Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

Landers and I each took a bed, I being warned to be forehanded by my experience in Moorea, where I slept on the floor. The chief retired, and Polonsky went off with his arm about his inamorata’s waist, she having apparently awaited his return. When Llewellyn and McHenry appeared half an hour later, having emptied a bottle reminiscent to McHenry of his father’s liking for Auld Reekie, they were discomfited by the beds being all occupied, the other two having been early claimed by two men who ate and drank and immediately slept.

When I awoke, the sun was up half an hour, and Landers and I went for a bath in the brook. We found a pool famed in the legends of the natives. In the olden days the kings and chiefs would have made it tabu to themselves.

Landers had on a pareu only, his two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle a refreshing sight, and his eyes as bright as if he had had the prescribed eight hours. They looked at him, sighingly, the young women of the village, even at this hour busied cooking breadfruit or fish and coffee; and Landers flirted with each one and in Tahitian called out words which made them laugh, and sometimes hide their heads coquettishly.

“I dated them all,” he said to me when we were under the water. We threw off our garments at the edge of the pool and plunged in. The water was as soft as milk and as clear as crystal, cool and invigorating. I drank my fill of it as I swam.

Breakfast we had in the chief’s house, the remains of the amuraa rahi of the night before. The chief drank coffee with us, and when we had gone to sit on the veranda, his eight children and wife took the board. I talked with Teriieroo a Teriieroterai for half an hour in French. He was thirty-eight years old, very engaging, and had several grandchildren.

“Eh bien,” he said to my question, “I will tell you. I was married first at sixteen years of age and this is my third wife.” He pointed over his shoulder to a tow-headed German for all I could see, and who certainly showed no sign of the native except in her dress and manners and avoirdupois.

“My first wife died,” continued the arii, contemplatively. “I divorced the second, and the third is just now eating the first déjeuner in that room. I have eight children, and will have twenty, and I am the chief of the Papenoo district, but this is not the place of my ancienne famille. I was appointed here by the French Governor three years ago to administer the district, which needed a strong hand. I like it, and have bought land and built this house. I will stay my days here. There is the farehau, the administration building where I meet the people and we have conferences.”

He pointed to a wooden cottage near by, with what looked like a dancing-pavilion attached. There the people come to squat upon the floor and relate their grievances. Most of the disputes before minor and major courts were over land and water rights.

It was half past seven o’clock when we inspanned for the trek to Papeete, a balmy, brilliant morning. The banks and cliffs were masses of ferns, the living imposed upon the dead, and hibiscus and gardenias and clumps of bamboo in a dissolving pageant mingled with plots of taro and yams, pineapples and bananas. The majestic bread trees and the spreading mangoes, the latter with their fruit verging from gold to russet, were surflnounted by the soaring cocoanuts, the monarchs of the tropics, whose banners fly from every atoll, and fall only before the most terrible might of the King of Storms.

A cocoanut-palm bears at eight years and when about twenty-five feet high. It rises seventy or eighty feet, and has a hundred curves. It is the wily creature of the winds, but outwits them in all but their worst moods. To the tropical man the cocoa-palm is life and luxury. He drinks the milk and eats the meat, or sells it dried for making soaps and emollients and other things; the oil he lights his house with and rubs upon his body to assuage pain; he builds his houses and wharves of it, and thatches his home with the husks, which also serve for fuel, fiber for lines and dresses and hats, leaves for canoe-sails and the shell of the nut for his goblet. Its roots he fashions into household utensils. The cocoa grows where other edibles perish. It dips its bole in the salt tide, and will not thrive removed from its beloved sea.