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Updated: June 24, 2025
They then ate a hearty but silent meal, and prayed again before lying down to sleep. The couch offered to Mr. Hoffman was a raised platform in the hut, thickly spread with mats, with a pair of sheets of the Tahaitian manufacture, called Tapa, for its covering.
It is also their custom to prepare the dying man's coffin before his eyes; and what is still more incredible, when they see him about to render up his last sigh, they place a bit of moistened 'tapa' in his mouth, whilst the fingers of some friend are employed in closing the lips and nostrils!"
The place was wonderful. Ahuna, sepulchrally muttering prayers and meles, moved about, lighting various whale-oil lamp-calabashes. They were all there, the Hawaiian race from the beginning of Hawaiian time. Bundles of bones and bundles of bones, all wrapped decently in tapa, until for all the world it was like the parcels- post department at a post office. "And everything!
I know it; I have felt it. Go to her, Peter, but do not quite forget me." These were her last words, and, when I kissed her, Melannie, Queen of the Island of Gems, had crossed the waters of the Great Divide. Next day I consigned her body to the deep wrapped in her robe of white tapa cloth which formed her shroud.
She was not the first knowing one who had been silenced by a child. Little Daniel McCoy came up at the moment. Having passed the "staggering" period of life, he no longer walked the earth in a state of nudity, but was decorated with a pair of very short tapa trousers, cut in imitation of seafaring ducks, but reaching only to the knees. He also wore a little shirt.
If you think for a moment, you will see that to adopt civilized habits was for them to make a prodigious change in their ways of life. Formerly the maro and the slight covering of the tapa alone shielded them from the sun and rain. Their bodies became hardy by exposure. Their employments fishing, taro-planting, tapa-making, bird-catching, canoe-making were all laborious, and pursued out-of-doors.
Two months later, six more of the most pious and best educated young men, who had long deferred ordination through aversion to the old forms, followed his example; among them our mountain friend Oshana, Deacon John, of Geog Tapa, and Deacon Yakob, of Sapergan.
The crowd broke silence with an ear-piercing yell. He then spoke, and was interrupted from time to time with cries of approval or the reverse, and sometimes loud laughter, while the "Buli," sitting by me, every now and then shouted out, or broke into a childish giggle. Then the old man unwound the "tapa" around him and threw it on the mats, as did others.
But in their new calicos and ginghams they walked in the rain, bathed in the rivers, and returned to sleep huddled in the wet folds, ignorant of the danger. As the tapa disappeared, so did the beautiful carvings of canoes and paddles and clubs, superseded by the cheaper, machine-made articles of the whites.
From the enormous number of baskets, the food supply was enough to feed a large multitude. They were all put down together by the mats. Then there was dead silence, in which you could almost have heard the proverbial pin drop, and an oldish man stepped forward and stood by the mats and baskets, his body wound round with "tapa" till it stuck out many feet from his body.
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