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Updated: May 17, 2025
The pastors were no longer of the type of the pioneers, and with the fast decrease of the race, the Tahitians were left largely to their own devices. Half a dozen religions supported ministers from America and Europe in Papeete; but there was no longer a fire of proselytizing, as all were nominally Christians.
The Tahitians have ever been adoring of little ones, and if their annals are stained by the blood of innumerable innocents murdered at birth, let it be remembered that it was a law, and not a choice of parents a law induced by the sternest demands of social economy. Religion or the domination of priests commanded it. They obeyed, as Abraham did when he began to whet his knife for his son Isaac.
Now, to the native who saw all around him on the ship huge masses of the material most precious to him in the world, it was as if an American in Yucatan saw in a native hut heaps of gold and diamonds not valued by the savage. Suppose the savage left the American alone with the treasure! But the Tahitians did not murder for blood lust, had no assassination, and virtually no theft.
I never heard such screeching and yelling in my life. The niggers must have just dived for the bush without looking to see what was up, while her Tahitians let loose, shooting in the air and yelling to hurry 'em on. And then, just as sudden, came the silence again all except for some small kiddie that had got dropped in the stampede and that kept crying in the bush for its mother.
In view of these things, who can remain blind to the fact that, so far as mere temporal felicity is concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now, than formerly; and although their circumstances, upon the whole, are bettered by the presence of the missionaries, the benefits conferred by the latter become utterly insignificant when confronted with the vast preponderance of evil brought about by other means.
He fished in the rear of his frock and produced the stump of a cigar, for which I yielded a match. "I found that on the steps of the Roman Catholic bishop's carriage, which was standing near here an hour ago," he said. "They'll tell you that you will burn in hell; but they smoke here, and good Havana tobacco." "I think it's a pity the Tahitians weren't left alone," I asserted.
Those discriminating birds are like the Japanese, seldom pioneering in wild places, but settling on developed lands to gain by the slower industry of other peoples. "Birds that live on cows," the Tahitians call the minas, because where there are enough ruminants each bird selects one, and spends the day upon its back, eating the insects that infest its skin.
But the obligation was only moral; it could not be, or was not, enforced; as a matter of fact, it was disregarded. The language had recently to borrow from the Tahitians a word for debt; while by a significant excidence, it possessed a native expression for the failure to pay "to omit to make a return for property begged."
In Borobodo, in the jungle of Java, I had seen, as near Cairo, the proudest trophy, temple, and tomb of king and priest humbled in the dust by the changing soul of man in his fight to throw off the shackles of the past. This marae had not been a place of cannibalism, as the Paepae Tapu of the Marquesas Islands. The Tahitians had no record of ever having eaten humans.
Now Tahitian customs were very like those of Hawaii at that time, in that the Tahitians offered human sacrifices when a canoe or a heiau was in process of construction. How the observance of this custom caused the flight of Paoa to Hawaii, you shall see. It so happened that one of the brothers was having a canoe built, and they were all undecided as to whom should be offered in sacrifice.
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