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Updated: June 3, 2025
Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered.
Père Olivier tried to dissuade me from walking back to Oomoa, and offered me his horse, but I determined to go afoot and let Orivie, a native youth, be my mounted guide. Orivie is named for Père Olivier; there being no "l" in the Marquesan language, the good priest's name is pronounced as if spelled in English Oreeveeay.
The valley of Oomoa was drunk. Rum was everywhere, the palm namu was being made all the time, and few people were ever sober. There was a Hawaiian Protestant missionary there, and he was not good friends with Frère Fesal. There was no French authority at Oomoa, and the strongest man was the law. The whalers were worse than the natives, and hated the missionaries.
One still might easily break one's neck. And I reflected that Père Olivier crosses many times a year between Oomoa and Hanavave, in his black soutan and on his weary horse, in all weathers, alone; it is a fact to treasure for recalling when one hears all missionaries included in the accusation of selfishness that springs so often to the lips of many men.
From him I learned that the Roberta was bound for Oomoa, a port of that Island. That I had not been given the vaguest idea what our first landfall would be was indicative of the secrecy maintained by these traders in the competition for copra.
Fishing in Hanavave; a deep-sea battle with a shark; Red Chicken shows how to tie ropes to shark's tails; night-fishing for dolphins, and the monster sword-fish that overturned the canoe; the native doctor dresses Red Chicken's wounds and discourses on medicine. Grelet returned to Oomoa in the whale-boat, but I remained in Hanavave for the fishing.
We reached the stones again and again, only to be torn away by the racing tide. At last we all jumped into the surf and swam ashore, except one man who anchored the whale-boat before following us. The canoe that had sounded the conch off Oomoa was lying on the shale, and those who had come in it were on the stones cooking breadfruit.
I thought of the Roberta and those two kinds of cockroaches, the Blatta orientalis and the Blatta germanica, who raid by night and by day respectively; I looked at Grelet's surroundings, and I accepted. While the Roberta gathered what copra she could and flitted, I became a resident of Oomoa until such time as chance should give me passage to my own island.
Return in a canoe to Atuona; Tetuahunahuna relates the story of the girl who rode the white horse in the celebration of the féte of Joan of Arc in Tai-o-hae; Proof that sharks hate women; steering by the stars to Atuona beach. The canoe we had followed to Hanavave stopped in Oomoa on its way to Hiva-oa, my home, for I had bargained with Tetuahunahuna, its owner, for my conveyance to Atuona.
The men here conspired with the men of Hanahouua to descend on Oi, a little village by the sea between here and Oomoa. They had guns of a sort, for the whalers had brought old and rusty guns to trade with the Marquesans for wood, fruit, and fish. Frère Fesal learned of the conspiracy, but the men were drinking rum, and he was helpless.
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