanut-stems, and usually it is his only tool for building native houses, so that he becomes very expert with it, as the Filipino with his bolo or the Cuban with his machete.
For the Marquesans are perishing, and, to judge from conditions at Taiohae, the one thing that retards their destruction is the infusion of fresh blood. A pure Marquesan is a rarity. They seem to be all half-breeds and strange conglomerations of dozens of different races.
By this deprivation, as by a dozen others, the Marquesans have been robbed of racial pride and clan distinction, and their social life destroyed. Despite this delay, Orivie and I were soon past the houses. As population has decreased in all the valleys the people have moved down from the upper heights to districts nearer the sea, for neighborliness and convenience.
Marquesans think our singing strange and no wonder! Theirs is a prolonged chant, a monotone without tune, with no high notes and little variance. But loving distraction, they listened with deep amusement to my rendering of American airs, as we might listen to Chinese falsettos.
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.
Hardly had the arrangement been made, when a whaleboat rowed by Marquesans followed in the wake of the canoe, and a tall, rangy Frenchman climbed aboard the Morning Star.
Roses were strewn on the glowing waste, rose and gold and purple curtained the horizon, and suddenly, without warning, abrupt as lightning, the sun beamed hot above the edge of the world. The Marquesans stirred, their bodies stretched and their lungs expanded in the throes of returning consciousness. Then one sat up and called loudly, "A titahi a atu! Another day!"
Better that none knew where the body was laid and that the chosen friends who carried it to the sepulchre forgot the spot. In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in the night at the foot of great trees. Or they carried the bodies to the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil.
Thus, Samoans are the most chaste of Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely fertile; Marquesans are the most debauched: we have seen how they are perishing; Hawaiians are notoriously lax, and they begin to be dotted among deserts. So here is a case stronger still against unchastity; and here also we have a correction to apply.
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