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Updated: May 12, 2025
Our canoe was twenty feet long, and with a very strong outrigger, but though all four of us paddled, Teta, the chief man of Puforatoai, in the stern, steering, the vaa labored heavily.
The highway along the eastern portion of the Presqu'île was much like that between Taravao and Puforatoai, tortuous, constricted, and often forced to hang upon a shelf carved out of the precipice which hemmed it.
Carefully and in a wide circle the vaa crept around to head back toward our port, and it was after sunset before we were in Teta's house in Puforatoai. The villagers met us with torches and incredulous aues and we walked up the road singing the song of the "Ai Dobbebelly Dobbebelly," which was known wherever a fisher for market dwelt in all Tahiti.
A council of the elders of Vaieri opposed me, but yielded to my persistence by advising me at least to ride as far as possible in the cart along the western road, and to find, nearer to Tautira, in Maora, or farther on, in Puforatoai, a canoe and canoeists for the risky attempt. Tatini, who had lagged behind at Butscher's, appeared as I harnessed the horse.
She had accompanied the Tinito storekeeper of Taravao to Vaieri, and would not permit me to go on alone. She climbed into the vehicle, and we wended a winding road, and forded several streams until we came to Puforatoai, having gone through Hatiti and Maora.
There was a pass in the reef admitting to a questionable shelter, Port Beaumanoir, used by the French when little gunboats threatened to bombard villages to force the rule of Paris. Puforatoai was a handful of houses, hardly a village. My advent was of importance, and its few people gathered about us.
The alluvial strip of land which in them stretched from a quarter of a mile to a mile from the lagoon to the slopes of the hills, here was cramped to the barest strip. The huts of the indigenes, few and far apart outside of Puforatoai, seemed to be set in terraces cut at the foot of the mountains which rose almost straight from the streak of golden sand to the skies.
The little boy and I chatted as the horse ambled at will, occasionally urged to a trot by a shaking of the reins. The country as we progressed became far more beautiful than that behind. A new wildness, not fierce and rugged as between Vaiere and Puforatoai, but gentler and more inviting, preluded the exquisite setting of the village.
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