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Updated: June 17, 2025
I thought they might fall at any moment, and the Marquesans recount many such happenings. In Tai-o-hae three hundred natives were entombed forever by a landslide, and Orivie pointed out the tracks of such slides, and immense masses of rock in the far depths below, beside strips of soft soil brought down by the rains.
In response, Porter landed a six-pound gun, tremendously heavy, and said that if the Tai-o-hae tribe would carry it to the top of a high mountain overlooking the Hapaa valley, he would drive the Hapaas from the hills where they stood and threatened to descend.
They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana his kingdom in the Marquesas Islands, eight hundred miles from here, northward, Temoana had been a singer of psalms at the Protestant mission in his valley of Tai-o-hae, in the island of Nukahiva, a victim of shanghaiers, a cook on a whaler, a tattooed man in English penny shows, a repatriate, a protege of the Catholic archbishop of the Marquesans, and finally, through the influence of the Roman church, a king.
From San Francisco I sailed on the brig Galilee for Tahiti. I have never finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left her and installed myself on the Eunice, a small trading-schooner, and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land and settled down here." Grelet looked about him and smiled.
I said, of course, that I must visit Typee, the scene of Porter's bloody raid and Herman Melville's exploits, and while I was making arrangements to get a horse in Tai-o-hae I met Haus Ramqe, supercargo of the schooner Moana, who related a story concerning the valley.
But his mind would take no account of these familiar features; as he dodged in and out along the frontier line of sleep and waking, memory would serve him with broken fragments of the past: brown faces and white, of skipper and shipmate, king and chief, would arise before his mind and vanish; he would recall old voyages, old landfalls in the hour of dawn; he would hear again the drums beat for a man-eating festival; perhaps he would summon up the form of that island princess for the love of whom he had submitted his body to the cruel hands of the tattooer, and now sat on the lumber, at the pier-end of Tai-o-hae, so strange a figure of a European.
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.
He saw that if he had tried that entrance to the valley again, he would have failed as before. Only heavy artillery could have conquered that mighty stronghold. From the beach the Americans climbed by an easier ascent into the mountains, leaving a desolated valley behind them, and after feasting with the Hapaas, they marched back to Tai-o-hae almost dead with fatigue.
"'It is three miles from here to the beach, he said, 'and I have seen men coming with their presents for the chief, walking a yard apart, and yet the line stretched all the way to the beach. "He could hardly ride back to Tai-o-hae, and he departed with the Tropic Bird without saying another word to any one." Typee, they told me, was half way to Atiheu and a good four miles by horse.
He cautioned conservation of cartridges, and leaving two small parties behind to guard the wounded, he, with the main body, marched onward, followed by hordes of Tai-o-hae and Hapaa men, who dispatched the wounded Typees with stones and spears. They burned and destroyed ten villages one by one as they were reached, until the head of the valley was reached.
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