I am the darker-age grown old and thin—
Personified, tattooed from toes to chin,
And for you and your God care not one pin!
Such was O Le Langi’s cry to the white men—O Le Langi, who stands out like some wonderful, tattooed bas-relief in the background of my memory.
O Le Langi means Chief of the Heavens, and, so far as his handsome physique and fine, expressive face were concerned, he deserved that name. He was a fine sample of his race. Though he lived in Samoa, he was a full-blooded Marquesan, having emigrated from Nuka Hiva to Samoa in his youth. His father had been high chief of Queen Vaekehu’s royal bodyguard when that South Sea Semiramis had reigned supreme over her dominions and a thousand death-drums had called the hour of the sacrificial festival. O Le Langi’s mother had escaped from the rods of the French officials by beating a hasty retreat from Nuka Hiva to Papeete some fifty years before I met him. From Papeete she had stowed away in a trading schooner with her three little children, O Le Langi and her two daughters.
Both the girls had succumbed to the privations and terrors of some long voyage in an open boat which had finally drifted O Le Langi and his mother to the Samoan Isles. The incidents of that terrible voyage O Le Langi only hinted about. Nor was I one who would attempt to learn more, it being quite obvious to me that the sad old chief had some strange idea that the whole truth of those days were best kept a secret in his own heart.
Though secretive over the tragic history that had caused his father’s execution and his mother’s flight from her native land, O Le Langi never tired of telling me the wonders of his tribe, and commemorating in words the mighty deeds of his forefathers.
His knowledge of heathen mythology was marvellous, as were the tattooed armorial bearings, the insignia of blue blood, which were visible on his massive chest. I entertained no doubt whatever as to Le Langi’s royal pedigree. Seeing that massive human parchment inscribed with wondrous savage hieroglyhpics, the truth of all he said was perfectly evident. I knew that the Marquesans of royal blood had the tribal mottoes and family crest tattooed on their sons before puberty.
Langi looked liked some Greek god as he stood on his village stump, his royal robe of the best tappa-cloth swung about his rosewood-hued, majestic frame. Never were the graceful, god-like shoulders wholly covered. Even the maids, as they listened to his impassioned oratory, sighed as the lightnings of poetic imagination leapt from those fine dark eyes of his. Yes, old as he was. By profession he was a travelling scribe, a genuine South Sea poet. This talent he had inherited. For I discovered that his father had once stood in the barbarian forums of Tai-o-hae and spouted the charms of his queen, Vaekehu, commemorating in verse the warrior-like deeds of the many brief kings who had ascended her throne—and their deaths when she had tired of them.
His temperament was Byronic, but at times he would become strangely imbued with the savage instincts of his race, becoming extremely bitter and cynical when his fortunes were at a low ebb. For I must confess he had a large share of the commercial spirit. This much I noticed when he looked into the coco-nut-shell that he always passed around amongst his audience. Often one could see a poetic grin of extreme satisfaction end the handsome wrinkles in a bunch up to the northern territory of his high, bald, intellectual physiognomy as he counted the collection.