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Updated: June 2, 2025
Her beauty was extraordinary, like that of the Marquesans, with that peculiar straightness of all the lines, at once Grecian, austere, and incalculably voluptuous. The dance, as I saw it for the first time that night, I will not speak of. I have traded to many islands in many groups even the Low Archipelago but the island where that dance was indigenous I am sure I've never touched.
Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers the American races and the South Sea Islanders the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn't frightened. All the rest are craven Europeans, Asiatics, Africans everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob.
We who are alive are the immune, the fit the ones best constituted to live in a world of hostile micro-organisms. The poor Marquesans had undergone no such selection. They were not immune. And they, who had made a custom of eating their enemies, were now eaten by enemies so microscopic as to be invisible, and against whom no war of dart and javelin was possible.
And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners. I do not think that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count paternal kinship.
I can see them now hanging over the little temple, as if to keep out the intrusive sun. *White appears to be the sacred colour among the Marquesans. On all sides as you approached this silent spot you caught sight of the dead chief's effigy, seated in the stern of a canoe, which was raised on a light frame a few inches above the level of the pi-pi.
What hidden clue to the remotest beginnings of the human race lies in the fact that two peoples, so far apart as the Marquesans and the South American Indians, use the same method of making their native beverage?
They are besides inclined to view the Marquesans with an eye of humorous indulgence. 'They are dying, poor devils! said M. Delaruelle: 'the main thing is to let them die in peace. And it was not only well said, but I believe expressed the general thought. Yet there is another element to be considered; for these convicts are not merely useful, they are almost essential to the French existence.
But the Fiji-Papuans at last drove them out, and they left with blood in their eyes. When the whites found the Marquesans in the sixteenth century, they were building at Vaitahu great war-canoes to "attack the black people who used bows and arrows." No living Marquesan had ever seen them nor could they have attained Fiji in any strength, yet the historical hate persisted.
If to that superb, almost perfect, physical base that nature had given these Marquesans, to that sweetness simplicity, generosity, and trust acknowledged by all who know them, there could have been added a knowledge of the things we have learned; if by example and kindness they could have been given rounded and informed intelligence, what living there would have been in these islands!
The islanders are still the same; and I have seen boys in the Typee Valley of whose 'beautiful faces' and promising 'animation of countenance' no one who has not beheld them can form any adequate idea. Cook, in the account of his voyage, pronounces the Marquesans as by far the most splendid islanders in the South Seas.
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