Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

Chapter XXIII

My life at Tautira—The way I cook my food—Ancient Tahitian sports—Swimming and fishing—A night hunt for shrimp and eels.

T’yonni and Choti were the only aliens except myself in all Tautira, nor did others come during my stay. The steamships, spending only twenty-four hours in Papeete port every four or five weeks, sent no trippers, and the bureaucrats, traders, and sojourners in Papeete apparently were not aware of the enchantment at our end of the island. T’yonni had found Tautira only after four or five voyages to Tahiti, and Choti had first come as his guest. T’yonni had no art but that of living, while Choti had studied in Paris, and was bent on finding in these scenes something strong and uncommon in painting, as Gauguin, now dead, had found. They lived separately, T’yonni studying the language and the people,—he had been a master at a boys’ school in the East,—and the artist painting many hours a day. But we three joined with the villagers in pleasure, and in pulling at the nets in the lagoon.

The routine of my day was to awake about six o’clock and see the sun swinging slowly up out of the sea and hesitating a moment on the level of the horizon, the foliage brightened with his beams. I sprang from my bed, washed my hands and face, and hastened to the faré umu, the kitchen in a grove of pandanus trees, a few steps away. There from a pile of cocoanut husks and bits of jetsam I selected fuel, which I placed between a group of coral rocks on which were several iron bars. I lit the fire, and put into a pot three tablespoonfuls of finely ground coffee and two cups of fresh water. The pot was a percolator, and beside it I placed a frying-pan, and in it sliced bananas and a lump of tinned butter from New Zealand. Leaving these inanimate things to react under the dissolving effect of the blaze, I ran to the beach, where I watched the sunrise. There recurred to me the mornings and evenings in the Orient when I had seen the Parsees, the fire-worshippers of India, offer their devotions, standing or kneeling on their rugs on the seashore. I, too, raised my hands in silent admiration of the mother of all life. Then I observed about me the hurry and scurry of the dwellers on the sands and in the water. Small hermit-crabs in shells many sizes too big for them toddled about, land-crabs rushed frantically and awkwardly for their holes, and Portuguese men-of-war sailed by the coast, luffing to avoid casting up on the beach. A brief period of observation, and I dashed back to the faré umu, and trimmed the fire. When cooked, I brought my food to my house, where I had a low table like a Japanese zen, and with rolls from the Chinese store I made my first meal, adding oranges, papayas and pineapple.

From the doorway, for all I encompassed in my view, I might have been the sole human on this island. I could look to the reef and far across the lagoon to Hitiaa or down the beach, but from that spot no other house was in sight. If I went around the house, I was almost on the Broadway of Tautira, the home of Ori-a-Ori before me, and a coral church close to it, with other buildings and groves toward the mango copse of T’yonni. On the bushes huge nets were drying, and canoes were drawn up into the purau and pandanus clumps. As the day advanced, the artless incidents of the settlement aroused my interest. I saw about me scenes and affairs which had caused a famous poet after a week or two in this very lieu to write:

Here found I all I had forecast:
The long roll of the sapphire sea
That keeps the land’s virginity;
The stalwart giants of the wood
Laden with toys and flowers and food;
The precious forest pouring out
To compass the whole town about;
The town itself with streets of lawn,
Loved of the moon, blessed by the dawn,
Where the brown children all the day
Keep up a ceaseless noise of play,
Play in the sun, play in the rain,
Nor ever quarrel or complain;
And late at night in the woods of fruit,
Hark! do you hear the passing flute?

The school-house was near to the master’s home where Choti lived, and often I heard the children learning by singsong, the way I myself had been taught the arithmetical tables. The teacher was Alfred, a Tahitian, who, being a scholar, must have a French name, and wear clothes and shoes when in his classes, but who very sensibly sat with Choti upon his veranda in only his pareu. Much of the time the pupils played in the grounds, hopscotch and wrestling on stilts being favorite games. Alfred regretted that the ancient Tahitian games which his grandfather played were out of style. Among these was a variation of golf, with curved sticks, and a ball made of strips of native cloth; and foot-ball with a ball of banana-leaves tightly rolled. 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. The spectators, thousands, did not view the contest from seats, but literally followed it as it surged up and down within the space of a mile.

