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Updated: June 2, 2025
Those Spaniards, on whose ships the cross was seen in cabin and forecastle, on gun and halberd, murdered many Marquesans at Oomoa to glut their taste for blood. The standard of death the white flew then has never been lowered.
He fondled the impression of her as of silverspun wire, of fine leather, of twisted hair-sennit from the heads of maidens such as the Marquesans make, of carven pearl-shell for the lure of the bonita, and of barbed ivory at the heads of sea-spears such as the Eskimos throw. "All right, Aaron," they heard Dick Forrest's voice rising, in a lull, from the other end of the table.
This is remarkable of the Marquesans; each toe in the old and industrious is often separated a half inch from the others, and I have seen the big toe opposed from the other four like a thumb. My neighbors picked up small things easily with their toes, and bent them back out of sight, like a fist, when squatting.
For a quarter of an hour the only sounds were the plup of fingers withdrawn from mouths filled with popoi, and the faint creaming of waves on the beach. Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the tentacles being devoured as one eats celery.
Marquesans are not deep thinkers. In fact, they have a word, tahoa, which means, "a headache from thinking." Ten years of ardent and nobly self-sacrificing work by missionaries left the islands still without a single soul converted. It was not until the chiefs began to set the seal of their approval on the new outlandish faiths that the people flocked to the standard of the cross.
The namu when stale causes the Marquesans to revert to wickedest savagery, and has incited many murders. Under the eye of the gendarme its making ceases, but a hundred valleys have no white policemen, and the half score of people remaining amid their hundreds of ruined paepaes give themselves over to intoxication.
"I have seen through a karahi mea tiohi i te fetu, the Mirror Thing Through Which One Looks At The Stars, long as a tree and big around as a pig. Miope has people upon it." "Are they Marquesans?" "They must be Marquesans for there are islands," I replied. "And popoi and pigs?" demanded the ena-perfumed one. "Namu?
With the Marquesans it might almost most be styled the great business of life, for they pass a large portion of their time in the arms of Somnus. The native strength of their constitution is no way shown more emphatically than in the quantity of sleep they can endure. To many of them, indeed, life is little else than an often interrupted and luxurious nap.
A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one hundred. A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults.
Her decks have run blood, and heard the wailing of the gentle savage torn from his beloved home and lashed or clubbed into submission by the superior white. Name and color and rig had changed time and again, owners and masters had gone to Davy Jones's locker; the old brass cannon on her deck had raked the villages of the Marquesans and witnessed a thousand deeds of murder and rapine.
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