Lovaina wore a wine-colored peignoir, and in her red-brown hair many strands of the diaphanous reva-reva, delicate and beautiful, a beloved ornament taken from the young palm-leaf. O’Laughlin Considine and Brooke were much concerned for the unhappy mother, and asked how she was.
“She cut off her hair,” answered Lovaina, “like I do when my l’i’l boy was killed in cyclone nineteen huner’ six. It never grow good after like before.” Her hair was quite two feet long and very luxuriant, and like all Tahitian hair, simply in two plaits.
Brooke expressed his curiosity over what Lovaina had said, “jus’ like all T’ytee woman.”
“Was that a custom of Tahiti mothers, to bury their babes alive at birth?” he asked.
Lovaina blushed.
“Better you ask Tetuanui ’bout them Arioi,” she replied confusedly.
The chief pleaded that he could not explain such a complicated matter in French, and if he did, M. Considine would not understand that language. But with the question raised, the conversation continued about infanticide and depopulation. The chief quoted the death-sentence upon his race pronounced by the Tahitian prophets centuries ago:
“E tupu te fau, et toro te farero, e mou te taata!”
“The hibiscus shall grow, the coral spread, and man shall cease!”
“There were, according to Captain Cook, sixty or seventy thousand Tahitians on this island when the whites came,” continued the chief, sadly. “That number may have been too great, for perhaps Tooti calculated the population of the whole island by the crowd that always followed him, but there were several score thousand. Now I can count the thousands on the fingers of one hand.”