Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

In their simple dress, their practice of manipulation in the development of their bodies, their use of scents, unguents, and lotions, their wearing of flowers and ornaments, their singular and astounding art of the story-teller, the dance and the pantomime, and the exquisite tattooing of their persons, they showed a delicacy of feeling and an understanding of elegance unsurpassed in the records of the nations of the earth.

As I sat under the pandanus thatch of Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire, I recalled what that eminent moralizer, Lecky, had said:

The intense esthetic enthusiasm that prevailed was eminently fitted to raise the most beautiful to honor. In a land and beneath a sky where natural beauty developed to the highest point, supreme physical perfection was crowned by an assembled people. In no other period of the world’s history was the admiration of beauty in all its forms so passionate or so universal. It colored the whole moral teaching of the time, and led the chief moralists to regard virtue simply as the highest kind of supersensual beauty. It led the wife to pray, before all other prayers, for the beauty of her children. The courtesan was often the queen of beauty.

Lecky wrote that of ancient Greece to contrast it with the morals of the Europe of his day, but I considered the striking likeness between the condition he described and the attitude of the ancient Marquesans. Here in these tiny islands, separated by ten thousand miles of billow from the land of Pericles and Aspasia, a people whose origin was only guessed at by science, erected the same goal of attainment, and like standards of harmony of form and movement. Doubtless at that very day these Greeks of the tropics, considering their environment, most distant from the birthplace of humanity and from the example of other peoples, were comparable in brilliancy of person and ease of motion to the Homeric figures.

The American sea-fighter, Captain David Porter, who ran up the Stars and Stripes in the breadfruit groves of these islands, said:

The men of the Marquesas are remarkably handsome, of large stature and well-proportioned; they possess every variety of countenance and feature, and a great difference is observable in the color of the skin, which for the most part is of a copper color. But some are as fair as the generality of working people much exposed to the sun of a warm climate.

The young girls were handsome and well-formed; their skins were remarkably soft and smooth and their complexions no darker than many brunettes in America, celebrated for their beauty. Their modesty was more evident than that of the women of any place we had visited since leaving our own country; and if they suffered themselves (though with apparent timidity and reluctance) to be presented naked to strangers, may it not be in compliance with a custom which taught them to sacrifice to hospitality all that is most estimable?

Why, and how had this strange race, so far from others’ strivings, attained so singular a state of natural beauty that discoverer after discoverer and diarist after diarist, from the bloody Spaniard, Mendaña, to the gentle Louis Stevenson, set it down as the “handsomest on earth?”

One must guess at the beginnings of the Marquesans. Scientists make explorations to find the route of the Caucasian people who thousands of years ago—maybe, before the Hebrews deserted Jehovah for Baal-Peor—migrated through the unknown and fearsome wastes of ocean toward these misty islands of the far south. What equipment of body and soul they brought with them we do not know, but they were or became the masters of their seas, and in their frail canoes dared even the long voyage to New Zealand and to Hawaii, when Europeans and Asiatics in keeled ships crept carefully about their own coasts, or crossed the Mediterranean Sea only within the threatening Pillars of Hercules.

During the thousands of years the Marquesans were separated from Europe they developed a policy of government, a paternalistic democracy, or communism, which was perfectly adapted to their nature and surroundings. A very large part of it was concerned with beauty, manners, and entertainment, with personal decoration, carving of stone and wood, building of temples and houses, oratory, dances, and chants. All of these were carefully regulated by cults, gilds, and tapus. They must have been an extremely prolonged growth, for they had come to a fixed standard of detail and exactness, and an acme of art, bizarre and exotic as it was, that could have been but the minute accretion of many centuries. When the first explorers came into the uncharted spaces of these warm seas, they found a culture totally beyond the understanding of most of them, and abhorrent to state and church, but which a few fine souls glimpsed as an astonishing revelation of the natural development of the human, and, by foil, of the decadence of civilization. They found health and high spirits abounding to a degree utterly strange to them, the hardiest and most adventurous of Europeans and Americans, and they were provoked by the innocence, radiance, and naturalness of the women.