Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Such a one must expect to have no apple of love thrown at him, to awaken no passion in womankind, nor ever to find a wife to bear him children. He was as the giaour among the Turks. He had no honor in life or death, no foothold in the ranks of the warriors, or place among the shades of Po.

So when white men were cast by shipwreck in those isles, or fled from duty on whalers or warships, and sought to stay among the Marquesans, they acceded to the honored customs of their hosts, and adopted their facial adornment and often in the course of years their whole bizarre garb. The courage that did not shrink from dwelling among cannibals could not wilt at the blow of the hama.

The explorer in the far North, who lets his face become covered with a great growth of hair, when he intends to return to civilization can with a few strokes of a razor be again as before. But once the curious ink of the tattooer has bitten into the skin, it is there forever. It is like the pits of smallpox; it can never be erased. Through all his life, and into the grave itself, the human canvas must bear the pictures painted by the artist of the needles. It was a chain as strong as steel, riveted on him, that fastened him to these lotus isles. So men of America or Europe did not return to their native land from the Marquesas, but died here. The whorls and lines in the ama dye wrote exile forever from the loved ones at home.

Is that wholly true? Had not science or sorcery nepenthe for the afflicted by such a horror—horror if unwanted? Is there not one who has escaped such a fate when life had become fearful under it?

I asked that question of all, and in the valley of Hanavave was answered. I had rowed to Hanavave in the whaleboat of Grelet, and, when he returned to Oomoa, stayed on a month for the fishing with Red Chicken and discussions with Père Olivier.

“There is a sorcerer in the hills near here,” said the old French priest, thirty-five years there without leaving, “who was said to be the best tattooer on Fatuhiva. He is still a pagan, and has a wonderful memory. Take some tobacco and a pipe, and go to visit him. He may be in league with the devil, but he is worthy an hour’s journey.”

Puhi Enata was still vigorous, though very old. The designs upon his face and body were a strange green, the verde antique which the ama ink becomes on the flesh of the confirmed kava drinker. I greeted him with “Kaoha!” and soon, with the chunk of tobacco beside him and the new pipe lit, I led him to the subject. The story is not mine but his, and it has all the weird flavor of these exotic gardens of mystery. It is true without question, and I have often thought since of the American concerned in it, and wondered at his after fate.

We were seated, Puhi Enata and I, upon the paepae of his home, the platform of huge stones on which all houses in the Land of the War Fleet are built.

In the humid air of that tropic parallel he made pass before me a panorama of fantastic tragedy as real as the life about me, but as astounding and as vivid in its facts and its narration as the recital of a drama of ancient Athens by a master of histrionics. I laughed or shuddered with the incidents of the story. He spoke in his native tongue, and I have given his words as they filtered through the screen of my alien mind, not always exactly, but in consonance with the cast of thought of that far-away and unknown land.

“We had no whites here when he came, this man of your islands. Other valleys had them, but Hanavave, no. Few ships have come to this bay. Taiohae, a day and a night and more distant, they sought for food and water and now for copra, but Hanavave was, as always, lived in by us only. Yet we ever welcomed the haoe, the stranger, for he had ways of interest, and often magic greater than ours.