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Updated: June 19, 2025
How strongly rooted, then, must be the determination of the Typees with regard to me, and how suddenly could they display the strangest passions! The mere suggestion of my departure had estranged from me, for the time at least, Mehevi, who was the most influential of all the chiefs, and who had previously exhibited so many instances of his friendly sentiments.
At Nukuheva, and I believe, in all the other valleys, the weed is very scarce, being only obtained in small quantities from foreigners, and smoking is consequently with the inhabitants of these places a very great luxury. How it was that the Typees were so well furnished with it I cannot divine.
To be sure there was one rather unpleasant drawback to these agreeable anticipations the possibility of falling in with a foraging party of these same bloody-minded Typees, whose appetites, edged perhaps by the air of so elevated a region, might prompt them to devour one. This, I must confess, was a most disagreeable view of the matter.
They heard the echo in the blowing of war-conches, shouts of defiance, and the squealings of the pigs which the Typees began to catch for removal to the rear. The Hapaas were none too pleasant to the whites, and had to be forced by threats to bringing and cooking hogs and breadfruit.
I never used my razor during my stay in the island, but although a very subordinate affair, it had been vastly admired by the Typees; and Narmonee, a great hero among them, who was exceedingly precise in the arrangements of his toilet and the general adjustment of is person, being the most accurately tattooed and laboriously horrified individual in all the valley, thought it would be a great advantage to have it applied to the already shaven crown of his head.
But the continual happiness which, so far as I was able to judge, appeared to prevail in the valley, sprung principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us he at one time experienced, the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence. And, indeed, in this particular the Typees had ample reason to felicitate themselves, for sickness was almost unknown.
Although the valiant Typees would often, by gesticulations, declare their undying hatred against their enemies, and the disgust they felt at their cannibal propensities; although they dilated upon the manifold injuries they had received at their hands, yet, with a forbearance truly commendable, they appeared patiently to sit down under their grievances, and to refrain from making any reprisals.
On all sides the Typees were girt in by hostile tribes, and how could he possibly, if belonging to any of these, be received with so much cordiality? The personal appearance of the enigmatical stranger suggested additional perplexities.
THERE was no instance in which the social and kindly dispositions of the Typees were more forcibly evinced than in the manner the conducted their great fishing parties. Four times during my stay in the valley the young men assembled near the full of the moon, and went together on these excursions.
The slaughter had been, we were sorry to hear, considerable on both sides; for the Typees possessed several strong forts, formed of large stones and huge pieces of timber. These had been taken by assault, when all within had been put to the sword.
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