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Thus inaugurating a new era in his reign, Pomare introduced a code of useful laws, and brought about many much-needed reforms in his kingdom. He not only proved himself a warm friend of the missionaries, but gave them valuable assistance in the important work of translating the Scriptures into the Tahitian tongue a fact which proves Pomare to have been a man of no ordinary natural abilities.
Grown-ups in those Tahitian times were experts in all these sports, women excelling at foot-ball, with thirty on each side, and captains, backs, and guards, or similar participants, and with hard struggles for the ball, which, as the games were played on the beach, often had to be fought for in the sea.
Conspicuous above all were the Tahitian and part-Tahitian girls. In their long, graceful, waistless tunics of brilliant hues, their woven bamboo or pandanus hats, decorated with fresh flowers, their feet bare or thrust into French slippers, their brown eyes shining with yearning, they were so many Circes to us from the sea.
Numbers of children were playing on the beach, and had lighted bonfires which illumined the placid sea and surrounding trees; others, in circles, were singing Tahitian verses. We seated ourselves on the sand, and joined their party. The songs were impromptu, and I believe related to our arrival: one little girl sang a line, which the rest took up in parts, forming a very pretty chorus.
Williams none would tell me, and of the meaning of the name Kanitu none had a guess. It was not Tahitian, it was not Marquesan; it formed no part of that ancient speech of the Paumotus, now passing swiftly into obsolescence. One man, a priest, God bless him! said it was the Latin for a little dog.
"The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs." Tahitian proverb. Ah Cho did not understand French. He sat in the crowded court room, very weary and bored, listening to the unceasing, explosive French that now one official and now another uttered.
He gave me a look such as Diogenes might have given the man who stood in his sunlight. He lit his cigar-end, puffed it diligently for a minute, and then said arbitrarily: "The Tahitian is, first, a coward, afraid to fight the white; but if he can, in a group or by secret, kill or hurt you, he will. He is treacherous, and the more he pretends to be your friend, the more he connives to cheat you.
Ori-a-Ori every evening sat with me, and numbers of times we read the Bible, I, first, reciting the verse in French, and he following in Tahitian.
The favourite song of a Tahitian king, Tom explained the last of the Pomares, who had himself composed it and was wont to lie on his mats by the hour singing it. It consisted of the repetition of a few syllables. "E meu ru ru a vau," it ran, and that was all of it, sung in a stately, endless, ever-varying chant, accompanied by solemn chords from the ukelele.
Yet she could be a queen or a chiefess, and as such was as powerful as a man, making war in person, and often leading her troops valiantly. The Tahitian women were nearly as strong as the men and mentally their full equal. They wound their husbands around their fingers or treated them cruelly in many instances, astonishing the whites by their independence.
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