Wrestling was the most notable amusement, and boxing was fashionable for women, some of whom were skilled in fistic combats. The wrestlers, as their Greek prototypes, first invoked the favor of the gods, and offered sacrifices when victorious. The palestra was on a lawn by the sea, and in formal contests district champions met those of other districts, and islands competed for supremacy with other islands. The maona wore a breech-clout and a coat of cocoanut oil freshly laid on, but not sand, as in the Olympiads. When one was thrown, the victor’s friends shouted in triumph and sang and danced about him to the music of tom-toms, while the backers of the loser met the demonstrations with ridicule. This was much like the organized yelling on our gridirons; and when the wrestling began again there was instant silence. It was all good-humored, as was the boxing.

Spear-throwing and stone-slinging at targets were both fun and preparation for war, for in the battles the slingers took the van. The stones were here, as in the Marquesas, as big as hens’ eggs, and rounded by the action of the streams in which they were found. Braided cocoanut-fiber formed the sling, or flax was used, and looped about the wrist the sling was flung down the back, whirled about the head, and the missile shot with deadly force and accuracy.

Archery was associated with religion in Tahiti, as in Japan, between which countries there are many strange similarities of custom. The costumes of the bowmen and their weapons were housed in the temple, and kept by devotees, and were removed and returned with ceremonies. The bows, less than six feet, the arrows, half that long, were never used in war or for striking a mark, but merely for distance shooting, and the experts were credited with reaching a thousand feet.

Tatini had pointed out to me, when we walked the peninsula of Taravao, a projecting rock, marked with deep-worn grooves, from which the Tahitians once flew very large kites. These were tied to the rocks, and the ropes of cocoanut sennit in the course of hundreds of years had worn the stones away. Often when the wind was favorable, they intrusted themselves to their kites, and slipping the ropes, flew to the opposite side of the bay, forerunners in the air of a certain Lyonnais of 1783, and contemporaneous with the Siamese who centuries ago indulged their levitative dreams by leaping with parachutes.

Alfred had registered all these obsolete things in his memory, while most Tahitians had no detailed knowledge of them, being crammed with the lore of theology, of saints, of automobiles, and moving pictures, and prize-fights for money. Matatini Afaraauia, son of Faaruia, of chiefly descent, a boy of seven, and of a guileless, bewitching disposition, made me his intimate friend, and through his sharp eyes I discovered phenomena that might have escaped my untutored mind. He lifted a stone, and beneath it was a spider larger than a tarantula. It was tabu to Tahitians, harmless, and a voracious eater of insects. Spiders are larger in these tropics than elsewhere, and here, too, the male was smaller than the female. Being seized and slain and devoured by his lady love even in the very transports of husbandly affection, it had been bitten in on his subconscious sensibilities that diminutiveness was life-saving, and natural selection had made him inferior in size to his cannibal mate. He had a very shrinking attitude in her presence, as Socrates must have affected about Xantippe.

At eleven o’clock of the forenoon I, with Matatini and Raiere, a youth of twenty, strolled down the grassy street to the garden of Alfred, where Choti might be painting under the trees, and if a halloo did not bring him bounding to us, we went on to T’yonni’s, where he would surely be, either under the mango trees or in the salon. Choti had many canvases completed, some six feet long, and he also did excellent silver-point heads of the villagers. Tahitians were indifferent models, as they were not much interested in pictures, not seeing objects, as we do, and found posing irksome. Only Choti’s friendship for them, his bonhomie, and many merry jokes in their tongue could keep them still for his purposes.

T’yonni’s house was half a mile from my own. A quarter of a mile farther, and the same distance from the junction of lagoon and river, we had our swimming-place. On an acre or two of grass and moss, removed from any habitation, grew a score of lofty cocoas, and under these we threw off our pareus or trousers and shirts. The bank of the stream was a fathom from the water which was brackish at high tide and sweet at low. With a short run and a curving leap we plunged into the flowing water. It was refreshing at the hottest hour. The Tahitians seldom dived head first, as we did, but jumped feet foremost, and the women in a sitting posture, which made a great splash, but prevented their gowns from rising. As I remarked before, we three Americans bathed stark when with men, but the modest Tahitian men never for a moment uncovered themselves, but wore their pareus. Captain Cook said that in their houses he had not seen a single instance of immodesty, though families slept in one room. Choti avowed that he had to make love to his girl models to induce them to pose in the altogether, for money would not make them adopt the garb of Venus.

The Tahitians did not enter the sea for pleasure. The rivers and brooks were their bathing- and resting-places. They attributed sicknesses to the too frequent touch of salt water. They had not the habitude of swimming within the lagoons, as at Hawaii; it was not with them an exercise or luxury, but a part of their every-day activities in fishing and canoeing. A farmer after his day’s work does not run foot-races. Yet in gatherings these people often vied for supremacy in every sort of sea sport, and beforetime, in bays free of coral, developed an astonishing skill in surf-riding on boards, in canoes, and without artificial support. Such skill was ranked on a par with or perhaps the same as proficiency in the pastimes of war, as did the Greeks, who addressed Diagoras, after he and his two sons had been crowned in the arena: “Die, for thou hast nothing short of divinity to desire.” These ambitions had been ended in Tahiti by the frowns of the missionaries, to whom athletics were a species of diabolical possession, unworthy souls destined for hell or heaven, with but a brief span to avert their birthright of damnation in sackcloth and ashes.

We entered the river regularly at eleven and four, but Choti, T’yonni, and I also swam in the lagoon at the mouth of the river, and never suffered bad consequences unless we cut or scraped ourselves on coral. About noon I prepared my déjeuner à la fourchette, and had a wide choice of shrimp, eels, fish, taro, chicken, breadfruit, yams, and all the other fruits. The solicitude of the homesick missionaries had added to those indigenous, oranges, limes, shaddocks, citrons, tamarinds, guavas, custard apples, peaches, figs, grapes, pineapples, watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers and cabbages. They had grown these foreign flora many years before they made sprout a single shoot of Christianity.

I invented a stove from a five-gallon oil tin. With a can-opener I cut a strip out on opposite sides ten inches from the bottom, and laid two iron bars across, and under them, inside the receptacle, built a fire. Upon this I cooked my coffee in the percolator, while upon the earth and hot stones other delicious dishes boiled, stewed, and fried. If I baked, I used the native oven in the ground, with earth and leaves inclosing.

I passed hours on the reef with Raiere and Matatini or in canoes, drawing the nets and catching shrimp and eels. In the lagoon we usually secured a plentiful draft of fish, brilliant creatures of silver and crimson, as they leaped from the sea into the nets, and were later tumbled into canoes or on the beach. The orare, aturi, and paaihere were like the gleaming mesh purses worn by the women of our cities, but the ihi was as red as the beard of the Greek god T’yonni. These fish we kept in tubs of sea water, alive and even moderately happy until cooked.

Saturday’s parties went far into the woods to gather a choice kind of fei, and the oranges and limes of the foot-hills. Raiere, Matatini, and another boy, Tahitua, hunted the shrimp and eel. After our suppers, about seven or eight o’clock, when it was quite dark, we equipped ourselves for the chase, each with a torch and two or three lances, all but Tahitua, who carried a bag.

We followed the grand chemin, as Alfred called it, along the lagoon and past the clump of trees in which lived Uritaata, whom we saw sleeping peacefully a dozen feet from the earth in the branches of a mango. He lay on his back, with his arms above his little head, and one foot grasping a leaf, and did not arouse to notice our passing. The Tahitians gave him wide avoidance, with a mutter of exorcism. We descended the bank, and entered the stream at a point just below the last hut of the village.

