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Updated: June 8, 2025
We find them more mild and gentle than the people of Tahiti, and very different from the fierce savages of the Marquesas. Not far off is Karakaka Bay, where Captain Cook fell. We communicate with two other ships while lying here, and the officers all speak in favourable terms of the people. Captain Fuller, therefore, allows us to visit the shore more than he would otherwise have considered safe.
However, the horse could and did go up the steep, though it taxed him to the utmost, and these horses are like mountain-goats, for there is hardly any level land in the Marquesas. Unexpectedly, the sea came in view, with the Catholic church and its white belfry, but in another turn it disappeared.
It touched land only on the outskirts of the Marquesas group in the Southern Pacific, and presented, as the one available foothold for observers, a coral reef named Caroline Island, seven and a half miles long by one and a half wide, unknown previously to 1874, and visited only for the sake of its stores of guano.
What resistance could the five or six people left on board offer, even though they might have suspected her character before she got up to them? Still, I had the wisdom to keep these thoughts to myself. The captains decided on sailing first for the Galapagos, and then to the Marquesas and Sandwich Islands, calling off all intermediate islands.
Odds and ends of his history came to my ears: how he was at first a convert to the Protestant mission; how he was kidnapped or exiled from his native land, served as cook aboard a whaler, and was shown, for small charge, in English seaports; how he returned at last to the Marquesas, fell under the strong and benign influence of the late bishop, extended his influence in the group, was for a while joint ruler with the prelate, and died at last the chief supporter of Catholicism and the French.
My contemplated journey to the Marquesas Islands was to them a foolish and dangerous labor for no good reason. The trip to Papeete from Mataiea by motor-car took only an hour and a half, and I was in another world, on the camphorwood chest at the Tiare hotel, by five o'clock. "Mais, Brien, you long time go district!" exclaimed Lovaina. "What you do so long no see you?
This last touch was all that was needed; without further ado I at once engaged him as valet for the period of my stay in the Marquesas. His duties would be to help in conveying my luggage ashore, to aid me in the mysteries of cooking breadfruit and such other edibles as I might discover, and to converse with me in Marquesan.
I found a chair in the rear, next to that of Baufré, the shaggy drunkard, and as the chanting began, I observed an empty prie-dieu, specially prepared and placed for some person of importance. "Mademoiselle N " said Baufré, noticing the direction of my glance. "She is the richest woman in all the Marquesas."
They establish the great age of the island, an opinion which the builders of theories concerning the creation of the various groups in the South Seas are not always inclined to admit. For my own part I think it just as probable that human beings were living in the valleys of the Marquesas three thousand years ago as that they were inhabiting the land of Egypt.
In illustration of this latter peculiarity, I may cite the law which forbids a female to enter a canoe—a prohibition which prevails upon all the northern Marquesas Islands. It is sometimes used by a parent to his child, when, in the exercise of parental authority, he forbids it to perform a particular action.
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