Before a feast, if there were not conditions auspicious for a tuu i te upea toro, a dragging of the seine, the village was occupied during the day or the wind was unfavorable, we went out at night after the trades had died down, and in a dozen or twenty canoes we speared them by torchlight. One was at the paddle, and the other at the prow, with uplifted flambeau, searching the waters for the fleeing shadows beneath, and launching the dart at the exact instant of proximity. The congregation of lights, the lapping of the waves, and perhaps the very gathering of humans excited the fish. They leaped and splashed, and unaware of their betrayal of their presence to slayers, informed our eyes and ears of their whereabouts. I could not compete with the Tahitians with the spears, and held a paddle, and that slight occupation gave me time and thought for the scene. The torches threw a lurid glare upon the exaggerated, semi-nude figures of the giant bronzes on the beaks of the pirogues, their arms raised in the poise of the weapon, each outlined against the darkness of the night, glorious avatars yet of their race that had been so mighty and was so soon to pass from the wave.
“Maru,” said the chief, when we sat on the mats at late supper after a return from the lagoon, “it is a pity you were not here when the Tahitians had their ’ar’ia and pahi, our large canoes for navigating on the moana faa aro, the landless sea. The ’ar’ia was a double canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed together, outrigger to outrigger. A stout, broad platform was held firm between the canoes with many lashings of sennit, a strong, but yielding, framework on which was a small house of straw where the crew lived. We had no nails, but we used wooden pegs and thousands of cocoanut-fiber ropes, so that everything, aloft and alow, was taut, but giving in the toss of the sea.
“The pahi was eighty feet long, broad in the middle, very carefully and neatly planked over inside, forming a rude bulkhead or inner casing, and had a lofty carved stem rising into one or two posts, terminating in a human form. It was in these vessels that we made the long journeys from island to island, the migrations and the descents upon other Polynesian peoples in war. Both the ’ar’ia and the pahi were propelled by a huge ’i’e, or mat sail of pandanus-leaves shaped like a leg of a fat hog. In modern times these great canoes were built in Bora-Bora, the island the Hawaiians say they came from, and the name of which means ‘Land of the Big House Canoes.’ With a good wind we could sail a hundred and twenty miles a day in those vessels. We would attend the fa’a-Rua, which we now call the ha’a-Piti, the wind that blows both ways, for we waited for the northeast or southwest trade-winds according to the direction we made for.”
The chief lifted his glass of wine, and chanted:
“Aue mouna, mouna o Havaii!
Havaii tupu ai te ahi veavea!”
“Hail! mighty mountains, mountains of Havaii!
Havaii where the red, flaming fire shoots up high!”
Brooke had been to Lake Vaihiria, and suggested that I go. The excursion had been long in my mind, for every time an eel was caught or served some one exclaimed, “Aue! You should see the eels in Vaihiria. But, be careful!”
The warning referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel’s sorcery, as Mother Eve by the serpent, which doubtless was an eel.
As the eel and the water-snakes are the only serpentine animals in Tahiti, his reasoning was sound. The lake lies high in the mountains, at the very summit of the valley of Mataiea, and overlooks the Great Valley of Papenoo, owned by Count Polonsky, the cultivated Slav-Frenchman.
Tiura, the chief’s oldest adopted son, arranged for the journey, and led the four of us who made it. One was an Australian, a doctor of the bush country of Queensland, in his thirties, very tall, and strong, though thin. He was a guest of the chief, and had walked entirely around Tahiti, barefooted, as had Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, to the consternation of the conservative English residents of Tahiti, who wanted them to live in Papeete and hold teas. Two pleasant native youths went with us to carry our necessities.