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The population of Tahiti, after a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary. I hear of a similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as healthy and at least as fruitful as before the change.
He spent some months in Papeete to make his plans and gain experience; then, on money borrowed from a friend in France, he bought an island in the Paumotus. It was a ring of land round a deep lagoon, uninhabited, and covered only with scrub and wild guava.
In half an hour she was close to, and Brantley recognised her as a brig from Tahiti, that occasionally made a trading voyage to the Paumotus, and whose skipper was a personal friend. Suddenly she hove-to and lowered a boat, which came alongside the schooner, and the white man that steered jumped on deck and held out his hand.
And then, as the months went by, I began to imagine that something dreadful had happened to my husband and his ship among the wild people of the Paumotus, for when he sailed he did not expect to be away more than three months. "At last, however, when I was quite worn out and ill with anxiety, he returned.
Others were round like blow-fish, with their spickles at every angle, menacing in look. The clams and oysters were small, except the furbelowed clam, whose shell is fluted, and who grows to an immense size in the atolls of the Paumotus. I always ate my fill of these delicacies raw as I walked along the reef, smashing the shells to get at the inmates.
"You fired that shot?" "Yes; to warn you. But they were wise and would not shoot back, and it was my last cartridge." "Now you, Hare-Lip?" Grief said to the Valetta's cook. His tale was long and painfully detailed. For a year he had been sailing out of Tahiti and through the Paumotus on the Valetta. Old Dupuy was owner and captain.
Ten months before he had dropped on one of the best patches of shell in the Paumotus, and to-day, as he sits writing and smoking in the big room of his house, he looks contentedly out through the open door to a little white painted schooner that lay at anchor on the calm waters of the lagoon.
By the time my quest reached Tahiti, he caught my drift. His thought-processes were almost visible, and it was a joy to watch him think. He nodded his head vigorously. Yes, he had been to Tahiti, and he added himself names of islands such as Tikihau, Rangiroa, and Fakarava, thus proving that he had sailed as far as the Paumotus undoubtedly one of the crew of a trading schooner.
I'm going to knock a hole right straight through the Paumotus, and that's always a near touch. Now, if this South East Trade ever blew out of the S.E., which it don't, we might hope to lie within half a point of our course. Say we lie within a point of it. That'll just about weather Fakarava. Yes, sir, that's what we've got to do, if we tack for it.
Here and there, indeed, where the reef carried an inlet, like a signet-ring upon a finger, there would be a pencilling of palms; here and there, the green wall of wood ran solid for a length of miles; and on the port hand, under the highest grove of trees, a few houses sparkled white Rotoava, the metropolitan settlement of the Paumotus.
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