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Updated: June 13, 2025
They are very anxious we should accompany them on their return, and say they will show us plenty of villages and people. Yesterday we had great feasting in the villages on yams and taro. To an Eastern Polynesian it would be ridiculous to call it a feast, seeing there was no pig.
He was dressed in a brown cassock, and looked like the blue-eyed man who had been refused passage to my destination. Probably, that American in the toga and sandals, exiled from the island he loved so well, had a message for the Tahitians or others of the Polynesian tribes of the South Seas; Essenism, maybe, or something to do with virginal beards and long hair, or sandals and the simple life.
Raiatea was his first home, Rarotonga his second. There he placed his family, which long consisted of his one boy, John, born in Tahiti, all Mrs. Williams's subsequent babes scarcely living to see the light, until, in the sixteenth year of her Polynesian life, another son rejoiced her.
Fishing-nets of various kinds were in use, and were all manufactured on the islands. Several of the Polynesian tribes excel in this branch of industry. A captain of a ship of war, who was buying curiosities lately at Savage Island, actually refused their fine small fishing-nets, thinking that they must be articles of European manufacture. In Samoa, net-making is the same now as it was of old.
Speaking for myself, I have visited and dwelt in almost every seat of the Polynesian race, and have met but one man who gave me a stronger impression of character and parts. About the situation, Mataafa expresses himself with unshaken peace. To the chief justice he refers with some bitterness; to Laupepa, with a smile, as "my poor brother."
But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain Higginson forgot his rear-admiralship and his high family and took to wife three hundred thousand dollars and a refined and cultured girl who was one thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one-sixteenth Portuguese, eleven thirty-seconds English and Yankee, and one-half Chinese. Ah Chun's munificence had its effect.
The people of Meroka are very mixed, some very dark, others very light. Some of the women had quite an Eastern Polynesian look; some of the children were well-formed, and really pretty. A few men had light-coloured whiskers; curly heads abounded, although a number had straight hair. They say they are not Koiari.
But the particular drawback of the Polynesian system is to depress and stagger industry. To work more is there only to be more pillaged; to save is impossible. The family has then made a good day of it when all are filled and nothing remains over for the crew of free-booters; and the injustice of the system begins to be recognised even in Samoa.
Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of pin-pricks. We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the missionary. In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent authority; the king becomes his mairedupalais; he can proscribe, he can command; and the temptation is ever towards too much.
In one island of the Pacific he would find a small population of mingled Polynesian and English blood; and in the Fiji Archipelago a population of Polynesian and Negritos crossed in all degrees. Many analogous cases could be added; for instance, in Africa.
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