An American Josephite missionary and his wife, and their church
My friend, the poet, Rupert Brooke, had been made very ill by coral poisoning. He wrote from the Tiare Hotel in Papeete: “I’ve got some beastly coral-poisoning into my legs, and a local microbe on top of that, and made the places worse by neglecting them, and sea-bathing all day, which turns out to be the worst possible thing. I was in the country, at Mataiea, when it came on bad, and tried native remedies, which took all the skin off, and produced such a ghastly appearance that I hurried into town. I’ve got over it now and feel spry.” His nickname, Pupure, meant leprous, as well as fair, and was a joking double entendre by the natives.
I was later, in the Marquesas, to see a man die of such poison received in the Paumotus. But, in Kaukura, I had to make the best of it, and after a short rest began to see the sights. There was a crowd of people about, men and women, and still more children, all lighter than the Paumotuans in complexion and stouter in body. They were dressed up. The men were in denim trousers and shirts, and some with the stiff white atrocities suffered by urbanites in America and Europe. The women wore the conventional night-gowns that Christian propriety of the early nineteenth century had pulled over their heads. They were not the spacious holokus of Hawaii. These single garments fitted the portly women on the beach as the skin of a banana its pulpy body—and between me and the sun hid nothing of their roly-poly forms. I recognized the ahu vahine of Tahiti.
“Ia ora na i te Atua!” the people greeted me, with winning smiles. “God be with you!” was its meaning, and their accent confirmed their clothing. They were Tahitians. I spoke to them, and they commiserated my sad appearance, and pointed out a tall young white man who came striding down the beach, his mouth pursed in an anxious question as he saw me.
“Got any medicine on that hay wagon?” he asked. “We’ve got a bunch of dysentery here.”
I knew at once by his voice issuing through his nostrils instead of his mouth, and by the sharp cut of his jib, that he was my countryman, and from the Middle West. He had the self-satisfied air of a Kansan.
“The trade-room of the Marara is full of medical discoveries, perunas, Jamaica ginger, celery compounds, and other hot stuff,” I replied, “but what they’ll cure I don’t know. We have divers patent poisons known to prohibition.”
“That’s all rotten booze. My people don’t use the devilish stuff,” he commented, caustically. He continued on, wading to the boat, and, after a parley, proceeding with it to the schooner.
McHenry had half determined to plant himself, at least temporarily, in Kaukura, and left me to spy on the store of a Chinese, who had brought a stock of goods from Papeete. I walked toward an enormous thatched roof, under which, on the coral strand, were nearly a thousand persons. The pungent smoke from a hundred small fires of cocoanut husks gave an agreeable tang to the air; the lumps of coral between which they were kindled were red with the heat, the odors rose from bubbling pots. All the small equipment of Tahitian travelers was strewn about. Upon mattresses and mats in the shed, the sides of which were built up several feet to prevent the intrusion of pigs and dogs, lay old people and children, who had not finished their slumbers. Stands for the sale of fruits, ice, confections, soda-water, sauces, and other ministrants to hunger and habit bespoke the acquired tastes of the Tahitians; but most of the people were of Kaukura and other atolls.