“She enraged the gods. She corrupted even men. A council was held of the wise old men, and the words went forth from it. She was made to keep within her house, and a tapu against her made it forbidden to listen to her wildness. In each period another woman arose to do the same, and more were corrupted. Some women stole canoes and were drowned. The sharks even hated them for their wickedness. We pointed out what fate had befallen them, but other women returned boasting. We slew some of these. But still it went on. You know, foreigner, how the pokoko enters a valley. One coughs and then another, and from the sea to the peak of Temetiu, many are made sick by the evil. It was so with us, and that revolt against religion.”
He sighed and rubbed his stomach.
“Is it not time they came?” he asked.
“Epo, by and by,” I answered. “Why did you men not yield? After all, what did it really matter?”
“O te Etua e! The gods of the High Place forbade, for the women’s own sake!” he said indignantly, and muttered further.
To break down every sacred relation of centuries! To shatter the tradition of ages! To unsex their beloved mothers, wives, and sisters by the license of canoe riding! The dangers and the hardships of the carven tree were to be spared the consolers of men’s labor and perils.
“Did the gods speak out plainly and severely?”
The taua looked at me quizzically. Foreigners mock holy things of nature. The bishop here had kicked the graven image of the deity of the cocoanut-tree.
“Ea! Po, the god of night, who rules the hereafter, spoke. The priest, the high priest, received the message. You know that grove by the Dark Cave. He heard the voice from the black recesses. Tapu haa, it said. A double tapu against any woman even lifting a paddle, or putting one toe, or her heel, or her shadow within a canoe. All the women were not wicked. Many believed their place was in the huaa, the home. These refused to join the brazen hussies, the deserters of the popoi pit. But the dance was dull, and there was strife. The huona, the artists, the women who rejoice men when they are merry, the women with three or more husbands, they all seemed to have the madness. They gained some of the younger men to their side, and they built that long house by those breadfruit-trees. They held their palaver there, and they refused to lie under their own faa, their roofs of pandanus. They would not dance by the light of the blazing candlenuts the mad hura-hura, nor let those bravers of the sea share their mats on the paepae of the valley. Many husbands fought one another when their wife did not return. The tribe grew apart.”
He sighed and took a shark’s tooth from his loin-cloth, with which he scraped our pipe.