On the morning after the trouble we raised our first land—the western islands of the Marquesas. At sunset we had seen flocks of birds flying steadily southeast, and my uncle told me that if we followed them they would lead us to the land. At dawn, when I came on deck, I heard the ringing shout of landfall from aloft, and gazing eastward, I made out the high silhouette of Hatutu, a faint outline against the flushing sky. An hour later we drew abreast of Eiao, a saw-toothed ridge, falling away gently at either end; and toward midday we raised the rock of Motu Iti, and the long highlands of Nukuhiva, veiled in masses of black thundercloud. At nightfall, in the darkling east, the pinnacled skyline of Uapou faded and disappeared.
"A beautiful group," remarked my uncle, standing by the rail. "When I was trading there I knew every bay from Hanavave to Tai-O-Hae. The larger islands have a fascination—a gloomy beauty that gets into one's blood. The people, though they were cannibals, were a fine savage race, who had developed, during the course of centuries in their isolated group, an interesting culture of their own. But their blood was too wild to stand contact with our civilization, and when the white man came they died off, as the Indian and the buffalo disappeared from our American plains. Now the valleys where people once dwelt in thousands are silent and deserted, the lonely burial-places of a vanished race. I suppose I'm a heathen, but I can see the savage's point of view—he asked no more than to be left in peace, a favor we white men have never been willing to grant...."
Two days afterward I had my first glimpse of the coral islands. The moon was bright that evening as we passed through the twelve-mile channel separating the atolls of Rangiroa and Tikehau. I climbed to a perch in the shrouds and lingered there as we coasted the western end of Rangiroa; the night-breeze blowing off the land brought to my nostrils a faint sweet perfume, the odor of pandanus blossoms. The line of palms, growing on the low ring of land, stood out sharply in the moonlight, and at times, when we passed a region of sparser vegetation, I had glimpses of the great lagoon beyond, silvered by the moon and stretching away to the horizon without land in sight.
It was close to midnight when the atoll dropped away astern and I climbed down to the deck, stiff from my long vigil aloft. I found Uncle Harry busy over some papers at the little desk in his stateroom. He swung about in his chair and lit a cigar as I sat down on the berth.
"Been having a look at Rangiroa, eh," he remarked. "There's a kind of beauty about the atolls, especially on a moonlight night. Iriatai is the same sort of place, though on a much smaller scale. There's no other group in the world like the Paumotus: eighty lagoon islands, some of them of immense size, strung out northwest and south-east in a cluster a thousand miles long. Darwin believed that they were the peaks of a submerged mountain-range, on which the coral polyps have built, as the mountains sank little by little beneath the sea. The lagoons are accounted for on the ground that the polyps tend to die in calm water, and thrive best in the froth and spray of breaking seas. As time went on, you see, the ones on the outside would build higher and higher, while the ones inside would die. Then, as the island continued gradually to sink, with the live polyps all working in the wash of the sea along the outer run, a deepening lagoon would form inside—and there you have your atoll. The passes are believed to be caused by fresh water, the heavy rainfall of these latitudes, finding an outlet to the sea. Running out at low tide over the lowest portion of the reef, it kills the coral-builders and causes the slow formation of a pass, often deep enough to allow large vessels to enter the lagoon.
"There was a day, perhaps, two thousand years ago, when the Paumotus lay lonely and uninhabited, spread out like a vast net, a thousand miles long and four hundred miles across, to catch the canoes of wanderers who had missed the higher and richer islands to the west. The Polynesians were daring seamen, but their methods of navigation were of the most primitive sort—by the stars, the clouds, the trade wind, and the flight of birds. Hundreds of their great double canoes with clumsy sails of matting must have left Samoa for the eastern groups, and some of them, missing the Cook Islands or Tahiti, of which they had only half-legendary accounts, fetched up along this chain of atolls. The Paumotan people of to-day are their descendants. The names of the islands still show the wonder of those ancient wanderers at the strange sea in which they found themselves, and the joy and relief the landfalls brought—'The Spread-out Heavens'; 'The Place of Rejoicing'; 'The Windward Rainbow'; 'The Land of Great Beacon-Fires.' But perhaps this doesn't interest you very much—I have a way of preaching when I start on the subject of the islands!" My uncle tilted his chair and smiled at me through a cloud of smoke.
"The wind is shifting toward the north," he went on, "and with a little luck we'll sight Raiatea before dark to-morrow night. As I said, I'll leave young Marama with you; you're getting on well with the language, but you'll need an interpreter for the present. I'll be gone a month, at least, and when I return I'd like to be able to start at once for Iriatai. You'll stop with Marama's father, the chief of Faatemu Bay. I'll be careful to explain what I want to the old man, but remember that a native hasn't the least notion of the passage of time. I'm leaving this to you—if you don't keep after old Taura every day, the canoes may not be finished for months. I want fifteen strongly made canoes of hibiscus wood, about twenty feet long, and complete with outriggers, cinnet for lashings, and a pair of paddles with each. Then we'll need twenty-five or thirty pairs of diving-goggles, with the glass set in wood or horn. Some of the men will have their own, but they're always losing them, and once his goggles are lost, a diver is no more use. I'll leave you the glass and the diamond to cut it with; Marama will find you men who understand this work. I have a store at Faatemu; you can take the keys and advance a certain amount of goods to the canoe-builders, but don't let them get too far ahead of you! Old Taura, the chief, is as good a native as I know, and he'll see that you enjoy your stay on the island. You'll be swimming, and spearing fish, and hunting wild pig in the mountains—I only wish that I were stopping over, myself!"
The north wind blew all night with sudden fierce gusts and squalls of rain. The day broke wild and gray, but toward noon the sun shone out, and presently the clouds were left behind, sinking along the horizon to the north. At four bells land was in sight—the peaks of Huahine, bearing a little west of south, minute irregularities on the line where sea met sky. It was an afternoon such as one sees rarely in the tropics: a cloudless horizon and an atmosphere clear as the air above our deserts at home. An hour before sundown the Leeward Islands were all in view, strung out in the shape of a great half-moon on the sea ahead of us. The tall mountain rising abruptly in the north was Bora Bora; Tahaa and Raiatea, sheltered within the same circling barrier-reef, lay straight before the Tara's bows; and Huahine made the southern horn—beautiful as some land remembered from a dream.
At midnight we saw the torches of fishermen on the Raiatea reef, and dawn found us off Faatemu Bay. The sails were furled, Pahuri started the engine, and we glided in through the Nao Nao passage, past the green islet of Haaio, past Tuuroto Point, and into the deep inlet where the thatched roofs of the village clustered beneath the palms.