Raiere cast a glow upon the water with his torch, and we saw the shrimp resting upon the bottom or leaping into the air in foot-wide bounds. He poised his smallest lance and thrust it with a very quick, but exact, motion, so that almost every time he impaled a shrimp upon its prongs. The oura was instantly withdrawn, and Tahitua received it in his bag. All but he then began in earnest the quest of the bonnes bouches. We separated a hundred feet or so, and treading slowly the pebbled or bouldered and often slippery floor of the river, keeping to the shallow places, we lighted the rippling waters with our torches, and sought to spear the agile and fearful prey. The oura lances were five feet long, not thicker than a fat finger, and fitted with three slender prongs of iron—nails filed upon the basalt rock. One saw the faintest glimpse of a shrimp on the bottom, or a red shadow as the animal darted past, and only the swiftest coordination of mind and body won the prize. Whereas Raiere and even Matatini secured most of those they struck at, I made many laughable failures. I missed the still body through the deceptive shadows of the water, or failed to strike home because of the lightning-like movements of the alarmed shrimp.

The sport was fascinating. The water was as warm as fresh milk, transparent, and with here a gentle and there a rapid current. A million stars glittered in a sky that was very near, and the trees and vegetation were in mysterious shadows. Only when our torches lit the darkness did we perceive the actual forms of the cocoanuts, mango- and purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling over a stone or buried branch, and I looked often to reassure myself that Raiere’s gigantic figure loomed in the farther gloom. There was no danger save in me; the scene was peaceful, but for our own disturbance of the night and the river, and not even a breeze fluttered the dark leaves of the trees. The mountain rose steeply at our backs, and constellations appeared to rest upon its shadowy crest.

At last we came to a place where a tiny natural dam caused the stream to break in glints of white on a crooked line of rocks, and pausing there, Raiere suddenly bent over. He called peremptorily to Tahitua to bring him the big lance, which the little boy carried along with the bag.

“Puhi! Haere mai!” he said in a low, but urgent, voice.

Tahitua flew through the ripples, and we all hurried to see the new adventure.

“Puhi! Puhi!” again said Raiere, and pointed to the rocks. We cautiously stepped that way, and saw, apparently asleep at the foot of the stones, a tangle of huge eels. Their black and gray slate-colored bodies lay inert in folds, as if they had gathered for a night’s good slumber, and not until Raiere, with unerring aim thrust the great spear, with its half-dozen points of iron, into one of them, did the others scatter in a mad swim for safety. The mere transfixing of the eel did not always mean his securing, but another of us must put a lance in the contorting curves and with quick and dexterous motion lift him to the bank where his struggles might be ended with knife or rock. The release of him for a second might permit him to wriggle to the river and escape.

With the finding of the first eel, began an hour’s search for his fellows. We had struck their haunt, but they did not yield us half a dozen of their kind without diligent, though pleasant, work. We splashed to places when one sang out that an eel was in sight, and pursued them in their divagations through the river, trusting to drive them into eddies or under the fringe of plants hanging from the banks where we hunted them out.

In a couple of hours we found ourselves with a full creel of eels and oura, and I a trifle dismayed at facing the march home. Raiere relieved Tahitua of the burden, and a song shortened the way. I gave them the ditty of the New-Zealand Maori, who metaphorically toasted his enemy:

O, the saltiness of my mouth
In drinking the liquid brains of Nuku
Whence welled up his wrath!
His ears which heard the deliberations!
Mine enemy shall go headlong
Into the stomach of Hinewai!
My teeth shall devour Kaukau!
The three hundred and forty of my enemy
Shall be huddled in a heap in my trough;
Te Hika and his multitudes
Shall boil in my pot!
The whole tribe shall be
My sweet morsel to finish with! E!