Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Areva tuai aue.

Fariura prayed melodiously and pleadingly for ten minutes, during which Tevao Kekela’s father never raised his head but remained bowed in meditation. A tattooed man in front of me bent double and groaned constantly during the invocation. The others were occupied with their thoughts.

Then said Fariura, “Ma teinoa o Ietu Kirito, Metia kaoha nui ia, in the name of Jesus Christ, a good day to all the world.”

He began his hour’s sermon. The discourse was about Rukifero and his fall from Aki, and I discovered that Rukifero was Lucifer and Aki was paradise. He described the fight preceding the drop as much like one of the old Marquesan battles, with bitter recriminations, spears, clubs, and slings as weapons, and Jehovah narrowly escaping Goliath’s fate. In fact, the preacher said He had to dodge a particularly well-aimed stone. Fariura, Kekela, Terii, the catechist, and his wife, Toua, received communion, with fervent faces, while the others departed, lighting cigarettes on the steps, some mounting horses, and the women fording the river with their gowns rolled about their foreheads.

The preacher shook hands with me, the only white. He was in a lather from the heat and his unusual clothes, and the rills of sweat coursed down his body. His pantomime of the heavenly faction fight had been energetic. I took him to my house for a swig of rum, and we had a long chat on the activities of the demon, and ways of circumventing his wiles.

Men like Vernier were not deceived by dry ecclesiasticism. They knew how little the natives were changed from paganism, and how cold the once hot blast of evangelism had grown. Religion was for long the strongest tide in the affairs of the South Seas both under the heathen and the Christian revelation. Government was not important under Marquesan communism, for government is mostly concerned with enforcing opportunity for acquisitive and ambitious men to gain and hold wealth and power. In the days of the tapus gods and devils made sacred laws and religious rites. The first missionaries in the Marquesas, who sailed from Tahiti, were young Englishmen, earnest and confident, but they met a severe rebuff. They relate that a swarm of women and girls swam out to their vessel and boarded it.

“They had nothing on,” says the chronicle, “but girdles of green ferns, which they generously fed to the goats we had on board, who seemed to them very strange beings. The goats, deprived for long of fresh food, completely devastated the garments of the savage females, and when we had provided all the cloth we had to cover them, we had to drive the others off the ship for the sake of decency.”

Harris, one of the English missionaries, ventured ashore, and the next morning returned in terror, declaring that nothing would induce him to remain in the Marquesas. He feared for his soul. He said that despite his protestations and prayers the girls of the valley had insisted on examining him throughout the night hours to see if he was like other humans, and that he had to submit to excruciating intimacies of a “diabolical inspiration.” Crooks, Harris’s partner, dared these and other dangers and remained a year. Crooks said that in Vaitahu, the valley in which Vanquished Often and Seventh Man Who Wallows in the Mire lived, there were deified men, called atuas, who, still in life, wielded supernatural power over death, disease, the elements, and the harvests, and who demanded human sacrifices to appease their wrath. Crooks believed in the supremacy of Jehovah, but, like all his cloth then, did not doubt diabolism and the power of its professors.

For half a century American and English centers of evangelism despatched missionaries to the Marquesas, but all failed. The tapus were too much feared by the natives, and the sorcerers and chiefs held this power until the sailors and traders gradually broke it. They sold guns to the chiefs, and bought or stole the stone and wooden gods to sell to museums and collectors. They ridiculed the temples and the tapus, consorted with the women, and induced them for love or trinkets to sin against their code, and they corrupted the sorcerers with rum and gauds. They prepared the ground for the Christian plow, but it was not until Hawaiian missionaries took the field that the harvest was reaped. Then it was because of a man of great and loving soul, a man I had known, and whose descendants I met here.

I was picking my way along the bank of a stream when a deep and ample pool lured me to bathe in it. I threw off my pareu and was splashing in the deliciously cool water when I heard a song I had last heard in a vaudeville theater in America. It was about a newly-wedded pair, and the refrain declared that “all night long he called her Snookyookums.” The voice was masculine, soft, and with the familiar intonation of the Hawaiian educated in American English. I swam further and saw a big brown youth, in face and figure the counterpart of Kamehameha I, the first king of Hawaii, whose gold and bronze statue stands in Honolulu. He was washing a shirt, and singing in fair tune.