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Updated: June 10, 2025
Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials. And yet though the hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has always an eye upon the past.
We sailed from Hilo, Hawaii, on October 7, and arrived at Nuka-hiva, in the Marquesas, on December 6. The distance was two thousand miles as the crow flies, while we actually travelled at least four thousand miles to accomplish it, thus proving for once and for ever that the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line.
Ten days of this, and on the morning of December 6, at five o'clock, we sighted land "just where it ought to have been," dead ahead. We passed to leeward of Ua-huka, skirted the southern edge of Nuka-hiva, and that night, in driving squalls and inky darkness, fought our way in to an anchorage in the narrow bay of Taiohae.
The port the mart, the civil and religious capital of these rude islands is called Tai-o-hae, and lies strung along the beach of a precipitous green bay in Nuka-hiva. It was midwinter when we came thither, and the weather was sultry, boisterous, and inconstant.
Père Victorien said that I must not leave the Marquesas before I visited the island of Nuka-hiva seventy miles to the northward and saw there in Tai-o-hae, the capital of the northern group of islands, a real saint. "A wonderful servant of Christ," he said, "Père Simeon Delmas. He is very old, and has been there since the days of strife.
Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua- pu.
On either hand, at every hundred yards, instead of the houseless, disembowelling paepaes of Nuka-hiva, populous houses turned out their inhabitants to cry 'Kaoha! to the passers-by.
Dad was cut up when he learned that the French charged an export duty on copra he called it medieval but he liked the land. There was a valley of fifteen thousand acres on Nuka-hiva, half inclosing a perfect anchorage, which he fell in love with and bought for twelve hundred Chili dollars.
"There are many proofs of this, but most convincing is a happening that every one in Tai-o-hae and Nuka-hiva knows, because it happened only a few years ago. I saw that happening." I looked at him with attention, and after a few puffs of smoke he continued. "You may think, you who use the Iron Fingers That Make Words, that the shark does not know the difference between men and women.
It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended. Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new plantation arisen in their stead. There was a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister island, Nuka-hiva.
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