ACROSS the Bordelaise Channel from Atuona, many hours of sailing in an outrigger canoe, lay the island of Tahuata. Its principal settlement was Vaitahu, and there I went with Exploding Eggs, my adopted brother of fourteen, to stay awhile in the house of the chief, Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire, as Neo Efitu, his short name, meant. Atuona personified the brooding spirit of melancholy that possessed the race, the shadow of the white upon the Marquesan spirit, but Vaihatu had as genus loci a blithe and domestic sprite, which had kept the tiny village—formerly of thousands—in the habits and moods of the old ways. Waited on as an honored guest by the chief, his wife, and his niece, Vanquished Often, the friend and playmate of the few score inhabitants, I had happy weeks of simple pleasures, and of intense interest in searching into the past of the Marquesans, and especially into their customs and manners in relation to esthetics.
The only foreigner in the valley, by my earnest wish and laughable example, life resumed for a time much of the old Marquesan method and appearance. The mission church, the first Christian edifice within a thousand miles, was rejoining the wilderness. Without clergy or adherent, its walls were fast falling into decay, and its precisely-planned garden was jungle. The artist-schoolmaster, Le Moine, who had taught Vaitahu’s children to say, “La France est le plus bon pays du monde,” was gone to seek other models for painting as ravishing as Vanquished Often, or men as majestic as Kahuiti, the cannibal of Taaoa. Existence, almost as devoid of invention and artificiality as before the white came, I was able to rebuild in my mind the structure of Marquesan taste, and to view in imagination the attractive aspect of Vaitahu in its idyllic days of old. We brought out of the chests the native garments of tapa, and we lived as much as possible—like children playing Indians—a perspective of the past.
I looked from my mat upon the paepae of Seventh Man Who Wallows to see Vanquished Often by the Vai Puna, the spring of Vaitahu. She had taken off her ahu or tunic of pink muslin and bent over to receive the full stream of cool water from the hills which flowed through the bamboo pipes. Her beautiful body, the blood mantling under her silken skin, perfect in development at thirteen years, glowed in the dazzling light and under the silvery cascade, and her long, unconfined hair shone red-gold in the sunbeams. My mind reverted to the descriptions of the women, the men, and the scenes described by these who voyaged here decades ago.
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
Some friends in my valley
Wash-day in the stream by my cabin
Not any people in all the world, ancient or modern, ranked human beauty higher in the list of life’s gifts than did the people of these islands. In the star-scattered archipelagos of the Pacific tropics a dozen tawny races or breeds of superb physical endowment made their bodies wondrous temples for their free souls. The loveliness and grace of women, the symmetry and strength of men, were, before the white came to destroy them, the fascinating labor of their days, their vivid religion, and the expression of their joy of living.
They brought the culture of beauty and the rhythm of motion to an unequaled perfection, and in the adornment of their bodies and development of their natural attractions reached a pitch of splendor and artistry which, though seeming savage to us of this period, struck beholders, even of our kind, as entrancing and marvelous.
While all over Polynesia these conditions obtained when the first Anglo-Saxons threw down the anchors of their ships in the enchanting harbors of these tropics, they remained longest in the Marquesas Archipelago.