Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

That there were any inhabitants in the South Sea islands occupied by the Polynesians is improbable but a race of mighty stone-carvers had swept through that ocean, perhaps many thousands of years before, and had left in the Ladrones and in Easter Islands monuments and statues now existing which are a profound mystery to the ethnologist, the archaeologist, and the engineer. If the Polynesians came upon any of the stone builders, they had killed or absorbed them.

The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved on wood in Easter Island by some of the Polynesians there half a century ago would denote there had been intercourse with the people who had made them, and who were not the Polynesians.

Once in Samoa, and finally at home there, after their Fiji disaster, they had gone adventuring, or the canoe drift of unfortunates caught by wind and tide had brought populations to all the other Polynesian islands, and principally to Tahiti. This island in the center of Polynesia, and especially favored by nature, had been a source of growth and distribution of the race, the Paumotus, New Zealand, and probably the Marquesas, and Hawaii having been stocked from it, the language developing furthest in it, and customs, refinements, and leisure reaching their highest pitch in the marvelous culture, savage though it was, which astounded the Europeans. Yet all these people remained curious as to what might be beyond the distance, and a hundred years ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to search for Utupu, a Utopia from which the god Tao introduced the cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for the mystic land of their forefathers, as from Ireland to India the happy isles of the west was a myth. The mariners of Erin had long seen the Tir-n’an-Oge just beyond the horizon.

The Tahitians had a legend of the god Maui, that “he brought the earth up from the depths of the ocean, and when mankind suffered from the prolonged absence of the sun and lived mournfully in obscurity, with no ripening fruits, Maui stopped the sun and regulated its course, so as to make day and night equal, as they are in Tahiti.”

Does not this hark back to a clime where the inequality of day and night was greater than in the tropics?

Lieutenant Bovis of the French navy, who seventy years ago, after ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his conclusions, said that after him it would be useless to hunt in the memories of the living for anything of the past, for the old men were dead or dying, and those now in middle age did not even speak or understand the old language in which the records were told. He had, he said, arrived in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti of the true native, the Tahiti unspoiled by European civilization, was only a memory, but by years of labor he had taken from the lips of the venerable their recollections of conditions in their childhood and early manhood, and what their fathers had told them, and by comparison he had been able to write intelligently of former times.

If Bovis found the real Tahiti no longer existent seventy years ago, what must I look for when two generations or three had died since, and swift steamships coursed where only the clipper had sailed? Yet Tahiti was the least spoiled of islands on liner routes, because France being so far from it, and the French such poor business men, they had not exploited the natives except in the way of taxes. The bureaucracy lived on the imposts, but they had not reformed the people by laws and punishments, and made them see the wisdom of acquiescence in a scheme of regular work, as had the British missionary government in Tahiti and the American missionary government in Hawaii, in the name of an avenging and critical Lord. No people believed in the dignity of labor more than the Tahitians, because they refused to do any more than was requisite for health, cleanliness, comfort, and pleasure, and saw no more dignity or greater indignity in helping me on with my boots or bringing me my dinner or massaging my body than in listening to a sermon or catching fish.

They thought absurd and artificial the ideas foisted by politicians, merchants, and lawyers that it was dignified to sit in an office, to sell goods, or to draw up agreements, or undignified to disembowel a pig, make a net, or dig an oven. They saw governors and bankers spend all day chasing a boar or angling for a fish which they did not eat when they possessed it. They thought them queer, and that their own regimen of work and play was more sensible.

“What land is this?” asked Cook, and understanding him, the Tahitians answered, “Otaiti oia” or, “This is Tahiti.”

Cook put it down as Otaheite, pronounced by him Otahytee. It was Cook’s carpenter who was building a house for a chief, a friend of Cook’s, and lost all his tools during the visit of the high priest of the god Hiro and his acolytes. Hiro was the first king in their myths, and, until Christianity came, the god of business. When Cook sailed away, the tools were taken to the marae, or temple of Hiro, where the priest said he would cause the prized tools to reproduce their kind, like fruit. He planted them in a field near by and watched for results. The lack of any result except rust was an able argument for the Christian missionaries, when they came, to destroy his cult by laughing at the foolishness of his ideas and the weakness of his god.