“Good morning,” said Mapuhi, in English, of which he knew only a few words. He gave me a probing glance, and retired, to appear in a few minutes in black calico trousers, a pink undershirt, and a belt of red silk. His eyes asked me if I was a trader come to compete with him. He sat down in a great chair that vaguely resembled a throne, wrought of bamboo, and carved, and trussed to bear the exceeding weight of the man, for Mapuhi was over three hundred pounds. As he sat he inquired of the elders the reason for my being there. He did it with his foot. He twisted his toes into the most expressive interrogation, which was a plain question to the elders. They said in Paumotuan that I was an American, an important man, but precisely what were my affairs they did not know. I was interested in Mormonism, in Takaroa, and in the career of Mapuhi. Assured that I was not another Tahiti trader, Mapuhi put out his great hands and took into them one of mine, and pressed it, as he said in Paumotuan, “My island is yours.”
I was loath to talk my poor Paumotuan, because I wanted to get as closely as possible to the mind of this noblest of his tribe; and so I conversed in French, except when I appealed to the elders for more exact meanings in Paumotuan.
“Mapuhi,” I began, “even in San Francisco sailors know your skill in these dangerous waters.”
“Ah, San Francisco!” said Mapuhi, regretfully. “I was there. I had a ship built there, and I sailed it to Takaroa. I lived there a week in your great house into which one drives with horses.”
I conjured a picture of Mapuhi coming in a hack from the dock in San Francisco to the Palace Hotel, and of the striking contrast between this mighty man of these isles and the little men of finance and of commerce who must have dined about him. Kalakaua, king of the Hawaiian Islands, had lived there, and had died there. But charming as was that prince of bons vivants, he was nevertheless the victim of the white man’s vices, and as years passed, his appearance became that of an overfed, over-ginned head porter. Even the patrons of the Palace must have had some vision of this man Mapuhi on the deck of his schooner, his vast chest and arms bare, his hair blown by the wind. Or, emerging from the waters of the lagoon, arising from the plunge to the coral cave where the lethal shark looks for prey. This was what he spoke in face and form to me.
“I had seven nights,” said Mapuhi, “in your great house, and seven days in your streets. The people were like the fish in the lagoon of Pukapuka, where no man seeks them, and where they crowd each other until they kill. I went in a room from the ground to where I slept, a room that moved on a cord; and I rode in other rooms that moved about the roads on iron bands in which people sat who never said a word to one another, and who never spoke to me. As I walked in the roads they were dark as in the cocoanut-groves, for your houses make caves of the roads, as under the barrier-reef.”
“But, Mapuhi,” I said, “we are happy in our way.”
“You do not laugh much,” returned the chief. “Only I heard the laughter from the houses in which you sold rum. I am a good Mormon. I do not now drink your mad waters, but in your city only the mad waters made men happy. I was a gentile myself many years and did not know the truth. I, too, drank the mad waters.”
Mapuhi’s eyes sought the picture of Brigham Young which was on the wall, but mine went to the figures of the prize-fighters, Jeffries and Johnson. Mapuhi intercepted my glance and immediately became alert.
“Was it possible that I had ever seen Teferite or Tihonitone?”