Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
Ariioehau Amerocarao, commonly known as Tetuanui Tavana, or Monsieur le Chef de Mataiea, Tetuanui, and his wife, Haamoura, were the salt of the earth. The chief was a large man, molded on a great frame, and very corpulent, as are most Polynesians of more than thirty years. He was about sixty, strong and sweet by nature, brave and simple.
All of a sudden a something I could not see hurled itself from a limb upon my head, and two affrighting paws seized my right ear and my hair, grown long at Mataiea, and tried to tear them out by the roots, while at the same time many fierce teeth closed, though without much effect, on my tough and weathered shoulder.
"When I was made chief of Mataiea," said Tetuanui, reminiscently to me as we sang, "I went, as was the custom, to Papeete to drink with the king. He had just fallen down a stairway while drunk, and injured himself severely, so that our official drinking was limited. He hated stairs, anyhow, but his trouble was that he mixed his drinks. That is suicidal.
All of us have had that feeling on certain mornings; but was it not interwoven with the affairs of the day a picnic, a rendezvous, our wedding, a first morning of the vacation encampment? In Mataiea it was spontaneous, the harking back to a beneficent mood of nature; the very sense of being stirring the blood in delight, and girding up the loins instantly to pleasurable movement.
Tetuanui ended with a line of Brault's song about Pomaré: "Puisqu'il est mort ... N'en parlons plus!" Mataiea was the farthest point on Tahiti from Papeete I had reached, and wishing to see more of the island, I set out on foot with Tatini, my handmaid. We bade good-bye to Tetuanui and Haamoura and all the family after the dawn breakfast.
The first had been in and about the capital, mingling mostly with white men, and living in a public inn; the second at Mataiea had taken me far from those rookeries, and had introduced me to the real Tahitians, to their language, their customs, and their hearts; but still I had been a guest, and a cared-for and guarded white among aborigines.
He said there wasn't any work; so knowin' Llewellyn was badly in need of people, I sent him to his vanilla plantation out Mataiea way. You know here they haven't the bees or whatever it is that transfers the pollen from the stigma to the anther or what-d 'ye-call-it, and so they do it by hand with a piece of bamboo or a stem of grass.
The Tahitians who mourned his iconoclasm had a chant which said that the Taharuu River ran blood when their gods were dishonored." From the stream the vast domain of the plantation of Atimaono stretched to Mataiea.
Mama Tetuanui cried a few moments from the pangs of separation, and the chief wrung my hand sorrowfully, though I was to be back in a few days. From the reef at Mataiea I had glimpsed the south-west of Tahiti, the lower edge of the handle of the fan-shaped double isle, mountainous and abrupt in form, and called commonly the presqu'ile de Taiarapu.
The Mataiea boxer was on his back, but his glazing eyes stared reproachfully at Opeta. The latter, now clearly the victor, glanced at the red-headed girl, who was dancing on the floor beside her perambulator and waving her congratulations. The house was on its feet yelling wildly to Teaea to rise.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking