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Updated: June 26, 2025
Seeing the way the Lermontoffs lived, caused me to resolve that during the remainder of my stay in Tahiti I would go even farther from Papeete than Mataiea. They suggested Tautira, a village they had never visited, but which was at the very end of the habitable part of the Presqu'île of Taiarapu.
The smell of the burning wood of the Umuti was hardly out of my nostrils before my day of leaving Tautira came.
Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene. On a level spot, under five ponderous mapé-trees, eight or ten men of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven.
I brought in my belongings, which included bedding, and in half an hour was enough at home to dismiss the coachman and his equipage, and to lie down, as was my wont during the heat of the day. I put my bed in the doorway, and before I fell into my first sleep at Tautira, filled my eyes with the blue of the shimmering lagoon and the hoary line of the reef.
In Tautira everybody went to the Protestant or the Catholic church, the latter having a fifth as many attendants as the former. A reason for this may have been that there was no French priest resident at Tautira, and no Tahitian priests, whereas Tahitian preachers abound. Also the chiefs were Protestants, and their influence notable.
How was it that in all the Orient, and formerly in America, this power over fire was known and practised, and that it was interwoven with the strongest and oldest emotions of the races? That from the Chaldea of millenniums ago to the Tautira of to-day, the ceremonial was virtually the same?
Mahine and Maraa, two girls of my acquaintance, unmarried and the merriest in Tautira, joined me. They adorned me with a wreath of ferns and luminous, flower-shaped fungus from the trees, living plants, the taria iore, or rat's-ear, which shone like haloes above our faces. The girls wore pink gowns, which they pulled to their waists as we forded the streams.
None of them ever regretted the perseverance which led them on, however, for in all their wanderings in the South Seas before or after no place ever charmed them more, or were they received with greater hospitality than in Tautira. The day after their arrival, Moe, an island princess and an ex-queen, visited them.
"These she hired to take them to Tautira, the nearest village of any size, a distance of sixteen miles over a road crossed by one-and-twenty streams. Stevenson was placed in the cart, and, sustained by small doses of coca, managed, with the help of his wife and their servant, to reach his destination before he collapsed altogether." They found a house and made him as comfortable as possible.
The Tahitian youth addressed the Greek god as T'yonni, which was an effort to say John, and I adopted it instanter, as he did my own Maru. T'yonni said that Uritaata was the bane of his existence at Tautira. After building his faré he had been called to America, and had danced in Chinatown the night before his steamship departed for his return to Papeete.
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